A lullaby is exceptional among art forms insofar as it aims to induce its audience into a state of non-perception, to cease regarding it! You can listen to music while you are falling asleep but once you’re really asleep, you’re not listening to music anymore!

What other art form does this? Imagine a poet writing stanzas with the explicit intention of making your eye lids grow heavier and heavier as you read them. Or a painter wishing to create canvases that elicit somnolence to such an extent that couches, cots and bedsteads must be set up in the galleries where they are exhibited, bedecked with comforters and pillows. Or a play that deliberately sets out to induce its audience to snore by intermission.

To be sure, there are boring poems, paintings and plays; none were written with the specific intention of assisting readers, viewers or theatre goers in falling asleep.

When my brothers and I were tiny, grandmother sang us to sleep with a little tune of her own making. The words were simply, “Doo-lee, doo-lee, doo-lee….” repeated for as long as was needed to dispatch us to the Land of Nod.

When my turn came to sing lullabyes to my own little ones, I sang that tune again, along with “Loch Lomond” and two Shaker folk hymns: “Simple Gifts” and “Love is Little.”

The better known lullabyes didn’t serve. Brahms’ Lullaby is beautiful but it’s a piano piece, not really intended to be sung.

“Rock-a-bye Baby” has a lovely tune, but the imagery is troubling. You don’t think about the lyrics until you are actually singing them to a baby. If you looked out your kitchen window and saw a neighbor placing an occupied cradle in a treetop, you’d call the police; they would arrest the caregiver on a charge of child endangerment. Such a stunt would be dangerous on a still day, but the song says that the wind is blowing, or soon will be! That bough? It is going to break; the lyrics leave no room for doubt. The song doesn’t say “if the bough breaks.” No. It is quite clear on that point. It says “when the bough breaks.” Folks, that cradle is destined to take the plunge. “Down will come baby, cradle and all.” This is a lullaby? Are you kidding me?

Fortunately, the tune belies all this, rendering the images tongue-in-cheek, even dreamlike. A good tune can do that, working a sea-change on the lyrics. The treetop seems hazy, like foliage rendered by Monet. The wind ineffably gentle. The baby’s predestined descent will take place, we feel assured, in slo-mo, very slo-mo. Gravity notwithstanding, we know that the baby will be perfectly safe.

In 2002, my graphic artist friends Randy and Michelle Wright asked me to write a lullaby for their newborn daughter, Kara. If you have my CDs, you’ve seen Randy’s work; he designs my CDs and also my books.

A lover of the cello, Rand asked that the piece be scored for cello and piano. Interestingly, a few nights after I received this request, as I was falling asleep, a lullaby-like tune came to me. It was still in my head the next morning so I used it as the opening melody of the piece.

It’s followed by a contrasting middle section, beginning at 2:40, evoking the sleepy Old South as imagined by Yankees like myself, who have seen "Gone With The Wind” a time or two. The Antebellum South, when life was slow and easy, at least for the aristocrats, as always. And sleep was deep. That’s the fantasy; let us suspend our revisionist impulses for a bit and honor it for what it is: a fantasy, yes, but a pleasant one.

Randy and Michelle, with little Kara in tow, were present when the piece was premiered. She crooned and chortled as the piece was played before an otherwise silent audience. Her contribution was the perfect, non-musical touch and the audience loved it.

To hear cellist Jeff Schoyen and pianist Phil Amalong perform "Lullabye for Kara,” click on the link above.

To see the score, click on the link above.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
June 4, 2016

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

A certain thought comes to me in October.

I see a tree in full autumn flourish -- leaves blazing out in yellow, salmon, purple or red — and I think about what exactly it would take to MAKE that object from scratch.

A person would have to be extremely clever. Each of the innumerable leaves would be of cloth, starched stiff, but not too stiff, each one very precisely cut with scissors, then carefully tinted by soaking them in a dye solution, then attached with thread to each of a myriad of tiny wires extended from to wires coiled to form a branch, those in turn extending from thicker coils of wire, back to the main branches, heavy with thick cordons of cable and somehow woven and twisted into a dense trunk made of some really sturdy material … I don’t even know what. Concrete, perhaps?

The bark would perhaps be a mix of dark-stained sawdust and slow-drying glue, applied to the trunk with a trowel, then spray-painted that nameless color of tree trunk’s, Nature’s peculiar gray-green-brown.

The structure would have to be well anchored so as to bear up against the wind. It would be an enormous effort; even a team of thirty or forty dedicated workers could hardly do the job in a year … all those leaves, each unique, each hand-cut, all those wires. It would cost a fortune in labor.

And all those skilled man-hours would all result in only ONE tree. Most likely, it would never look as good as the tree that is right in front of me.

And then I think … We don’t have to MAKE something like that … because it’s already there, already made and put in place in all its glory.

And there it stands, this miraculous creation. And this tree is only one of billions, blazing their October colors for all to see … and FREE OF CHARGE.

All that work and no one was paid so much as a penny to do it. What a gift, what a blessing. And that’s just a tree, just a tree!

Think of everything else! On and on, near and far, in all directions from wherever we are and as far back into the the past or into the future as you can thrust your imagination. What a universe we inhabit!

All we have to do is notice.

Living in such a blessed place, the wonder is, always and always, how anyone can ever be mean-spirited.

Let’s listen, together, to an autumnal lullaby.

To hear cellist Jeff Schoyen and pianist Phil Amalong perform "Lullaby for Kara,” click on the link above.

To see the score, click on the link above.