Topic: Lullaby - Instrumental
Lullabies are dead, long live the lullaby. That is, technology and marketing are obsoleting mothers’ singing, and replacing it with gadgets. A Canadian team found "infant sleep machines" were touted as de rigueur for nurseries. They were able to buy 14 different devices that provided "ambient noise" to keep infants from waking in the night. [1]
Capitalism expands by creating new markets for existing products, and these essentially were applications of ideas that were new when today’s grandparents were youngsters in the early 1970s. Then, Irv Teibel recorded the ocean at Coney Island [2] for a friend’s film about an aging transsexual. [3] He made an accidental discovery when he was editing the tape to fit the footage:
"Normally while working with loops, he’d have to turn the volume down to stop the sound from driving him crazy, but this one didn’t bother him at all. In fact, the longer the loop played, the more relaxed Teibel felt." [4]
Since his microphones did not capture his mental image of an ocean’s sound, he worked with Louis Gerstman of Bell Labs to rework the tape to produce the "Psychologically Ultimate Seashore." He released that in 1969 on his own Syntonic Research, Inc. album with testimonials to its effectiveness in curing insomnia. [5]
The release of Environments 1 coincided with actual research being done on the effectiveness of white noise in inducing sleep. Most papers were not scientifically rigorous, and at best proved music could help relax people if they were so inclined. [6] It did not matter. Folk science filled the vacuum with theories about entraining rhythms to heartbeats or brain waves that again have not been proven, [7] but did no harm [8] and were cheaper than tranquilizers.
Meanwhile, Dan Gibson was experimenting with microphones in Ontario that would better capture the true sounds of nature. He had discovered the wilds when he was sent to Taylor Statten’s Camp Ahmek in the 1930s, [9] and worked as a nature photographer after World War II. In 1989, he began including music with his commercial recordings of natural environments. [10]
His Solitudes record company tended to call it relaxation music when it sold its CDs on racks in gift stores. [11] Others use the word lullaby because it evokes images of a lost childhood, while the techno-jargon sleep aid comes from the noisy world of school, work, and traffic.
When people imitated his Solitudes’ model with "Kumbaya" as a lullaby, they almost always used a flute with running water. Gibson used both water and bird calls in 2003 with a flute accompanied by a piano.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: Louie Papachristos, flute; Attila Fias, piano [12]
Rhythm Accompaniment: running water, random bird calls
Credits
Traditional
Attila Fias, Arranger [13]
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: slow
Basic Structure: five repetitions with variations in instrumentation, melody, and key; no intentional changes in volume.
Introduction: bird calls, then running water was added. A short piano section with chords and a few right-hand figures followed.
Repetition 1: flute melody; piano accompany with chords. The only embellishment was two tones for Lord in last line. Constant running water and random bird calls.
Repetition 2: piano melody by right hand, with chords and arpeggios in left hand. It introduced variations in the melody in lines 3 and 4. Constant running water and random bird calls. There might have been some strings in the background.
Repetition 3: deep-toned instrument played the melody with piano, running water, and birds. It sounded too deep to be a flute, was not distinctive enough to be a brass instrument, and had a greater melodic range than a jug.
Repetition 4: flute melody and pianist playing counter to it. The flautist used vibrato in lines 2 and 3. Constant running water and random bird calls.
Repetition 5: flute melody in a higher key with more vibrato. Piano accompaniment simple; may have been augmented by the deep-toned instrument. Constant running water and random bird calls.
End: flute repeated the last line with vibrato, piano played a measure, then running water and bird calls alone.
Notes on Performance
Cover: photograph of a mother with an infant over her shoulder. She was sitting in a white rattan chair with greenery behind.
Audience Perceptions
Gibson’s son entered the company in 1986. [14] Gordon and a friend took it over in 1994 as Somerset Entertainment. [15] With the bubbling of the economy, Somerset went public in 2005. [16] Three years later, just before the market crashed, Fluid Music made a bid to buy, [17] and succeeded in 2009. [18] That company was bought in 2010 by Mood Media, [19] and Somerset was resold in 2013 to another company [20] that was trying to save itself by going farther into debt. [21] Somerset was spun off [22] before Allegro’s assets were sold at auction in 2016. [23]
The corporate history is mirrored in the versions of "Kumbaya" offered by Amazon. Apparently, during the Mood Media period, songs were repackaged in cheap compilations with bad engineering. One buyer complained:
"The worst thing--and it’s not something that makes me want my money back--is the sound quality of a large number of the MP3 files. Bit rates vary between just under 100kbs to just under 220kbs. Fortunately we’re not dealing with highly complicated melodies so the variance in sound quality isn’t critical, but it is unfortunate.
"The good thing about this collection is that it will provide agreeable background music that varies from flute, to Christmas standards, to decent classical excerpts for barely $0.06 per track. If you just want some music that won’t demand your attention while working or relaxing, this collection is fine. It’s not for music critics or audiophiles, but let’s be honest here, does anyone really expect 101 tracks for $5.99 to be a major music release?" [24]
As mentioned in the post for 23 January 2018, companies serving the niche music market were highly variable. Solitudes controlled 85% of the market before becoming the target of more ambitious men. Then it was valuable because it had pioneered new digital marketing tools, not because it had high quality recordings. [25]
Notes on Performers
Fias was born in Budapest and immigrated to Toronto with his family. He had a jazz trio and had worked with Indian musicians. Both experiences may have given him ideas for the sustained accompaniment in "Kumbaya." [26]
Papachristos was the son of a Toronto music teacher. He remembered his father constantly brought home instruments for him when he was a child. He preferred the flute because it "makes beautiful sounds and is an extension of your voice." [27]
Availability
CD: Dan Gibson’s Solitudes. Lullabies: From Nature’s Nursery. Solitudes. Metalworks Studios, Mississauga, Ontario. Released 23 September 2003. [Owned by Somerset]
CD: Relaxing Music: 101 Songs To Help You Relax and Sleep Better Nature Relaxation Edition. Relax Me. 8 February 2010. Downloaded file also called, Christian Children’s Songs. [Owned by Mood Media]
CD: Dan Gibson’s Solitudes. Lullabies: From Nature’s Nursery. Solitudes. 22 October 2013. [Somerset spun off by Allegro]
CD: Chris Beaty and Dan Gibson’s Solitudes. Nature’s Lullaby Collection. Lifescapes. 2016. This is a different recording with crickets, a guitar, and xylophone. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises on 26 July 2016.
End Notes
1. Sarah C. Hugh, Nikolaus E. Wolter, Evan J. Propst, Karen A. Gordon, Sharon L. Cushing, and Blake C. Papsin. "Infant Sleep Machines and Hazardous Sound Pressure Levels." Pediatrics 133:677-681:2014.
2. Wikipedia. "Irv Teibel." The film was Tony Conrad’s Coming Attractions.
3. J. Hoberman. "Tony Conrad, Experimental Filmmaker and Musician, Dies at 76." The New York Times, 9 April 2016.
4. Mike Powell. "Natural Selection: How a New Age Hustler Sold the Sound of the World." Pitchfork website.
5. Powell.
6. K. V. Jespersen, J. Koenig, P. Jennum, and P. Vuust. "Music for Insomnia in Adults (Review)." Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 8, 2015. They found 465 articles in the scientific literature, but only six that met their criteria of rigorous research.
7. Stefan Koelsch and Lutz Jäncke. "Music and the Heart." European Heart Journal 36:3043-3048:2015.
8. Hugh’s team tested the decibel levels of devices sold for use with babies and found some had the potential for harming infants’ ears.
9. Ahmek was in Algonquin Park, Ontario, where Gibson did much of his work.
10. Alan Niester. "Nice and Easy Does It." The [Toronto] Globe and Mail. 31 May 2000, last updated 30 March 2017.
11. Niester.
12. "Dan Gibson: Lullibies from Nature’s Nursery." All Music website.
13. All Music.
14. Catherine Dunphy. Comments occasioned by Dan Gibson’s death. The Toronto Star. 24 April 2006.
15. Kelly Gadzala. "Forest Hill Pals in Tune with Music Market." My Town Crier website, Toronto. 1 May 2008.
16. CCNMatthews. "Somerset Entertainment Leaders Receive Entrepreneur Of The Year Award." Market Wired website. 23 October 2006.
17. "Fluid Music Tables Somerset Takeover Bid ." The Toronto Star, 15 July 2008.
18. Ed Christman. "Allegro Media Group to Acquire Canadian Label Somerset Entertainment." Billboard, 9 May 2013.
19. Wikipedia. "Mood Media."
20. Christman, 2013.
21. Ed Christman. "Hastings Entertainment & Allegro Media Corp’s Different Strategies for Handling Financial Woes." Billboard, 13 June 2016.
22. Natasha Rausch. "Music Distributor Lays off ‘Dozens’ of Employees, Keeps CDs from Labels." Oregon Live website. 9 June 2016.
23. GA Global Partners. Auction notice for Allegro assets.
24. J. V. Donnant. Comments posted 16 August 2010 to Amazon website for Relaxing Music.
25. CCNMatthews.
26. "Attila Fias Trio." CD Baby website.
27. Lorianna De Giorgio. "Papachristos Helps Orchestra Toronto Celebrate 50th Year." My Town Crier website, Toronto. 1 August 2005.
Showing posts with label ~ Lullaby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ~ Lullaby. Show all posts
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Paul Greaver - Kumbaya
Topic: Lullaby - Instrumental
B. F. Skinner once said he kept his child from crying by placing it in a warm environment where it could move about freed from the constraints of clothing. [1] Other professionals have told parents to resist the urge to rock their infants to sleep. [2] I suspect there have been times, in the wee hours, when those parents have wondered when those specialists last held a fretful baby.
Midnight crises become more stressful if the mother or father does not know any lullabies, because it is hard to maintain a rocking rhythm without singing, walking, or sitting in a moving chair. One woman told a friend that was when she played a CD:
"She said it was a saving grace when Eddie would wake up crying in the middle of the night. She would hold him close and rock to the music until he drifted back off to sleep. Mary said the music was soothing enough that she was also able to fall back asleep after Eddie was tucked back in, rather than laying awake frazzled." [3]
The particular record she played was Paul Greaver’s Guitar Lullabies. His version of "Kumbaya" was fairly complex, for musicians have a difficult time playing monotonously. Many of pianists mentioned in the post for 23 January 2018 had been so trained they could not stop themselves from emphasizing the melody, and if they had succeeded their adult audience would have been confused.
It is easier to prevent one line from attracting attention on a guitar because young musicians tend to either play just the melody or only the accompaniment. Blues musicians like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Rosetta Tharpe emphasize the melodic line, but classical ones do not. After graduation from college, Greaver became a follower of Rajneesh in Oregon. [4] Exposure to meditation music probably made it easier for him to alternate between two tones in his accompaniment and maintain a consistent volume.
What is harder for musicians to overcome is their sense of form. Western music tends to move from the simple to the complex, from a statement or a theme to variations upon it. Lullabies have a different logic: they either remain the same or become progressively simpler or slower as the infant gets drowsier.
Greaver played four repetitions of the standard "Kumbaya" tune that fell into the general ABA pattern, with B more varied than A. He began by playing the melody one note at a time with parallel thirds from the end of the third line through the fourth. The notes were played distinctly, with the reverberations filling the gaps. This was the only time the music called attention to itself.
On the second iteration, Greaver alternated between two notes in his accompaniment. Some were minor in the third line. The accompaniment became a bit louder in the third repetition, with the use of stronger strums on down beats, but returned to the alternating two notes in the final iteration. This time many of the intervals were small. The very last line was slower and softer.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Soloist: Paul Greaver, guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
© 2010 Music For Little People
Author, Composer: Traditional
Author, Composer: Paul Greaver
Music Publisher: Sudhananda Music (BMI) [5]
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: slow
Basic Structure: repetition of melody with variations in accompaniment
Instrumental Style: classical with one hand playing both the melody and the accompaniment. No modifications in dynamics or tempo, except at the end.
Notes on Performance
Cover: realistic drawing of a mother’s face leaning toward a baby’s head in the sound hole of an acoustic guitar.
Audience Perceptions or Notes on Audience
The reviewer for a website recommending music to parents indicated she confused her own taste and that of her readers, with the needs of an infant:
"The African lullaby Kumbaya also gains complexity as it goes, creating a bass made up of beautiful triads." [6]
Notes on Performers
Greaver grew up in an artists’ family in Maine and Michigan, then studied guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and North Carolina School of The Arts. After recording for years under the name Antar Sudhananda, he moved to northern California where he worked as a sound engineer for Music for Little People. [7]
Availability
CD: Guitar Lullabies. Music For Little People. 1 January 2010.
Reissue: Guitar Lullabies. Music For Little People. 6 January 2014.
YouTube: uploaded by Universal Music Group North America on 26 July 2015.
End Notes
1. B. F. Skinner. "Baby in Box." Ladies Home Journal, October 1945. 535-540 in Skinner. Cumulative Record. Edited by Victor G. Laties and A. Charles Catania. Cambridge, Massachusetts: B. F. Skinner Foundation, 1999 definitive edition. Summarized by T. Gordon and B. M. Foss. "The Role of Stimulation in the Delay of Onset of Crying in the Newborn Infant." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 18:79-81:1968. 79. Skinner did acknowledge infants cry when they were hungry or needed to be changed.
2. See post for 15 January 2018.
3. Mary. Quoted by Audra Rundle. Review of "Guitar Lullabies by Paul Greave." Little One Books website, Seattle, Washington.
4. "Sudhananda by Sudhananda." CD Baby website.
5. Notes uploaded to YouTube.
6. Rundle.
7. CD Baby.
B. F. Skinner once said he kept his child from crying by placing it in a warm environment where it could move about freed from the constraints of clothing. [1] Other professionals have told parents to resist the urge to rock their infants to sleep. [2] I suspect there have been times, in the wee hours, when those parents have wondered when those specialists last held a fretful baby.
Midnight crises become more stressful if the mother or father does not know any lullabies, because it is hard to maintain a rocking rhythm without singing, walking, or sitting in a moving chair. One woman told a friend that was when she played a CD:
"She said it was a saving grace when Eddie would wake up crying in the middle of the night. She would hold him close and rock to the music until he drifted back off to sleep. Mary said the music was soothing enough that she was also able to fall back asleep after Eddie was tucked back in, rather than laying awake frazzled." [3]
The particular record she played was Paul Greaver’s Guitar Lullabies. His version of "Kumbaya" was fairly complex, for musicians have a difficult time playing monotonously. Many of pianists mentioned in the post for 23 January 2018 had been so trained they could not stop themselves from emphasizing the melody, and if they had succeeded their adult audience would have been confused.
It is easier to prevent one line from attracting attention on a guitar because young musicians tend to either play just the melody or only the accompaniment. Blues musicians like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Rosetta Tharpe emphasize the melodic line, but classical ones do not. After graduation from college, Greaver became a follower of Rajneesh in Oregon. [4] Exposure to meditation music probably made it easier for him to alternate between two tones in his accompaniment and maintain a consistent volume.
What is harder for musicians to overcome is their sense of form. Western music tends to move from the simple to the complex, from a statement or a theme to variations upon it. Lullabies have a different logic: they either remain the same or become progressively simpler or slower as the infant gets drowsier.
Greaver played four repetitions of the standard "Kumbaya" tune that fell into the general ABA pattern, with B more varied than A. He began by playing the melody one note at a time with parallel thirds from the end of the third line through the fourth. The notes were played distinctly, with the reverberations filling the gaps. This was the only time the music called attention to itself.
On the second iteration, Greaver alternated between two notes in his accompaniment. Some were minor in the third line. The accompaniment became a bit louder in the third repetition, with the use of stronger strums on down beats, but returned to the alternating two notes in the final iteration. This time many of the intervals were small. The very last line was slower and softer.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Soloist: Paul Greaver, guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
© 2010 Music For Little People
Author, Composer: Traditional
Author, Composer: Paul Greaver
Music Publisher: Sudhananda Music (BMI) [5]
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: slow
Basic Structure: repetition of melody with variations in accompaniment
Instrumental Style: classical with one hand playing both the melody and the accompaniment. No modifications in dynamics or tempo, except at the end.
Notes on Performance
Cover: realistic drawing of a mother’s face leaning toward a baby’s head in the sound hole of an acoustic guitar.
Audience Perceptions or Notes on Audience
The reviewer for a website recommending music to parents indicated she confused her own taste and that of her readers, with the needs of an infant:
"The African lullaby Kumbaya also gains complexity as it goes, creating a bass made up of beautiful triads." [6]
Notes on Performers
Greaver grew up in an artists’ family in Maine and Michigan, then studied guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and North Carolina School of The Arts. After recording for years under the name Antar Sudhananda, he moved to northern California where he worked as a sound engineer for Music for Little People. [7]
Availability
CD: Guitar Lullabies. Music For Little People. 1 January 2010.
Reissue: Guitar Lullabies. Music For Little People. 6 January 2014.
YouTube: uploaded by Universal Music Group North America on 26 July 2015.
End Notes
1. B. F. Skinner. "Baby in Box." Ladies Home Journal, October 1945. 535-540 in Skinner. Cumulative Record. Edited by Victor G. Laties and A. Charles Catania. Cambridge, Massachusetts: B. F. Skinner Foundation, 1999 definitive edition. Summarized by T. Gordon and B. M. Foss. "The Role of Stimulation in the Delay of Onset of Crying in the Newborn Infant." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 18:79-81:1968. 79. Skinner did acknowledge infants cry when they were hungry or needed to be changed.
2. See post for 15 January 2018.
3. Mary. Quoted by Audra Rundle. Review of "Guitar Lullabies by Paul Greave." Little One Books website, Seattle, Washington.
4. "Sudhananda by Sudhananda." CD Baby website.
5. Notes uploaded to YouTube.
6. Rundle.
7. CD Baby.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Steven Anderson - Kumbaya
Topic: Lullaby - Instrumental
Lullabies have become a commercial music genre propagated by niche recording companies. [1] Following World War II, these businesses provided inexpensive albums that depended on public domain material by anonymous artists. [2] Since their records were not sold through channels monitored by Billboard, companies learned what sold by what was reordered or returned by merchants and middlemen. [3]
Judging from the contents of albums containing "Kumbaya," the repertoire includes the few commonly known lullabies like "Rockabye Baby" and "All through the Night," along with some adult songs like "Amazing Grace." The rest of the records are filled with nursery songs: "Baa Baa Black Sheep," "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," and all the others mentioned by parents in the post for 19 January 2018.
Unusual material rarely is included because first-time parents or people buying shower gifts tend to buy what they recognize. As mentioned in the post for 19 January 2018, people remember the songs of early childhood but not the earlier lullabies.
Many would be shocked by the actual contents of traditional lullabies described in 19 January 2018. Lyrics that expressed women’s non-maternal feelings would not be considered "age-appropriate" material. [4]
Since lullabies and nursery songs are now the same, record companies distinguish them by the way they are performed. Songs for the awake are sung, while most of the lullaby recordings offered by Amazon are instrumentals. The most common are piano solos, perhaps because Brahms used a piano accompaniment for his lullaby.
One person, who only used initials, suggested he or she wanted a piano arrangement to sing with. [5] Most people do not sing without a piano after they enter primary school or join a church youth choir, and do not remember singing a capella.
Since parents no longer sing to their infants, they, not the infants, have become the primary market for lullaby promoters. One woman said: "We leave this on loop all night and it’s great. It’s soothing for me too, if I need to go in the nursery for a crying baby, it keeps me calm, rocking baby baby To sleep. I love it!" [6]
Another said of the same recording: "We hear our son’s music playing over the monitor, so I like cds that will not annoy us and keep us up at night. Some music gets repetative and does not travel well over the monitor." [7]
Unlike adults, infants might be calmed by anything that was slow and quiet. The difference between the two generations’ aesthetics becomes clear when albums violate infants’ needs to be lulled. One mother praised an album because "every song is soothing and easy to listen to in the background, with no sudden changes in volume, sharp tones, or other surprises. [8]
Another warned "there are times when songs change and the tempo seems to fast for a lullaby." However, she reported her infant, along with her five- and seven-year-old children, all "listen to it every night when they sleep." [9]
Beyond the bare minimum elements of slow tempo and soft dynamics, adults judge lullabies by their own expectations. One man complained, "the arrangements for some of the tracks partially mask the traditional tunes by superimposing the instrumentalist’s interpretation." [10]
The number of piano versions of "Kumbaya" are relatively small, compared to the number of albums containing these versions. Once niche companies have created an inventory of songs, they tend to repackage them rather than spend money finding new material. A recording by Steven Anderson was available on eleven different albums in December 2017, and appeared on another three without attribution. The company name varied with the needs of its owner, Madacy Entertainement.
His version differed from the other six because much of it was played in the higher octaves. Most of the other pianists played their accompaniments below middle C, the normal domain of the left hand. Simon Parry was the only one who kept his notes within the range of a newborn’s hearing abilities [11] between middle C and the C above it.
They all played the standard 1-3-5 melody as a series of single notes, with parallel chords reserved for the fourth line. The accompaniments were arpeggios with a few chords, but no one played true chordal harmony. A couple, including Anderson, played the melody louder than the accompaniment. [12]
To introduce variety several played interludes that relied on arpeggios, often in the lower register. They never paused so the murmuring sounds were continuous.
Notes on Performance
The cover art was inexpensive, usually a drawing of a child sleeping or a picture of a night sky. Most was similar to clip art available on the web.
Notes on Performers
Madacy Entertainment was founded in 1980 in Montréal by Amos Alter to provide high-quality low-cost classical records. He used musicians from eastern Europe who did not have union wage protections. [13] The company then expanded into other niches. Its primary United States office was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, [14] near Target’s corporate headquarters.
In 2000, Alter started a children’s line. [15] Steven Anderson, who was living in Saint Paul, Minnesota, [16] recorded a lullaby collection for Madacy in 2002. He had graduated with a music degree from Hamline in 1988 [17] and supported himself for years by teaching and tuning pianos, and playing contract events like weddings. [18] He became involved with companies supplying children’s music to Target in the late 1990s when he produced records for Baby Genius in Saint Paul [19] and mixes of music and nature sounds for a Wisconsin company. [20]
Madacy expanded in 2006, just as music downloading cut into his market. Then, during the downturn of 2008, Wal-Mart reduced its purchases, and the company was taken over by one of its investors. [21] The list of Anderson’s reissues probably is incomplete, since it reflects only what was available in December 2017. Even so, one can see that after 2008, his recording of "Kumbaya" was constantly being included in other packages.
Meantime, Anderson began exploring ways the new digital media could be exploited by an independent artist. He since has recorded his own music, and sold it through internet outlets. [22]
The never ending needs of films, cable programs, and local advertising for music has prompted others to emulate the niche record company model. Rob and Mike Silverman began Autumn Hill Records in Saint Louis to "offer literally any style imaginable, with a huge sample library of over 10,000 virtual instruments, along with our stable of first call musicians." [23] Mike was a pianist, while Rob played drums.
Tim and Ryan O’Neill created a similar company, Shamrock-n-roll in Minnesota in 1997. They argued people should use their company’s music because they had "over 5000 songs to choose from" and "we own the arrangements of these songs so we can offer fast & affordable licenses." The two were both pianists, and often played together. [24]
Simon Parry started Allstars Kids Club in 2016 [25] as a medium for distributing Christian children’s music in England. [26] He worked as the children’s pastor for the Connect Church, and played piano. [27] The church claimed it valued "the life changing work of the Holy Spirit." [28]
I could not discover anything about the other record companies or artists. The Children’s Music Group and Stradivari Music were simply too generic, while the East London Orchestral Piano Ensemble upload was too recent to generate any information.
Availability
The versions in each group sounded the same to me. The CDs all were listed by Amazon in December 2017.
Madacy
Steven Anderson. Heavenly Lullabies. Madacy Christian. 3 December 2002.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Study Like a Hipster, Volume 1. Hipster Stories Records. 8 May 2006.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Land Of Milk and Honey. Madacy Kids. 6 October 2006.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Lullabies for Little Dreamers. Madacy Kids. 14 April 2009.
Countdown Singers. Lullabies and Goodnight. Suite 102. 21 February 2012.
Countdown Kids. Lullaby and Goodnight. Suite 102. 6 November 2012.
Steven C. Anderson. Heavenly Lullabies. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises. 13 January 2014.
Sleep Baby Sleep. Baby’s Bedtime Music. Still Water Records. 1 April 2014.
Steven C. Anderson. 30 Bible Songs. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises. 30 September 2014.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Piano Cleansing, Volume 2. La Brise Musique. 6 October 2014.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Lullabies: Baby Lullabies. Single Spoon Music. 6 August 2015.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Berceuses. Soleil Brille Musique. 6 August 2015.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Canciones de Cuna. Solido Producciones. 8 August 2015.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Soothing Piano Music. Glider’s Edge Entertainment. 16 January 2016.
Steven Anderson. 50 Songs for Sunday Inspirations. Suite 102. 19 April 2016.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Relaxing Piano Music. Sleepless Notes Records. 16 September 2016.
Steven Anderson. Avec la technologie Box. Uploaded to YouTube by test kamen. 13 September 2017.
Autumn Hill
Lullaby Renditions of Classic Children’s Songs. Time Machine Records. 28 April 2009.
Smart Baby Lullaby. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Autumn Hill Records. 12 November 2009.
Bedtime Baby. Baby Music. Autumn Hill Records. 1 December 2009.
Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies. EDU Music and Films. 4 March 2010.
Smart Baby Lullabies. 60 Nursery Rhymes. EDU Music and Films. 6 March 2010.
Classical Lullabies. Autumn Hill Records. 14 March 2010.
Smart Baby Music. Smart Babies R US. 7 July 2012.
Piano Masters. New Age Piano Music. Autumn Hill Records. 8 November 2012.
Allstars Kids Club
Lullaby Music for Baby. Uploaded to YouTube by Allstars Kids Club on 8 July 2015.
Simon Parry. Soothing Piano Lullabies, Volume 1. Allstars Kids Club. 25 July 2015. Also, uploaded to YouTube by TuneCore on 1 August 2015.
The Children’s Music Group
Lullaby World. Lullabies. The Children’s Music Group. 7 May 2015.
Lullaby World. Ultimate Nursery Rhymes Collection. The Children’s Music Group. 12 May 2015. Also, uploaded to YouTube by CDBaby on 3 June 2015.
Others
Little Magic Piano. 30 Favorite Lullabies on Piano. Stradivari Music. 5 April 2015. Also, uploaded to YouTube by Symphonic Distribution on 11 April 2017.
East London Orchestral Piano Ensemble. Classical Piano Renditions. East London Orchestral Piano Ensemble. 2 December 2017. Also, uploaded to YouTube by Amuseio AB on 1 December 2017.
End Notes
1. As soon as record manufacturing techniques and raw materials became cheap and available after World War II, a number of small companies began releasing inexpensive recordings. They dominated the market for children’s records when I was young, and today Amazon includes three separate genres: lullabies, children’s, and children’s Bible songs. Niche producers also supply karaoke and Christmas collections to club owners and merchants through Amazon.
2. The ways the less scrupulous companies exploited composers and performers were revealed when Marion Rosette sued one for non-payment. She and her husband had formed Lincoln Records in 1949 to issue children’s song she had written. She did not copyright her material at the time, but did so years later. She discovered her songs were being reproduced by Playtime Albums and Carousel Albums in 1964 without credit. She notified them she then had valid copyrights for the material they were using. When they refused to pay her royalties, she sued and won.
According to Rosette v. Rainbo Record Manufacturing Corporation, (S.D.N.Y. 1973), Jack Brown claimed he and another man had formed Rainbo Record Manufacturing to manufacture records, but dissolved their partnership in the late 1940s. One of their customers had been Sidney Taback of Lyric Records, which had begun as a partnership of Brown, Taback and a third unrelated man. That "partnership was dissolved in February 1963 but Taback continued using the name Lyric."
Brown claimed "Lyric and Rainbo were not related companies," but Rosette "established that during the years 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1966 Rainbo and Lyric (or Playtime-Lyric) shared the same telephone numbers and were listed in the Los Angeles telephone directory as having the same address." She argued that "Rainbo was related to Lyric, Carousel and Playtime Records and that, in fact, Rainbo had purchased the Carousel and Playtime line of songs from Lyric."
3. Billboard changed its methods for tracking record sales years ago. Today, artists use digital tools to monitor their sales and downloads.
4. As mentioned in the post for 15 January 2018, some groups promote "research-based, developmentally appropriate early childhood music." The crashing cradle in "Rockabye Baby" probably does not qualify.
5. JD. Comments posted 30 May 2014 to Amazon website for EDU Music’s [Autumn Hill] Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies. JD wrote: "would have liked the lyrics to refresh memory and sing to the baby with the music."
6. KimG. Comments posted 27 December 2016 to Amazon website for Time Machine’s [Autumn Hill] Lullaby Renditions.
7. Mik Rhab. Comments posted 9 November 2015 to Amazon website for Lullaby Renditions.
8. Serena. Comments posted 24 February 2014 to Amazon website for Madacy’s Land Of Milk and Honey: Heavenly Lullabies.
9. melinny2007. Comments posted 13 December 2015 to Amazon website for Lullaby Renditions.
10. Bruce. Comments posted 3 April 2005 to Amazon’s website for Madacy’s Heavenly Lullabies.
11. The hearing abilities of infants was discussed in the post for 13 January 2018.
12. The other versions with loud melodies were sold by Autumn Hill and Little Magic Piano.
13. Richard Henderson. "Concept to Conglomerate in Two Decades." Billboard advertising supplement, 26 February 2000. 58.
14. Henderson. 58.
15. Advertisement for Madacy Kids. Billboard. 63.
16. Chris Roberts. "Steven C Works His Piano." Minnesota Public Radio website. 16 May 2008.
17. "Steven C. Anderson ’88." Hamline University website.
18. Roberts. "Right out of graduating from Hamline, I was worried about being a starving artist," he said. "So I learned to tune pianos, took on 22 piano students and played in three different bands."
19. "Genius Products. Children’s Songs: Vocal Series." All Music website.
20. "Past to Presence by Steven C." CD Baby website. The producer was NorthWord Press of Minocqua, Wisconsin.
21. Richard Blackwell. "Wal-Mart Cutbacks Leave Madacy Singing the Blues." The [Toronto] Globe and Mail. 10 July 2008. B10.
22. CD Baby.
23. "Autumn Hills Records." Facebook.
24. "The O’Neill Brothers: Tim and Ryan." Piano Brothers website.
25. "Allstars Kids Club Limited." Endole Suite website.
26. Allstars Kids Club website.
27. "About Simon Parry." Facebook.
28. "Connect Church Values." Church’s website.
Lullabies have become a commercial music genre propagated by niche recording companies. [1] Following World War II, these businesses provided inexpensive albums that depended on public domain material by anonymous artists. [2] Since their records were not sold through channels monitored by Billboard, companies learned what sold by what was reordered or returned by merchants and middlemen. [3]
Judging from the contents of albums containing "Kumbaya," the repertoire includes the few commonly known lullabies like "Rockabye Baby" and "All through the Night," along with some adult songs like "Amazing Grace." The rest of the records are filled with nursery songs: "Baa Baa Black Sheep," "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," and all the others mentioned by parents in the post for 19 January 2018.
Unusual material rarely is included because first-time parents or people buying shower gifts tend to buy what they recognize. As mentioned in the post for 19 January 2018, people remember the songs of early childhood but not the earlier lullabies.
Many would be shocked by the actual contents of traditional lullabies described in 19 January 2018. Lyrics that expressed women’s non-maternal feelings would not be considered "age-appropriate" material. [4]
Since lullabies and nursery songs are now the same, record companies distinguish them by the way they are performed. Songs for the awake are sung, while most of the lullaby recordings offered by Amazon are instrumentals. The most common are piano solos, perhaps because Brahms used a piano accompaniment for his lullaby.
One person, who only used initials, suggested he or she wanted a piano arrangement to sing with. [5] Most people do not sing without a piano after they enter primary school or join a church youth choir, and do not remember singing a capella.
Since parents no longer sing to their infants, they, not the infants, have become the primary market for lullaby promoters. One woman said: "We leave this on loop all night and it’s great. It’s soothing for me too, if I need to go in the nursery for a crying baby, it keeps me calm, rocking baby baby To sleep. I love it!" [6]
Another said of the same recording: "We hear our son’s music playing over the monitor, so I like cds that will not annoy us and keep us up at night. Some music gets repetative and does not travel well over the monitor." [7]
Unlike adults, infants might be calmed by anything that was slow and quiet. The difference between the two generations’ aesthetics becomes clear when albums violate infants’ needs to be lulled. One mother praised an album because "every song is soothing and easy to listen to in the background, with no sudden changes in volume, sharp tones, or other surprises. [8]
Another warned "there are times when songs change and the tempo seems to fast for a lullaby." However, she reported her infant, along with her five- and seven-year-old children, all "listen to it every night when they sleep." [9]
Beyond the bare minimum elements of slow tempo and soft dynamics, adults judge lullabies by their own expectations. One man complained, "the arrangements for some of the tracks partially mask the traditional tunes by superimposing the instrumentalist’s interpretation." [10]
The number of piano versions of "Kumbaya" are relatively small, compared to the number of albums containing these versions. Once niche companies have created an inventory of songs, they tend to repackage them rather than spend money finding new material. A recording by Steven Anderson was available on eleven different albums in December 2017, and appeared on another three without attribution. The company name varied with the needs of its owner, Madacy Entertainement.
His version differed from the other six because much of it was played in the higher octaves. Most of the other pianists played their accompaniments below middle C, the normal domain of the left hand. Simon Parry was the only one who kept his notes within the range of a newborn’s hearing abilities [11] between middle C and the C above it.
They all played the standard 1-3-5 melody as a series of single notes, with parallel chords reserved for the fourth line. The accompaniments were arpeggios with a few chords, but no one played true chordal harmony. A couple, including Anderson, played the melody louder than the accompaniment. [12]
To introduce variety several played interludes that relied on arpeggios, often in the lower register. They never paused so the murmuring sounds were continuous.
Notes on Performance
The cover art was inexpensive, usually a drawing of a child sleeping or a picture of a night sky. Most was similar to clip art available on the web.
Notes on Performers
Madacy Entertainment was founded in 1980 in Montréal by Amos Alter to provide high-quality low-cost classical records. He used musicians from eastern Europe who did not have union wage protections. [13] The company then expanded into other niches. Its primary United States office was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, [14] near Target’s corporate headquarters.
In 2000, Alter started a children’s line. [15] Steven Anderson, who was living in Saint Paul, Minnesota, [16] recorded a lullaby collection for Madacy in 2002. He had graduated with a music degree from Hamline in 1988 [17] and supported himself for years by teaching and tuning pianos, and playing contract events like weddings. [18] He became involved with companies supplying children’s music to Target in the late 1990s when he produced records for Baby Genius in Saint Paul [19] and mixes of music and nature sounds for a Wisconsin company. [20]
Madacy expanded in 2006, just as music downloading cut into his market. Then, during the downturn of 2008, Wal-Mart reduced its purchases, and the company was taken over by one of its investors. [21] The list of Anderson’s reissues probably is incomplete, since it reflects only what was available in December 2017. Even so, one can see that after 2008, his recording of "Kumbaya" was constantly being included in other packages.
Meantime, Anderson began exploring ways the new digital media could be exploited by an independent artist. He since has recorded his own music, and sold it through internet outlets. [22]
The never ending needs of films, cable programs, and local advertising for music has prompted others to emulate the niche record company model. Rob and Mike Silverman began Autumn Hill Records in Saint Louis to "offer literally any style imaginable, with a huge sample library of over 10,000 virtual instruments, along with our stable of first call musicians." [23] Mike was a pianist, while Rob played drums.
Tim and Ryan O’Neill created a similar company, Shamrock-n-roll in Minnesota in 1997. They argued people should use their company’s music because they had "over 5000 songs to choose from" and "we own the arrangements of these songs so we can offer fast & affordable licenses." The two were both pianists, and often played together. [24]
Simon Parry started Allstars Kids Club in 2016 [25] as a medium for distributing Christian children’s music in England. [26] He worked as the children’s pastor for the Connect Church, and played piano. [27] The church claimed it valued "the life changing work of the Holy Spirit." [28]
I could not discover anything about the other record companies or artists. The Children’s Music Group and Stradivari Music were simply too generic, while the East London Orchestral Piano Ensemble upload was too recent to generate any information.
Availability
The versions in each group sounded the same to me. The CDs all were listed by Amazon in December 2017.
Madacy
Steven Anderson. Heavenly Lullabies. Madacy Christian. 3 December 2002.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Study Like a Hipster, Volume 1. Hipster Stories Records. 8 May 2006.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Land Of Milk and Honey. Madacy Kids. 6 October 2006.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Lullabies for Little Dreamers. Madacy Kids. 14 April 2009.
Countdown Singers. Lullabies and Goodnight. Suite 102. 21 February 2012.
Countdown Kids. Lullaby and Goodnight. Suite 102. 6 November 2012.
Steven C. Anderson. Heavenly Lullabies. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises. 13 January 2014.
Sleep Baby Sleep. Baby’s Bedtime Music. Still Water Records. 1 April 2014.
Steven C. Anderson. 30 Bible Songs. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises. 30 September 2014.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Piano Cleansing, Volume 2. La Brise Musique. 6 October 2014.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Lullabies: Baby Lullabies. Single Spoon Music. 6 August 2015.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Berceuses. Soleil Brille Musique. 6 August 2015.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Canciones de Cuna. Solido Producciones. 8 August 2015.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Soothing Piano Music. Glider’s Edge Entertainment. 16 January 2016.
Steven Anderson. 50 Songs for Sunday Inspirations. Suite 102. 19 April 2016.
Steven Anderson. On various artists. Relaxing Piano Music. Sleepless Notes Records. 16 September 2016.
Steven Anderson. Avec la technologie Box. Uploaded to YouTube by test kamen. 13 September 2017.
Autumn Hill
Lullaby Renditions of Classic Children’s Songs. Time Machine Records. 28 April 2009.
Smart Baby Lullaby. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Autumn Hill Records. 12 November 2009.
Bedtime Baby. Baby Music. Autumn Hill Records. 1 December 2009.
Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies. EDU Music and Films. 4 March 2010.
Smart Baby Lullabies. 60 Nursery Rhymes. EDU Music and Films. 6 March 2010.
Classical Lullabies. Autumn Hill Records. 14 March 2010.
Smart Baby Music. Smart Babies R US. 7 July 2012.
Piano Masters. New Age Piano Music. Autumn Hill Records. 8 November 2012.
Allstars Kids Club
Lullaby Music for Baby. Uploaded to YouTube by Allstars Kids Club on 8 July 2015.
Simon Parry. Soothing Piano Lullabies, Volume 1. Allstars Kids Club. 25 July 2015. Also, uploaded to YouTube by TuneCore on 1 August 2015.
The Children’s Music Group
Lullaby World. Lullabies. The Children’s Music Group. 7 May 2015.
Lullaby World. Ultimate Nursery Rhymes Collection. The Children’s Music Group. 12 May 2015. Also, uploaded to YouTube by CDBaby on 3 June 2015.
Others
Little Magic Piano. 30 Favorite Lullabies on Piano. Stradivari Music. 5 April 2015. Also, uploaded to YouTube by Symphonic Distribution on 11 April 2017.
East London Orchestral Piano Ensemble. Classical Piano Renditions. East London Orchestral Piano Ensemble. 2 December 2017. Also, uploaded to YouTube by Amuseio AB on 1 December 2017.
End Notes
1. As soon as record manufacturing techniques and raw materials became cheap and available after World War II, a number of small companies began releasing inexpensive recordings. They dominated the market for children’s records when I was young, and today Amazon includes three separate genres: lullabies, children’s, and children’s Bible songs. Niche producers also supply karaoke and Christmas collections to club owners and merchants through Amazon.
2. The ways the less scrupulous companies exploited composers and performers were revealed when Marion Rosette sued one for non-payment. She and her husband had formed Lincoln Records in 1949 to issue children’s song she had written. She did not copyright her material at the time, but did so years later. She discovered her songs were being reproduced by Playtime Albums and Carousel Albums in 1964 without credit. She notified them she then had valid copyrights for the material they were using. When they refused to pay her royalties, she sued and won.
According to Rosette v. Rainbo Record Manufacturing Corporation, (S.D.N.Y. 1973), Jack Brown claimed he and another man had formed Rainbo Record Manufacturing to manufacture records, but dissolved their partnership in the late 1940s. One of their customers had been Sidney Taback of Lyric Records, which had begun as a partnership of Brown, Taback and a third unrelated man. That "partnership was dissolved in February 1963 but Taback continued using the name Lyric."
Brown claimed "Lyric and Rainbo were not related companies," but Rosette "established that during the years 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1966 Rainbo and Lyric (or Playtime-Lyric) shared the same telephone numbers and were listed in the Los Angeles telephone directory as having the same address." She argued that "Rainbo was related to Lyric, Carousel and Playtime Records and that, in fact, Rainbo had purchased the Carousel and Playtime line of songs from Lyric."
3. Billboard changed its methods for tracking record sales years ago. Today, artists use digital tools to monitor their sales and downloads.
4. As mentioned in the post for 15 January 2018, some groups promote "research-based, developmentally appropriate early childhood music." The crashing cradle in "Rockabye Baby" probably does not qualify.
5. JD. Comments posted 30 May 2014 to Amazon website for EDU Music’s [Autumn Hill] Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies. JD wrote: "would have liked the lyrics to refresh memory and sing to the baby with the music."
6. KimG. Comments posted 27 December 2016 to Amazon website for Time Machine’s [Autumn Hill] Lullaby Renditions.
7. Mik Rhab. Comments posted 9 November 2015 to Amazon website for Lullaby Renditions.
8. Serena. Comments posted 24 February 2014 to Amazon website for Madacy’s Land Of Milk and Honey: Heavenly Lullabies.
9. melinny2007. Comments posted 13 December 2015 to Amazon website for Lullaby Renditions.
10. Bruce. Comments posted 3 April 2005 to Amazon’s website for Madacy’s Heavenly Lullabies.
11. The hearing abilities of infants was discussed in the post for 13 January 2018.
12. The other versions with loud melodies were sold by Autumn Hill and Little Magic Piano.
13. Richard Henderson. "Concept to Conglomerate in Two Decades." Billboard advertising supplement, 26 February 2000. 58.
14. Henderson. 58.
15. Advertisement for Madacy Kids. Billboard. 63.
16. Chris Roberts. "Steven C Works His Piano." Minnesota Public Radio website. 16 May 2008.
17. "Steven C. Anderson ’88." Hamline University website.
18. Roberts. "Right out of graduating from Hamline, I was worried about being a starving artist," he said. "So I learned to tune pianos, took on 22 piano students and played in three different bands."
19. "Genius Products. Children’s Songs: Vocal Series." All Music website.
20. "Past to Presence by Steven C." CD Baby website. The producer was NorthWord Press of Minocqua, Wisconsin.
21. Richard Blackwell. "Wal-Mart Cutbacks Leave Madacy Singing the Blues." The [Toronto] Globe and Mail. 10 July 2008. B10.
22. CD Baby.
23. "Autumn Hills Records." Facebook.
24. "The O’Neill Brothers: Tim and Ryan." Piano Brothers website.
25. "Allstars Kids Club Limited." Endole Suite website.
26. Allstars Kids Club website.
27. "About Simon Parry." Facebook.
28. "Connect Church Values." Church’s website.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Camp Glen - Kumbaya
Topic: Lullaby - Context
Summer youth camps used to perpetuate lullaby singing by providing older campers with habits of singing and a repertoire of songs that could be adapted for bedtime. The typical camp repertoire then was divided into three categories: fun songs, pretty songs, and ceremonial ones like graces. [1] Most campers did not appreciate the slow-paced pretty songs until after their voices changed and their ears were better able to detect harmony. [2]
After the commercial folk-music revival introduced guitars, groups of older campers would get together to sing and play. Many of the songs they selected were ones that had been recorded with harmony by groups like Peter, Paul and Mary or Simon and Garfunkel. [3] When I was attending Kitanniwa in the 1950s, most of the pretty song singing was done by counselors on the last night of the session.
Last night rituals existed in many camps: sometimes they were jocular, and sometimes sentimental. In ones sponsored by the Camp Fire Girls, the evening program began with a processional and council fire. Sometimes, they would be followed by a wishing boat ceremony at the lake edge. Then, after the usual close-of-day activities, came the serenade. [4]
A woman who worked at Kitanniwa in the early 1960s, told me:
"We sang ‘Kumbaya’ at Kitanniwa as one of the songs in the last night of the camping session counselor serenade of the cabins. (You are going to get more information here than you asked for.) As you may recall as a camper, after taps on the last night of camp the counselors went through the cabin area serenading the campers. We started, standing on the path by the bluebird lodge--I think it was called--and sang ‘Little Owlet’ and ‘Kumbaya’. We generally sang three verses to ‘Kumbaya’--someone’s singing, laughing?, sleeping. We never sang someone’s crying. We then moved on up to the area in front of the wash house and sang a couple of songs for the younger Campfire Girls–‘A Canoe May Be Drifting at Sunset’, as I recall, and one or two more that could vary. We then went up the path by cabins L, M, N and sang ‘God Gave The Wisemen Their Wisdom’ and ‘Long Long Trail’ that segued into ‘With Someone Like You’. I think we then finished up by singing ‘Remember’ standing in front of the wash house. When the Senior Unit was occupied, we would then go down on the waterfront and sing ‘Across the Stillness of the Lake’ and ‘Remember’--although I am not sure we sang across the lake to the Senior Unit on every occasion when campers were there. There were always a couple of the counselors who could harmonize." [5]
The ones I remembered hearing were "Remember," because it was a favorite of another camper, and "Little Owlet," because it was one song we did not sing ourselves and had a descant. The latter was a Mexican song introduced into the camp repertoire by a 1922 YWCA songbook. [6]
When I worked as a counselor at the Oshkosh, Wisconsin, CFG camp in 1963 we had a similar repertoire. However, the only songs I remember from Hiwela serenades were the ones I had not sung before: "Louisiana Lullaby" and "Lullaby Round." The first, which I have not found in print, began "dreamland opens here." The other simply repeated the word "lullaby."
The commercial folk-music revival did not change the serenade tradition, although pre-World War I songs like "Long, Long Trail" disappeared. At the Finley, Ohio, CFG in 1974, the counselors sang 21 songs, including "Remember" and "Kumbaya." The ones the Glen staff sang more than once were "May All of Your Dreams Be like Daisies in the Field," "Walk, Shepherdess Walk," "Barges," "I Am a Rover," "Mmm I Want To Linger," and "To Ope Their Trunks." [7]
None were specifically lullabies, but many were songs a mother could sing, or, if the words were forgotten or archaic, could hum.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: counselors
Vocal Director: at Hiwela and Glen the leaders would huddle and decided the songs before each stop.
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Notes on Lyrics
Basic Form
Glen: four-verse song that began with kumbaya
Kitanniwa: the counselor did not remember if they sang "Kumbaya" as a four-verse song, or if they sang "kumbaya" after every verse
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Singing Style: usually timbraic harmony; Glen used parallel thirds.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: serenade on last night of camp session
Location: outdoors outside the cabins used for sleeping
Microphones: none
Clothing: counselors usually were still in the clothes they wore for the council fire, but some might have added slacks or sweatshirts if it was cold or mosquitoes were bad.
Notes on Movement
Counselors sometimes sang while they walked, but usually stopped so campers could hear them.
Notes on Audience
Bluebirds were the youngest girls in camp, usually seven- to nine-years-old. Homesickness was always a problem with that group. The counselors at Kitanniwa in the 1960s probably did not sing the crying verse as a kind of white magic; if they did not use the word, then maybe the girls would remain calm. The staff in 1974 also did not sing that verse. I do not know if that was because they had internalized this taboo or not. [8]
Availability
I have not replayed my tapes from Camp Glen, for the reasons mentioned in the post for 25 October 2017.
End Notes
1. Camp Songs, Folk Songs described the categories and labels used in camps. 85-86.
2. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 88-89.
3. Camp Songs, Folk Songs discussed the most important commercial folk-revival artists in 1976. 549-550.
4. Camp Songs, Folk Songs explored the origins of serenades in early college singing traditions. 342.
5. Email. 3 March 2016. Most of these songs were discussed in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
6. "The Owlet." Translated by Muna Lee; arranged by Elena Landázuri. 86+. Florence Hudson Botsford. Botsford Collection of Folk Songs. New York: G. Schirmer, 1922, 2 volumes. Republished in three volumes in 1930. The 1930 version was included in Music Makers with very minor changed by Augustus D. Zanzig. 24. My copy of Music Makers was purchased in the 1955-1956 school year. It carried no publication information other than it was "prepared for Camp Fire Girls, Inc." and was produced by Cooperative Recreation Service.
7. "To Ope" was the first camp song I found in a singing school book like the ones mentioned in the post for 21 December 2017. It appeared in George F. Root. First Years in Song-Land. Cincinnati: John Church, 1879. Most of the rest of the Glen songs were anonymous. The exception was "Walk Shepherdess," which Eleanor Farjeon wrote for Nursery Rhymes of London Town. It was published with music in London: Oxford University Press, 1919.
8. The 1974 Kitanniwa version of "Kumbaya" was discussed in the post for 29 November 2017.
Summer youth camps used to perpetuate lullaby singing by providing older campers with habits of singing and a repertoire of songs that could be adapted for bedtime. The typical camp repertoire then was divided into three categories: fun songs, pretty songs, and ceremonial ones like graces. [1] Most campers did not appreciate the slow-paced pretty songs until after their voices changed and their ears were better able to detect harmony. [2]
After the commercial folk-music revival introduced guitars, groups of older campers would get together to sing and play. Many of the songs they selected were ones that had been recorded with harmony by groups like Peter, Paul and Mary or Simon and Garfunkel. [3] When I was attending Kitanniwa in the 1950s, most of the pretty song singing was done by counselors on the last night of the session.
Last night rituals existed in many camps: sometimes they were jocular, and sometimes sentimental. In ones sponsored by the Camp Fire Girls, the evening program began with a processional and council fire. Sometimes, they would be followed by a wishing boat ceremony at the lake edge. Then, after the usual close-of-day activities, came the serenade. [4]
A woman who worked at Kitanniwa in the early 1960s, told me:
"We sang ‘Kumbaya’ at Kitanniwa as one of the songs in the last night of the camping session counselor serenade of the cabins. (You are going to get more information here than you asked for.) As you may recall as a camper, after taps on the last night of camp the counselors went through the cabin area serenading the campers. We started, standing on the path by the bluebird lodge--I think it was called--and sang ‘Little Owlet’ and ‘Kumbaya’. We generally sang three verses to ‘Kumbaya’--someone’s singing, laughing?, sleeping. We never sang someone’s crying. We then moved on up to the area in front of the wash house and sang a couple of songs for the younger Campfire Girls–‘A Canoe May Be Drifting at Sunset’, as I recall, and one or two more that could vary. We then went up the path by cabins L, M, N and sang ‘God Gave The Wisemen Their Wisdom’ and ‘Long Long Trail’ that segued into ‘With Someone Like You’. I think we then finished up by singing ‘Remember’ standing in front of the wash house. When the Senior Unit was occupied, we would then go down on the waterfront and sing ‘Across the Stillness of the Lake’ and ‘Remember’--although I am not sure we sang across the lake to the Senior Unit on every occasion when campers were there. There were always a couple of the counselors who could harmonize." [5]
The ones I remembered hearing were "Remember," because it was a favorite of another camper, and "Little Owlet," because it was one song we did not sing ourselves and had a descant. The latter was a Mexican song introduced into the camp repertoire by a 1922 YWCA songbook. [6]
When I worked as a counselor at the Oshkosh, Wisconsin, CFG camp in 1963 we had a similar repertoire. However, the only songs I remember from Hiwela serenades were the ones I had not sung before: "Louisiana Lullaby" and "Lullaby Round." The first, which I have not found in print, began "dreamland opens here." The other simply repeated the word "lullaby."
The commercial folk-music revival did not change the serenade tradition, although pre-World War I songs like "Long, Long Trail" disappeared. At the Finley, Ohio, CFG in 1974, the counselors sang 21 songs, including "Remember" and "Kumbaya." The ones the Glen staff sang more than once were "May All of Your Dreams Be like Daisies in the Field," "Walk, Shepherdess Walk," "Barges," "I Am a Rover," "Mmm I Want To Linger," and "To Ope Their Trunks." [7]
None were specifically lullabies, but many were songs a mother could sing, or, if the words were forgotten or archaic, could hum.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: counselors
Vocal Director: at Hiwela and Glen the leaders would huddle and decided the songs before each stop.
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Notes on Lyrics
Basic Form
Glen: four-verse song that began with kumbaya
Kitanniwa: the counselor did not remember if they sang "Kumbaya" as a four-verse song, or if they sang "kumbaya" after every verse
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Singing Style: usually timbraic harmony; Glen used parallel thirds.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: serenade on last night of camp session
Location: outdoors outside the cabins used for sleeping
Microphones: none
Clothing: counselors usually were still in the clothes they wore for the council fire, but some might have added slacks or sweatshirts if it was cold or mosquitoes were bad.
Notes on Movement
Counselors sometimes sang while they walked, but usually stopped so campers could hear them.
Notes on Audience
Bluebirds were the youngest girls in camp, usually seven- to nine-years-old. Homesickness was always a problem with that group. The counselors at Kitanniwa in the 1960s probably did not sing the crying verse as a kind of white magic; if they did not use the word, then maybe the girls would remain calm. The staff in 1974 also did not sing that verse. I do not know if that was because they had internalized this taboo or not. [8]
Availability
I have not replayed my tapes from Camp Glen, for the reasons mentioned in the post for 25 October 2017.
End Notes
1. Camp Songs, Folk Songs described the categories and labels used in camps. 85-86.
2. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 88-89.
3. Camp Songs, Folk Songs discussed the most important commercial folk-revival artists in 1976. 549-550.
4. Camp Songs, Folk Songs explored the origins of serenades in early college singing traditions. 342.
5. Email. 3 March 2016. Most of these songs were discussed in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
6. "The Owlet." Translated by Muna Lee; arranged by Elena Landázuri. 86+. Florence Hudson Botsford. Botsford Collection of Folk Songs. New York: G. Schirmer, 1922, 2 volumes. Republished in three volumes in 1930. The 1930 version was included in Music Makers with very minor changed by Augustus D. Zanzig. 24. My copy of Music Makers was purchased in the 1955-1956 school year. It carried no publication information other than it was "prepared for Camp Fire Girls, Inc." and was produced by Cooperative Recreation Service.
7. "To Ope" was the first camp song I found in a singing school book like the ones mentioned in the post for 21 December 2017. It appeared in George F. Root. First Years in Song-Land. Cincinnati: John Church, 1879. Most of the rest of the Glen songs were anonymous. The exception was "Walk Shepherdess," which Eleanor Farjeon wrote for Nursery Rhymes of London Town. It was published with music in London: Oxford University Press, 1919.
8. The 1974 Kitanniwa version of "Kumbaya" was discussed in the post for 29 November 2017.
Friday, January 19, 2018
Thula Mama - Kumbaya
Topic: Lullaby - Context
Americans know very few lullabies, if one restricts one’s definition to lyrics that use the words "sleep" and "baby." Bess Lomax Hawes listed six in the post for 7 January 2018, [1] and of those "Rockabye Baby" was the only one used by mothers of newborns in southern Ontario in the early 1990s. [2] Of the other songs they sang, the closest to a lullaby was "You Are My Sunshine." [3] The others were "Puff the Magic Dragon" [5] and "Barney’s Theme Song." [5]
These women, at least, were willing to sing. One women recommended Susie Tallman’s lullaby CD because "my voice is so awful and hers is so amazing, singing along wasn’t really an option." She added "save your voice and let Susie put your kid to sleep!" [6]
Hawes was writing in 1974 and Laurel Trainor was doing her Canadian research in the early 1990s. In between, popular music changed. Through the 1950s and the commercial folk-music revival, people could and did sing along with records. Then, the Beatles generated so much enthusiasm, they could only satisfy audience demand by appearing in stadiums in 1965. [7] The Rolling Stones responded in 1966 with sound and lighting systems that addressed the audio problems encountered by the Beatles. [8] After that, audiences developed new participation rituals that coevolved with the technology used by rock musicians. Singing along became passé.
More recently, groups like Music Together mentioned in the post for 15 January 2018, have been holding workshops to teach pregnant women and newborn mothers how to overcome their inhibitions and sing lullabies. Helen Yeomans said she discovered the pleasures of chorale singing after the birth of her second child. When the third arrived, she started holding singing meetings for members of her playgroup in her home. [9]
Pregnant women in a class in Limerick, Ireland, reported singing had a soothing effect on them. More, Mary Carolan’s team found it helped them express their fears and anxieties. [10] Abbe Walker thought the same need was served by the surviving fragments of ancient Greek lullabies. She believed they were magical incantations intended to protect the infant from the known and unknown. [11]
Singing lullabies is often a solitary occupation, especially for the very young infant. Many scholars have observed the slow tempos prompted musings about fate. Luisa Del Giudice thought the accompanying texts often resembled dreams in their use of free associations [12] in which Italian women could lament their condition. [13] Hunger and the fear of want were recurring themes. [14]
In Nigeria, Uwemedimo Enobong Iwoketok found lullabies sung by mothers expressed concerns about how "she will cope with a lean financial situation and several children." [15] Babysitters had less security, and their songs often mentioned the fact they did not eat until "after everybody, including the baby, has eaten and probably gone to sleep." [16]
Sayyed Mojtaba Hosseini noted women in southern Iran used "desolate and sad" tunes to express the "bitterness of life." [17] Federico García Lorca said Spanish lullabies also used the country’s "saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to tinge her children’s first slumber." Many lyrics dealt with male infidelity, and some with female adultery. [18]
Even in this country the baby crashes to the ground in the final lines of "Rockabye Baby." Hawes thought the lullaby was a way for mothers to deflect the hostilities they felt when they were forcibly separated from their infants at birth in hospitals like the one described by Margaret Mead in the post for 15 January 2018. She reflected it might be a way of coping with the "abnormal degree of separation strain" placed on American mothers. [19]
One person who thought "Kumbaya" was a lullaby said "songs don’t become ‘traditional" unless they tap into something deep in human nature (beneath and across cultures). With Kumbaya, that ‘something’ is abandonment, loneliness, longing. By invoking the memory of a comforting other, those painful feelings are assuaged." [20]
Yeomans’ group in south Devon, England, recorded "Kumbaya" with no musical instruments. She modified the standard version by substituting sleeping for singing in the second and third lines of the final verse. It thus progressed from a crying infant through a mother’s lullaby to a sleeping child. The intervening praying verse was less a Christian term than a reference to the lullaby itself as a form of sympathetic magic.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: women
Vocal Director: Helen Yeomans
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Copyright: 2012 Musical Hedge
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: com by ah with no obvious accent; Lord sung with a soft /d/.
Verses: kumbaya, crying, praying, sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: substitute sleeping for singing
Basic Form: four-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Singing Style: they began each line in unison, and changed to parallel harmony on the verbs; one syllable to one note except for final Lord.
Notes on Performance
CD cover: quilt-style design with dark-blue background. The outer pink-and-blue border had black picots on the outside. The inner frame was a series of small squares containing stars and hearts. That design was repeated in an outline of a bell jar containing a yellow new moon. Yellow stars were scattered inside and outside the jar.
Notes on Performers
Yeomans organized choirs in Totes, Devon, and began composing for them. After women heard her mothers’ group on radio, they wrote and asked how they could organize their own groups. That led to a franchise. [21]
She called the group Thula Mama, after a song recorded by Vusi Mahlasela. The South African Sotho-speaker dedicated it to "all the women in South Africa who refused to dwindle in the midst of apartheid at that time." He especially remembered his grandmother who protected them from the police with a pot of boiling water. [22]
"Thula Mama" mixed native words with references to childhood. Perhaps that was why Yeomans considered it to be an African lullaby. [23]
Availability
CD: Strictly Sleeping. 30 December 2011.
End Notes
1. Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 146. The list was in note 13.
2. Laurel J. Trainor. "Infant Preferences for Infant-Directed Versus Noninfant-Directed
Playsongs and Lullabies." Infant Behavior and Development 19:83-92:1996. She asked women in the maternity ward to sing a song with and without their infants. She then asked students to classify them as lullabies or playsongs. The playsongs were "Baa Baa Black Sheep," "Inky Dinky Spider," and "Skinamerink." They thought "Row Your Boat" was a lullaby when sung to an infant, and a playsong when sung without an infant present. They did not agree on the status of "ABCD," "Five Little Ducks," and "There’s a Hole in My Bucket."
3. "You Are My Sunshine" was recorded by Jimmie Davis in 1940.
4. "Puff the Magic Dragon" was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1963.
5. Barney and Friends originated as a series of videos about a purple dinosaur created by Sheryl Leach in 1987. PBS began broadcasting a version in 1992 that still was being aired when Trainor published her study in 1996. The theme song was written by Philip A. Parker. (Wikipedia. "Barney and Friends." and "Philip Parker." Barney Wiki website.)
6. Patricia Brahe. Comment on Susie Tallman. Lullaby Themes for Sleepy Dreams. Posted to Amazon 28 August 2006.
7. Wikipedia. "The Beatles’ 1965 US Tour."
8. Wikipedia. "Arena Rock."
9. "A Thula Mama Session." Its website.
10. Mary Carolan, Maebh Barry, Mary Gamble, Kathleen Turner, and Óscar Mascareñas. "Experiences of Pregnant Women Attending a Lullaby Programme in Limerick, Ireland: a Qualitative Study." Midwifery 28:321-328:2012.
11. Abbe Walker. "Ancient Greek Lullabies: Magic or Mundane?" Society for Classical Studies annual meeting. 2016.
12. Luisa Del Giudice. "Ninna-nanna-nonsense? Fears, Dreams, and Falling in the Italian Lullaby." Oral Tradition 3:270-293:1988. 273.
13. Del Giudice. 271.
14. Del Giudice. 277.
15. Uwemedimo Enobong Iwoketok. "Analysis of Lullabic Songs in Traditional African Communities: Some Nigerian Examples." African Research Review 3:147-157:2009. 149.
16. Iwoketok. 153.
17. Sayyed Mojtaba Hosseini. "A Study of Lullabies in Bushehr Province [Iran]." International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies 3:1115-1125:2016. 1117.
18. Federico García Lorca. "Las nanas infantiles." Madrid lecture, 1928. Translated as "On Lullabies" by A. S. Kline in 2008.
19. Hawes. 147-148.
20. mj. 31 August 2006. Comment on Eric Zorn. "Someone’s dissin’, Lord, kumbaya." Chicago Tribune website. 31 August 2006. Her comments on "Kumbaya" as a lullaby were quoted in the post for 3 January 2018.
21. "Thula Mama." Helen Yeomans’ website.
22. Vusi Mahlasela. Interviewed by Renee Montague. National Public Radio, Morning Edition. 24 April 2007.
23. Yeoman’s website.
Americans know very few lullabies, if one restricts one’s definition to lyrics that use the words "sleep" and "baby." Bess Lomax Hawes listed six in the post for 7 January 2018, [1] and of those "Rockabye Baby" was the only one used by mothers of newborns in southern Ontario in the early 1990s. [2] Of the other songs they sang, the closest to a lullaby was "You Are My Sunshine." [3] The others were "Puff the Magic Dragon" [5] and "Barney’s Theme Song." [5]
These women, at least, were willing to sing. One women recommended Susie Tallman’s lullaby CD because "my voice is so awful and hers is so amazing, singing along wasn’t really an option." She added "save your voice and let Susie put your kid to sleep!" [6]
Hawes was writing in 1974 and Laurel Trainor was doing her Canadian research in the early 1990s. In between, popular music changed. Through the 1950s and the commercial folk-music revival, people could and did sing along with records. Then, the Beatles generated so much enthusiasm, they could only satisfy audience demand by appearing in stadiums in 1965. [7] The Rolling Stones responded in 1966 with sound and lighting systems that addressed the audio problems encountered by the Beatles. [8] After that, audiences developed new participation rituals that coevolved with the technology used by rock musicians. Singing along became passé.
More recently, groups like Music Together mentioned in the post for 15 January 2018, have been holding workshops to teach pregnant women and newborn mothers how to overcome their inhibitions and sing lullabies. Helen Yeomans said she discovered the pleasures of chorale singing after the birth of her second child. When the third arrived, she started holding singing meetings for members of her playgroup in her home. [9]
Pregnant women in a class in Limerick, Ireland, reported singing had a soothing effect on them. More, Mary Carolan’s team found it helped them express their fears and anxieties. [10] Abbe Walker thought the same need was served by the surviving fragments of ancient Greek lullabies. She believed they were magical incantations intended to protect the infant from the known and unknown. [11]
Singing lullabies is often a solitary occupation, especially for the very young infant. Many scholars have observed the slow tempos prompted musings about fate. Luisa Del Giudice thought the accompanying texts often resembled dreams in their use of free associations [12] in which Italian women could lament their condition. [13] Hunger and the fear of want were recurring themes. [14]
In Nigeria, Uwemedimo Enobong Iwoketok found lullabies sung by mothers expressed concerns about how "she will cope with a lean financial situation and several children." [15] Babysitters had less security, and their songs often mentioned the fact they did not eat until "after everybody, including the baby, has eaten and probably gone to sleep." [16]
Sayyed Mojtaba Hosseini noted women in southern Iran used "desolate and sad" tunes to express the "bitterness of life." [17] Federico García Lorca said Spanish lullabies also used the country’s "saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to tinge her children’s first slumber." Many lyrics dealt with male infidelity, and some with female adultery. [18]
Even in this country the baby crashes to the ground in the final lines of "Rockabye Baby." Hawes thought the lullaby was a way for mothers to deflect the hostilities they felt when they were forcibly separated from their infants at birth in hospitals like the one described by Margaret Mead in the post for 15 January 2018. She reflected it might be a way of coping with the "abnormal degree of separation strain" placed on American mothers. [19]
One person who thought "Kumbaya" was a lullaby said "songs don’t become ‘traditional" unless they tap into something deep in human nature (beneath and across cultures). With Kumbaya, that ‘something’ is abandonment, loneliness, longing. By invoking the memory of a comforting other, those painful feelings are assuaged." [20]
Yeomans’ group in south Devon, England, recorded "Kumbaya" with no musical instruments. She modified the standard version by substituting sleeping for singing in the second and third lines of the final verse. It thus progressed from a crying infant through a mother’s lullaby to a sleeping child. The intervening praying verse was less a Christian term than a reference to the lullaby itself as a form of sympathetic magic.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: women
Vocal Director: Helen Yeomans
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Copyright: 2012 Musical Hedge
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: com by ah with no obvious accent; Lord sung with a soft /d/.
Verses: kumbaya, crying, praying, sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: substitute sleeping for singing
Basic Form: four-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Singing Style: they began each line in unison, and changed to parallel harmony on the verbs; one syllable to one note except for final Lord.
Notes on Performance
CD cover: quilt-style design with dark-blue background. The outer pink-and-blue border had black picots on the outside. The inner frame was a series of small squares containing stars and hearts. That design was repeated in an outline of a bell jar containing a yellow new moon. Yellow stars were scattered inside and outside the jar.
Notes on Performers
Yeomans organized choirs in Totes, Devon, and began composing for them. After women heard her mothers’ group on radio, they wrote and asked how they could organize their own groups. That led to a franchise. [21]
She called the group Thula Mama, after a song recorded by Vusi Mahlasela. The South African Sotho-speaker dedicated it to "all the women in South Africa who refused to dwindle in the midst of apartheid at that time." He especially remembered his grandmother who protected them from the police with a pot of boiling water. [22]
"Thula Mama" mixed native words with references to childhood. Perhaps that was why Yeomans considered it to be an African lullaby. [23]
Availability
CD: Strictly Sleeping. 30 December 2011.
End Notes
1. Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 146. The list was in note 13.
2. Laurel J. Trainor. "Infant Preferences for Infant-Directed Versus Noninfant-Directed
Playsongs and Lullabies." Infant Behavior and Development 19:83-92:1996. She asked women in the maternity ward to sing a song with and without their infants. She then asked students to classify them as lullabies or playsongs. The playsongs were "Baa Baa Black Sheep," "Inky Dinky Spider," and "Skinamerink." They thought "Row Your Boat" was a lullaby when sung to an infant, and a playsong when sung without an infant present. They did not agree on the status of "ABCD," "Five Little Ducks," and "There’s a Hole in My Bucket."
3. "You Are My Sunshine" was recorded by Jimmie Davis in 1940.
4. "Puff the Magic Dragon" was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1963.
5. Barney and Friends originated as a series of videos about a purple dinosaur created by Sheryl Leach in 1987. PBS began broadcasting a version in 1992 that still was being aired when Trainor published her study in 1996. The theme song was written by Philip A. Parker. (Wikipedia. "Barney and Friends." and "Philip Parker." Barney Wiki website.)
6. Patricia Brahe. Comment on Susie Tallman. Lullaby Themes for Sleepy Dreams. Posted to Amazon 28 August 2006.
7. Wikipedia. "The Beatles’ 1965 US Tour."
8. Wikipedia. "Arena Rock."
9. "A Thula Mama Session." Its website.
10. Mary Carolan, Maebh Barry, Mary Gamble, Kathleen Turner, and Óscar Mascareñas. "Experiences of Pregnant Women Attending a Lullaby Programme in Limerick, Ireland: a Qualitative Study." Midwifery 28:321-328:2012.
11. Abbe Walker. "Ancient Greek Lullabies: Magic or Mundane?" Society for Classical Studies annual meeting. 2016.
12. Luisa Del Giudice. "Ninna-nanna-nonsense? Fears, Dreams, and Falling in the Italian Lullaby." Oral Tradition 3:270-293:1988. 273.
13. Del Giudice. 271.
14. Del Giudice. 277.
15. Uwemedimo Enobong Iwoketok. "Analysis of Lullabic Songs in Traditional African Communities: Some Nigerian Examples." African Research Review 3:147-157:2009. 149.
16. Iwoketok. 153.
17. Sayyed Mojtaba Hosseini. "A Study of Lullabies in Bushehr Province [Iran]." International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies 3:1115-1125:2016. 1117.
18. Federico García Lorca. "Las nanas infantiles." Madrid lecture, 1928. Translated as "On Lullabies" by A. S. Kline in 2008.
19. Hawes. 147-148.
20. mj. 31 August 2006. Comment on Eric Zorn. "Someone’s dissin’, Lord, kumbaya." Chicago Tribune website. 31 August 2006. Her comments on "Kumbaya" as a lullaby were quoted in the post for 3 January 2018.
21. "Thula Mama." Helen Yeomans’ website.
22. Vusi Mahlasela. Interviewed by Renee Montague. National Public Radio, Morning Edition. 24 April 2007.
23. Yeoman’s website.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Leslie Abdallah - Kumbaya
Topic: Lullaby - Context
Lullaby genres are cultural artifacts that last as long as they are useful. Mari Sarv noted the oldest Estonian lullabies were runosongs that began disappearing when serfs were freed between 1816 and 1819. They then were under the power of the Russian Empire, and identified themselves with the local elite, the Baltic Germans. German music replaced traditional styles. [1]
Kreshnik Duqi found in Tirana, Albania, "lullabies or cradle songs, are being forgotten because they are no longer used." He noted they had been sung by grandmothers, but "nowadays the couples choose to live apart from their parents" and they find it "almost impossible" to spend time singing "as a result of a long and tiresome day at work." [2]
Sarv and Duqi both suggested lullaby genres could not survive changes in ways parents responded to the needs of newborn infants. In our country, two innovations have altered the ways infants are calmed. One was the introduction of the clock as the arbiter of working life.
When people lived on farms, and an infant with colic kept everyone awake, it was not a serious problem if cows were milked a little later the next morning. In the mills and mines, tardiness meant dismissal. People, who lived in cheaply built, congested company housing, had little tolerance for late-night noise from other families. Opium-based patent medicines like paregoric were sold to treat teething infants. [3]
Its use was not restricted to the working poor in urban or industrial areas. Gary Shattuck found complaints in Vermont in 1827 that "well-intentioned mothers dosed their infant children without consulting a doctor ‘with paregoric, or Godfrey’s cordial [containing morphine] or laudanum, to make them sleep and be quiet’." [4]
The second innovation was the transfer of maternal training from older women to professionals in hospitals. Margaret Mead described a typical stay in the 1950s when the mother was heavily sedated when the infant was born and not allowed to see it for hours, and then only for the "appointed number of minutes." [5] She added:
"During the nine or ten days that follow, the mother handles her baby clothed, and only at regular hours. The father does not handle it at all. Breast feeding is frequently abandoned altogether, and by the time the child goes home, the mother, if not the baby, has learned that contacts between mother and child have a certain form." [6]
Nurses and pediatricians today train mothers to put their infants on a schedule of regular feedings and sleep times. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia warned mothers, they may "want to rock or breastfeed a baby to sleep," [7] but to
"be sure that the baby does not fall asleep while eating or in your arms. This may become a pattern and the baby may begin to expect to be in your arms in order to fall asleep." [8]
As suggested in the post for 5 January 2018, many of methods used to calm infants are reinvented every generation. The songs that constitute a lullaby repertoire, on the other hand, need to be learned. As Yaghmaei noted, babies do not learn the words to their lullabies [9] the way they do the play songs used when they were awake. More elaborate transmission channels are required.
The post for 11 January 2018 mentioned the way patrilocal Alevi Islam villages in Turkeys initiated young mothers into the traditions of their husbands’ families. Stephen Hunter suggested a way lullabies were trasnferred in this country through the very media that were displacing mothers’ singing. He said his whole family liked a CD by Leslie Abdallah because
"Even my 9 year old daughter easily recognized the songs, and was singing happily to the lullabies, especially to My Bonnie!" [10]
The need for lullabies extends beyond the first few weeks, and, as mentioned in the post for 5 January 2018, the ones that work change as children develop new cognitive skills. Bess Lomax Hawes remembered:
"In my experience with putting two- and three-year-olds to bed, I found that at that age they actively resist anything that smacks of lulling." [11]
Thus, there is a market for records like Abdallah’s that use more complex forms of music: a harmonica played the melody between verses in her version of "Kumbaya." These are the songs children may sing to their younger brothers and sisters, and later to their own infants. Abdallah’s version might have been particularly effective because she sang with her own children and their voices may have invited participation by children like Hunter’s daughter.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Leslie Abdallah
Vocal Group: Abey Belle Abdallah, Geoffrey J. P. Abdallah
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano, Liz Toleno; [12] harmonica
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Copyright: 2015 Leslie Abdallah
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: comb by ya, with no accented syllable
Verses: kumbaya, sleeping, dreaming,
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: three-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: verses restricted to those related to sleep
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Seekers
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: vocal with instrumental accompaniment, introduction, and interlude
Singing Style: one syllable to one note, except for Lord; last line was sung slower
Solo-Group Dynamics: unison throughout
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: the piano played arpeggios with chords to suggest the melody in the introduction. In continued the arpeggios during the verses. An harmonica occasionally played a few notes between phrases, and played the melody during the interlude. It only played single notes, with some consistently louder than others.
Notes on Performance
Cover: light-blue background for photographs of scattered daffodil heads of various sizes and varieties.
Notes on Performers
Abdallah graduated from New York University’s musical theater program and worked in regional and touring productions of Broadway shows. After her marriage she worked as an instructor for Music Together in New Paltz, New York. [13]
Music Together was the logical extension of the professionalization of maternal training. It "began as an educational project of the Center for Music and Young Children in Princeton, NJ. It pioneered the concept of a research-based, developmentally appropriate early childhood music curriculum that strongly emphasizes and facilitates adult involvement." [14]
Availability
CD: Daffodil Dreams. 22 November 2015.
YouTube: uploaded by CDBaby on 29 November 2015.
End Notes
1. Mari Sarv. "Traditional Estonian Lullabies: A Tentative Overview." 2:161-176 in Estonia and Poland. Edited by Liisi Laineste, Dorota Brzozowska, and Wladyslaw Chlopicki. Tartu, Estonia: ELM Scholarly Press, 2013. 2:162.
2. Kreshnik Duqi. "The Cradle (Lullabies) Songs in the Villages of Tirana." European Journal of Language and Literature Studies 6:40-53:2016. 51. Beyond the usual upheavals caused by industrialization, he also alluded to problems ensuing from politics in the post-Communist world. He found researchers could not even preserve the lullabies that survived because people "don’t like to be recorded."
3. Paregoric was introduced in the early 1700s to treat asthma, and soon was used with coughs, especially those related to tuberculosis. It also was used for diarrhea. The original formula included a number of herbs, but, by the mid-1800s, was simplified. The opium was mixed with camphor and anise. The similar, but stronger Laudanum, was dissolved in alcohol. (Wikipedia. "Paregoric.")
4. Gary G. Shattuck. "Opium Eating in Vermont: "A Crying Evil of the Day." Vermont History 83:157-192:2015. 168. He was quoting the Vermont Gazette for 13 March 1827.
5. Margaret Mead. Male and Female. New York: William Morrow and Company, Publishers, 1952. 169
6. Mead. 169.
7. "Newborn-Sleep Patterns." Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia website.
8. Children’s Hospital. Jodi Mindell of the hospital’s Sleep Disorders Center was more blunt: "If you rock your child to sleep every night for the first eight weeks, why would he expect anything different later on?" Quoted by Johnson and Johnson’s BabyCenter website.
9. P. Yaghmaei. "Lullabies, the first Iranian women’ unwritten poems." Arya Adib website in Farsi. April 2014. Reported by Azadeh Okhovat Poudeh. "Children’s Perception of Emotion in Music: A Cross-cultural Study." Masters thesis. University of Jyväskylä, 2015. 16.
10. Stephen P. Hunter. Comment of Amazon site for Abdallah’s CD. 16 December 2015.
11. Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 144.
12. "Leslie Abdallah." CD Baby website.
13. CD Baby.
14. "Music Together: Babies!" New Baby New Paltz website.
Lullaby genres are cultural artifacts that last as long as they are useful. Mari Sarv noted the oldest Estonian lullabies were runosongs that began disappearing when serfs were freed between 1816 and 1819. They then were under the power of the Russian Empire, and identified themselves with the local elite, the Baltic Germans. German music replaced traditional styles. [1]
Kreshnik Duqi found in Tirana, Albania, "lullabies or cradle songs, are being forgotten because they are no longer used." He noted they had been sung by grandmothers, but "nowadays the couples choose to live apart from their parents" and they find it "almost impossible" to spend time singing "as a result of a long and tiresome day at work." [2]
Sarv and Duqi both suggested lullaby genres could not survive changes in ways parents responded to the needs of newborn infants. In our country, two innovations have altered the ways infants are calmed. One was the introduction of the clock as the arbiter of working life.
When people lived on farms, and an infant with colic kept everyone awake, it was not a serious problem if cows were milked a little later the next morning. In the mills and mines, tardiness meant dismissal. People, who lived in cheaply built, congested company housing, had little tolerance for late-night noise from other families. Opium-based patent medicines like paregoric were sold to treat teething infants. [3]
Its use was not restricted to the working poor in urban or industrial areas. Gary Shattuck found complaints in Vermont in 1827 that "well-intentioned mothers dosed their infant children without consulting a doctor ‘with paregoric, or Godfrey’s cordial [containing morphine] or laudanum, to make them sleep and be quiet’." [4]
The second innovation was the transfer of maternal training from older women to professionals in hospitals. Margaret Mead described a typical stay in the 1950s when the mother was heavily sedated when the infant was born and not allowed to see it for hours, and then only for the "appointed number of minutes." [5] She added:
"During the nine or ten days that follow, the mother handles her baby clothed, and only at regular hours. The father does not handle it at all. Breast feeding is frequently abandoned altogether, and by the time the child goes home, the mother, if not the baby, has learned that contacts between mother and child have a certain form." [6]
Nurses and pediatricians today train mothers to put their infants on a schedule of regular feedings and sleep times. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia warned mothers, they may "want to rock or breastfeed a baby to sleep," [7] but to
"be sure that the baby does not fall asleep while eating or in your arms. This may become a pattern and the baby may begin to expect to be in your arms in order to fall asleep." [8]
As suggested in the post for 5 January 2018, many of methods used to calm infants are reinvented every generation. The songs that constitute a lullaby repertoire, on the other hand, need to be learned. As Yaghmaei noted, babies do not learn the words to their lullabies [9] the way they do the play songs used when they were awake. More elaborate transmission channels are required.
The post for 11 January 2018 mentioned the way patrilocal Alevi Islam villages in Turkeys initiated young mothers into the traditions of their husbands’ families. Stephen Hunter suggested a way lullabies were trasnferred in this country through the very media that were displacing mothers’ singing. He said his whole family liked a CD by Leslie Abdallah because
"Even my 9 year old daughter easily recognized the songs, and was singing happily to the lullabies, especially to My Bonnie!" [10]
The need for lullabies extends beyond the first few weeks, and, as mentioned in the post for 5 January 2018, the ones that work change as children develop new cognitive skills. Bess Lomax Hawes remembered:
"In my experience with putting two- and three-year-olds to bed, I found that at that age they actively resist anything that smacks of lulling." [11]
Thus, there is a market for records like Abdallah’s that use more complex forms of music: a harmonica played the melody between verses in her version of "Kumbaya." These are the songs children may sing to their younger brothers and sisters, and later to their own infants. Abdallah’s version might have been particularly effective because she sang with her own children and their voices may have invited participation by children like Hunter’s daughter.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Leslie Abdallah
Vocal Group: Abey Belle Abdallah, Geoffrey J. P. Abdallah
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano, Liz Toleno; [12] harmonica
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Copyright: 2015 Leslie Abdallah
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: comb by ya, with no accented syllable
Verses: kumbaya, sleeping, dreaming,
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: three-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: verses restricted to those related to sleep
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Seekers
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: vocal with instrumental accompaniment, introduction, and interlude
Singing Style: one syllable to one note, except for Lord; last line was sung slower
Solo-Group Dynamics: unison throughout
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: the piano played arpeggios with chords to suggest the melody in the introduction. In continued the arpeggios during the verses. An harmonica occasionally played a few notes between phrases, and played the melody during the interlude. It only played single notes, with some consistently louder than others.
Notes on Performance
Cover: light-blue background for photographs of scattered daffodil heads of various sizes and varieties.
Notes on Performers
Abdallah graduated from New York University’s musical theater program and worked in regional and touring productions of Broadway shows. After her marriage she worked as an instructor for Music Together in New Paltz, New York. [13]
Music Together was the logical extension of the professionalization of maternal training. It "began as an educational project of the Center for Music and Young Children in Princeton, NJ. It pioneered the concept of a research-based, developmentally appropriate early childhood music curriculum that strongly emphasizes and facilitates adult involvement." [14]
Availability
CD: Daffodil Dreams. 22 November 2015.
YouTube: uploaded by CDBaby on 29 November 2015.
End Notes
1. Mari Sarv. "Traditional Estonian Lullabies: A Tentative Overview." 2:161-176 in Estonia and Poland. Edited by Liisi Laineste, Dorota Brzozowska, and Wladyslaw Chlopicki. Tartu, Estonia: ELM Scholarly Press, 2013. 2:162.
2. Kreshnik Duqi. "The Cradle (Lullabies) Songs in the Villages of Tirana." European Journal of Language and Literature Studies 6:40-53:2016. 51. Beyond the usual upheavals caused by industrialization, he also alluded to problems ensuing from politics in the post-Communist world. He found researchers could not even preserve the lullabies that survived because people "don’t like to be recorded."
3. Paregoric was introduced in the early 1700s to treat asthma, and soon was used with coughs, especially those related to tuberculosis. It also was used for diarrhea. The original formula included a number of herbs, but, by the mid-1800s, was simplified. The opium was mixed with camphor and anise. The similar, but stronger Laudanum, was dissolved in alcohol. (Wikipedia. "Paregoric.")
4. Gary G. Shattuck. "Opium Eating in Vermont: "A Crying Evil of the Day." Vermont History 83:157-192:2015. 168. He was quoting the Vermont Gazette for 13 March 1827.
5. Margaret Mead. Male and Female. New York: William Morrow and Company, Publishers, 1952. 169
6. Mead. 169.
7. "Newborn-Sleep Patterns." Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia website.
8. Children’s Hospital. Jodi Mindell of the hospital’s Sleep Disorders Center was more blunt: "If you rock your child to sleep every night for the first eight weeks, why would he expect anything different later on?" Quoted by Johnson and Johnson’s BabyCenter website.
9. P. Yaghmaei. "Lullabies, the first Iranian women’ unwritten poems." Arya Adib website in Farsi. April 2014. Reported by Azadeh Okhovat Poudeh. "Children’s Perception of Emotion in Music: A Cross-cultural Study." Masters thesis. University of Jyväskylä, 2015. 16.
10. Stephen P. Hunter. Comment of Amazon site for Abdallah’s CD. 16 December 2015.
11. Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 144.
12. "Leslie Abdallah." CD Baby website.
13. CD Baby.
14. "Music Together: Babies!" New Baby New Paltz website.
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Lokhi Pai - Kumbaya
Topic: Lullaby - Context
Parents soon discover their intentions and experiences with lullabies do not matter. Infants either like or dislike what they hear based on reasons they themselves know and "will never confess." [1] Federico García Lorca told a Madrid audience in 1928:
"I have witnessed innumerable instances in my own extended family where the child emphatically opposed the singing. He cried, he kicked, until the wet nurse changed the record, much to her disgust and broke into another song." [2]
Similarly, Rivka Galchenoct recalled her daughter would only listen to "Cotton Fields." When she tired of singing it and "tried to switch songs on her, she would immediately cry. She had chosen her lullaby." [3] Likewise, Bess Lomax Hawes remembered
"I happen to know quite a number of lullabies myself, and I come from a lullaby-singing family; but the song that always seemed to ‘work’ best—my stand-by old reliable in times of stress—was the fine old Protestant hymn "I Am Bound for the Promised Land." [4]
One factor that influences an infant’s response is his or her age and auditory skills. The inner hair cells of the inner ear mature in the third trimester. Foetuses begin to respond consistently to sound tests around 28 weeks, [5] and mothers report feeling movements in response to sounds. [6]. Sound waves pass through the fluids surrounding the head, and are transmitted through the bone rather than the middle and outer ear. The frequencies they detect are between 250 Hz and 500 Hz. [7]
At birth, the inner ear is better developed than the middle and outer ear. [8] Infants still hear only the lower frequencies [9] as they adjust to air as a medium for sound waves. Men’s speaking voices typically fall between 85 Hz and 180 Hz and women’s between 165 and 155 Hz. [10] The standard version of "Kumbaya" ranges from a middle C of 261 Hz to an orchestra’s A of 449 Hz. [11]
Between the third and sixth month, infants’ abilities to hear the higher frequencies [12] needed to decipher labial and fricative sounds [13] reach adult levels. Ruth Litovsky thought the perception they lost some of their abilities to hear the lower sounds was a function of tests that required greater cognitive skills than the ones used earlier. [14]
At the same time the "conditioned head-turn behavior emerges, whereby the infant’s response can be shaped such that a reinforcing stimulus is associated with the behavior." [15] This is the mechanism exploited by scientists who test young children’s ability to detect particular traits in music, and is the reason so little is known about hearing and music in the first months. [16]
The other time there is intense testing is when the prematurely born are kept in ICUs. The infants auditory systems are still in a neonatal phase. The monitoring machines are noisy, up to 50 dB to 100 dB, and the infants have little human contact. Researchers have tried almost everything, based on our culture’s image of the ideal lullaby, to mask the sound. As mentioned in the post for 5 January 2018, attempts to measure the utility of music by watching the monitors gave mixed results. Those who simply looked at the infants’ general responses were more satisfied. Shmuel Arnon’s team observed live music had no effect at the time, but 30 minutes the infants were in deep sleep, while the recorded music had no such effect. [17]
Douglas Keith’s group noted the ones who cried the most were those who had just been taken off ventilators but still could not eat. Although it was possible they were exercising their newly strengthened lungs, inconsolable crying, as distinct from normal crying, was a problem. When he played recorded music in their area, the crying bouts were less frequent, began later, and lasted less long. [18]
Finally, Gail Molloy reported those who heard Brahm’s lullaby gained enough weight to be discharged 9.9 days earlier those who did not. Recordings of their mothers’ speaking voices reduced the hospital stay by 6.2 days. [19]
The music that has not been tested much is singing by men. Hyejung Lee and Rosemary White-Traut reasoned that since premature infants had not had the opportunity to hear their mothers’ voices in the womb, they might respond better to the lowest frequency sounds. They played tapes of both men and women reading Goodnight Moon [20] each week, and recorded the infants’ reactions while they were listening. As they matured, the infants responded more positively to the male version. [21]
I found only one male lullaby uploaded to YouTube and it was by someone from a non-western culture. Lohki Pai was club musician in Hyderabad, India, who made his tape of "Kumbaya" for one specific infant whose pictures were shown while it played. His voice was deep, and doubled, so the lower tones were emphasized. The woman who requested the lullaby was pleased, but Aanika’s response was not reported.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Lokhi Pai
Vocal Group: second male voice
Instrumental Accompaniment: acoustic guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: block of wood
Credits
None
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: Koom BY ah; Pai did not pronounce the D in Lord
Verses: kumbaya, singing, praying, crying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: four-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic repetition with little variation.
Singing Style: some vibrato on "by;" a certain raspiness to the voice at times.
Solo-Group Dynamics: second voice added on second verse. It might have been his own overdubbed.
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: arpeggios and chords
Vocal-Rhythm Dynamics: widely spaced taps on wood
Notes on Performance
Occasion: "A lullaby done as per request of Arundhati" [22]
Researchers who asked fathers in southern Ontario to sing a song in the way they would in the shower and like they did with their five- to seven-month-old children thought the men sang more effusively than the women asked to make the same singing test. [23] That may have been because the men used songs normally associated with quiet alert time, like "Old MacDonald," rather than ones used as lullabies. Like many women, they may have considered the one a private repertoire, and the other a shareable public one.
Pai did not dramatize "Kumbaya" in any way, even though he added a second voice. As a musician he would have been able to alter the guitar accompaniment, but did not. Once he sang the verse through once, he repeated it with little intentional variation.
Audience Perceptions
The woman who requested the lullaby wrote:
"Thank you Mr Pai Sir. I love love love it." [24]
Notes on Performers
On his website, Pai wrote:
"Still on a journey, with music entering my life at nine, addiction to drugs at thirteen, marriage at 24, alcoholism at 30, death of my wife at 44, de-addiction at 51….am sober by the Grace of God since 16th March 2007 and intend to be so till my journey ends…." [25]
He then was playing guitar in rock bands influenced by Bob Marley, but said he had "loved folk rock and bands with harmony vocals" when he was growing up. [26]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by lokhi pai on 20 October 2013.
End Notes
1. Paraphrase of a line by T. S. Eliot. "The Naming of Cats." Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939.
2. Federico García Lorca. "Las nanas infantiles." Madrid lecture, 1928. Translated as "On Lullabies" by A. S. Kline in 2008.
3. Rivka Galchenoct. "The Melancholy Mystery of Lullabies." The New York Times Magazine. 18 October 2015. "When I had a newborn I found that the main song that came to me, unbidden, was ‘Cotton Fields,’ as sung by Creedence Clearwater Revival — a song I hadn’t heard for years and years."
4. Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 141.
"I am Bound for the Promised Land" was written by Samuel Stennett, and first was published by John Rippon. A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors. London: Thomas Wilkins, 1787.
5. Ruth Litovsky. "Development of the Auditory System." Handbook of Clinical Neurology 129: 55-72:2015. 58.
6. Beatriz Senoi Ilari. "Music Perception and Cognition in the First Year of Life." Early Child Development and Care 172:311-322:2002. 33.
7. Kenneth J. Gerhardt and Robert M. Abrams. "Fetal Hearing: Characterization of the Stimulus and Response 1." Seminars in Perinatology 20:11-20:1996.
8. Litovsky. 58.
9. Anne Fernald. "Human Maternal Vocalization to Infants as Biologically Relevant
Signals: an Evolutionary Perspective." 391-428 in The Adapted Mind. Edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 418.
10. Wikipedia. "Voice Frequency."
11. B. H. Suits. "Frequencies for equal-tempered scale." Notes for Physics of Music course, Michigan Technical University. 1998.
12. Litovsky. 61.
13. Wikipedia. "Audio Frequency."
14. Litovsky. 61-62.
15. Litovsky. 70.
16. Ilari. 312. She noted, "neonates up to the age of 6 months are still in a drowsy state and can be difficult to work with."
17. Shmuel Arnon, Anat Shapsa, Liat Forman, Rivka Regev, Sofia Bauer, Ita Litmanovitz, and Tzipora Dolfin. "Live Music Is Beneficial to Preterm Infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Environment." Birth 33:131-136:2006.
18. Douglas R. Keith, Kendra Russell, and Barbara S. Weaver. "The Effects of Music Listening on Inconsolable Crying in Premature Infants." Journal of Music Therapy 46:191-203:2009.
19. G. B. Malloy. "The Relationship Between Maternal and Musical Auditory Stimulation and the Developmental Behavior of Premature Infants." Birth Defects 15(7):81-89:1979. Described by Charlene Krueger. "Exposure to Maternal Voice in Preterm Infants: A Review." Advances in Neonatal Care 10:13-20:2010.
20. Margaret Wise Brown. Goodnight Moon. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1947. While tests comparing reading and singing generally have shown reading was less effective, the nature of this book may have made a difference. It was a rhyming poem written specifically for use at bedtime.
21. Hyejung Lee and Rosemary White-Traut. "Physiologic Responses of Preterm Infants to the Male and Female Voice in the NICU." Journal of Pediatric Nursing 29:e3-e5:2014.
22. Lokho Pai. Comments on YouTube. 2013.
23. Colleen T. O’Neill, Laurel J. Trainor, and Sandra E. Trehub. "Infants’ Responsiveness to Fathers’ Singing." Music Perception 18:409-425:2001.
24. Arundhati Ann Gandikota. Comment posted on YouTube. 2013.
25. Lohki Pai. His website.
26. "Lokhi Pai, Guitarist in Hyderadad, Andra Pradesh." Fandalism website.
Parents soon discover their intentions and experiences with lullabies do not matter. Infants either like or dislike what they hear based on reasons they themselves know and "will never confess." [1] Federico García Lorca told a Madrid audience in 1928:
"I have witnessed innumerable instances in my own extended family where the child emphatically opposed the singing. He cried, he kicked, until the wet nurse changed the record, much to her disgust and broke into another song." [2]
Similarly, Rivka Galchenoct recalled her daughter would only listen to "Cotton Fields." When she tired of singing it and "tried to switch songs on her, she would immediately cry. She had chosen her lullaby." [3] Likewise, Bess Lomax Hawes remembered
"I happen to know quite a number of lullabies myself, and I come from a lullaby-singing family; but the song that always seemed to ‘work’ best—my stand-by old reliable in times of stress—was the fine old Protestant hymn "I Am Bound for the Promised Land." [4]
One factor that influences an infant’s response is his or her age and auditory skills. The inner hair cells of the inner ear mature in the third trimester. Foetuses begin to respond consistently to sound tests around 28 weeks, [5] and mothers report feeling movements in response to sounds. [6]. Sound waves pass through the fluids surrounding the head, and are transmitted through the bone rather than the middle and outer ear. The frequencies they detect are between 250 Hz and 500 Hz. [7]
At birth, the inner ear is better developed than the middle and outer ear. [8] Infants still hear only the lower frequencies [9] as they adjust to air as a medium for sound waves. Men’s speaking voices typically fall between 85 Hz and 180 Hz and women’s between 165 and 155 Hz. [10] The standard version of "Kumbaya" ranges from a middle C of 261 Hz to an orchestra’s A of 449 Hz. [11]
Between the third and sixth month, infants’ abilities to hear the higher frequencies [12] needed to decipher labial and fricative sounds [13] reach adult levels. Ruth Litovsky thought the perception they lost some of their abilities to hear the lower sounds was a function of tests that required greater cognitive skills than the ones used earlier. [14]
At the same time the "conditioned head-turn behavior emerges, whereby the infant’s response can be shaped such that a reinforcing stimulus is associated with the behavior." [15] This is the mechanism exploited by scientists who test young children’s ability to detect particular traits in music, and is the reason so little is known about hearing and music in the first months. [16]
The other time there is intense testing is when the prematurely born are kept in ICUs. The infants auditory systems are still in a neonatal phase. The monitoring machines are noisy, up to 50 dB to 100 dB, and the infants have little human contact. Researchers have tried almost everything, based on our culture’s image of the ideal lullaby, to mask the sound. As mentioned in the post for 5 January 2018, attempts to measure the utility of music by watching the monitors gave mixed results. Those who simply looked at the infants’ general responses were more satisfied. Shmuel Arnon’s team observed live music had no effect at the time, but 30 minutes the infants were in deep sleep, while the recorded music had no such effect. [17]
Douglas Keith’s group noted the ones who cried the most were those who had just been taken off ventilators but still could not eat. Although it was possible they were exercising their newly strengthened lungs, inconsolable crying, as distinct from normal crying, was a problem. When he played recorded music in their area, the crying bouts were less frequent, began later, and lasted less long. [18]
Finally, Gail Molloy reported those who heard Brahm’s lullaby gained enough weight to be discharged 9.9 days earlier those who did not. Recordings of their mothers’ speaking voices reduced the hospital stay by 6.2 days. [19]
The music that has not been tested much is singing by men. Hyejung Lee and Rosemary White-Traut reasoned that since premature infants had not had the opportunity to hear their mothers’ voices in the womb, they might respond better to the lowest frequency sounds. They played tapes of both men and women reading Goodnight Moon [20] each week, and recorded the infants’ reactions while they were listening. As they matured, the infants responded more positively to the male version. [21]
I found only one male lullaby uploaded to YouTube and it was by someone from a non-western culture. Lohki Pai was club musician in Hyderabad, India, who made his tape of "Kumbaya" for one specific infant whose pictures were shown while it played. His voice was deep, and doubled, so the lower tones were emphasized. The woman who requested the lullaby was pleased, but Aanika’s response was not reported.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Lokhi Pai
Vocal Group: second male voice
Instrumental Accompaniment: acoustic guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: block of wood
Credits
None
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: Koom BY ah; Pai did not pronounce the D in Lord
Verses: kumbaya, singing, praying, crying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: four-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic repetition with little variation.
Singing Style: some vibrato on "by;" a certain raspiness to the voice at times.
Solo-Group Dynamics: second voice added on second verse. It might have been his own overdubbed.
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: arpeggios and chords
Vocal-Rhythm Dynamics: widely spaced taps on wood
Notes on Performance
Occasion: "A lullaby done as per request of Arundhati" [22]
Researchers who asked fathers in southern Ontario to sing a song in the way they would in the shower and like they did with their five- to seven-month-old children thought the men sang more effusively than the women asked to make the same singing test. [23] That may have been because the men used songs normally associated with quiet alert time, like "Old MacDonald," rather than ones used as lullabies. Like many women, they may have considered the one a private repertoire, and the other a shareable public one.
Pai did not dramatize "Kumbaya" in any way, even though he added a second voice. As a musician he would have been able to alter the guitar accompaniment, but did not. Once he sang the verse through once, he repeated it with little intentional variation.
Audience Perceptions
The woman who requested the lullaby wrote:
"Thank you Mr Pai Sir. I love love love it." [24]
Notes on Performers
On his website, Pai wrote:
"Still on a journey, with music entering my life at nine, addiction to drugs at thirteen, marriage at 24, alcoholism at 30, death of my wife at 44, de-addiction at 51….am sober by the Grace of God since 16th March 2007 and intend to be so till my journey ends…." [25]
He then was playing guitar in rock bands influenced by Bob Marley, but said he had "loved folk rock and bands with harmony vocals" when he was growing up. [26]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by lokhi pai on 20 October 2013.
End Notes
1. Paraphrase of a line by T. S. Eliot. "The Naming of Cats." Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939.
2. Federico García Lorca. "Las nanas infantiles." Madrid lecture, 1928. Translated as "On Lullabies" by A. S. Kline in 2008.
3. Rivka Galchenoct. "The Melancholy Mystery of Lullabies." The New York Times Magazine. 18 October 2015. "When I had a newborn I found that the main song that came to me, unbidden, was ‘Cotton Fields,’ as sung by Creedence Clearwater Revival — a song I hadn’t heard for years and years."
4. Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 141.
"I am Bound for the Promised Land" was written by Samuel Stennett, and first was published by John Rippon. A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors. London: Thomas Wilkins, 1787.
5. Ruth Litovsky. "Development of the Auditory System." Handbook of Clinical Neurology 129: 55-72:2015. 58.
6. Beatriz Senoi Ilari. "Music Perception and Cognition in the First Year of Life." Early Child Development and Care 172:311-322:2002. 33.
7. Kenneth J. Gerhardt and Robert M. Abrams. "Fetal Hearing: Characterization of the Stimulus and Response 1." Seminars in Perinatology 20:11-20:1996.
8. Litovsky. 58.
9. Anne Fernald. "Human Maternal Vocalization to Infants as Biologically Relevant
Signals: an Evolutionary Perspective." 391-428 in The Adapted Mind. Edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 418.
10. Wikipedia. "Voice Frequency."
11. B. H. Suits. "Frequencies for equal-tempered scale." Notes for Physics of Music course, Michigan Technical University. 1998.
12. Litovsky. 61.
13. Wikipedia. "Audio Frequency."
14. Litovsky. 61-62.
15. Litovsky. 70.
16. Ilari. 312. She noted, "neonates up to the age of 6 months are still in a drowsy state and can be difficult to work with."
17. Shmuel Arnon, Anat Shapsa, Liat Forman, Rivka Regev, Sofia Bauer, Ita Litmanovitz, and Tzipora Dolfin. "Live Music Is Beneficial to Preterm Infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Environment." Birth 33:131-136:2006.
18. Douglas R. Keith, Kendra Russell, and Barbara S. Weaver. "The Effects of Music Listening on Inconsolable Crying in Premature Infants." Journal of Music Therapy 46:191-203:2009.
19. G. B. Malloy. "The Relationship Between Maternal and Musical Auditory Stimulation and the Developmental Behavior of Premature Infants." Birth Defects 15(7):81-89:1979. Described by Charlene Krueger. "Exposure to Maternal Voice in Preterm Infants: A Review." Advances in Neonatal Care 10:13-20:2010.
20. Margaret Wise Brown. Goodnight Moon. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1947. While tests comparing reading and singing generally have shown reading was less effective, the nature of this book may have made a difference. It was a rhyming poem written specifically for use at bedtime.
21. Hyejung Lee and Rosemary White-Traut. "Physiologic Responses of Preterm Infants to the Male and Female Voice in the NICU." Journal of Pediatric Nursing 29:e3-e5:2014.
22. Lokho Pai. Comments on YouTube. 2013.
23. Colleen T. O’Neill, Laurel J. Trainor, and Sandra E. Trehub. "Infants’ Responsiveness to Fathers’ Singing." Music Perception 18:409-425:2001.
24. Arundhati Ann Gandikota. Comment posted on YouTube. 2013.
25. Lohki Pai. His website.
26. "Lokhi Pai, Guitarist in Hyderadad, Andra Pradesh." Fandalism website.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
KidsLullabies - Come By Here
Topic: Lullaby - Context
The animated video that ran with KidsLullabies’ version of "Kumbaya" showed a young woman in a rocking chair patting an infant on the back. She was not a nanny or a mammy because both she and the young boy had light complexions and full heads of brown hair.
The assumption that mothers are the ones who sing lullabies is deeply ingrained in our culture’s idyllic stereotypes of motherhood. In Turkey, Sandra Trehub and Rebekah Prince found that while "mothers assumed the principal duties of infant care," it was assumed they "required rest for several weeks after childbirth." Thus, grandmothers and other older women were the first to sing to newborn infants. [1]
This had the secondary effect of perpetuating the family’s tradition. Alevi Islam women in the Taurus mountains moved to their husband’s home when they married. [2] This rest period allowed the older women to teach both the infants and their mothers the local songs.
In Albania, Kreshnik Duqi said the lullabies sung in the mountains south of Tirana always were done by grandmothers. The area had been taken over by Rome in 228 BC, and Italian influence continued after the Ottomans took power. He was told, "when we take our grandchildren to bed, we would start singing with ‘ninna-nanna’ which were the main words." [3] The Oxford English Dictionary reported Italians were using ninne nonne for lullabies in 1779. [4]
The poet Federico García Lorca believed poor women were the ones who created the lullabies in Spain, and took them "into the homes of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy" when they worked as wet nurses. [5] However, he said,
"that lullabies are seldom sung to a newborn child. A newborn child may be entertained with a fragment of melody hummed under the breath, the physical rocking rhythm of the cradle being more important. The lullaby requires a listener who can follow its events intelligently and delight in the anecdote, character or evocation of landscape the song expresses. The child that is sung to can already talk, is beginning to walk, knows the meaning of words, and often sings alone." [6]
Researchers have been curious if the image of mothers singing lullabies was grounded in culture or in the ways infants behaved. One group had men sing songs alone and like they would with an infant. They then played the tapes to 80 infants six- to seven-months-old in a quiet alert state. [7] The youngsters paid more attention to the men, than a similar group of infants had done to women in a similar test. [8]
In another test, scientists compared the responses of six- to seven-month-old infants to singing by women and by young children. They discovered those who had older siblings preferred the children’s version, while those who were more isolated preferred singing by unknown women. [9]
One of the few lullaby versions of "Kumbaya" sung only by children was the one posted by KidsLullabies. They were old enough to sing two parts with some complexity in the use of glissandi on a few words. Their voices no longer were the high-pitched ones of young children and may not have had the same affect as those in the experiment. However, they did sing softly and slowly.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: children
Vocal Director: not identified
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: not use kumbaya
Verses: come by here, praying, sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: four-verse song
Ending: none
Unique Features: used come by here, instead of kumbaya
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: slow
Basic Structure: strophic repetition with verses demarcated by short instrumentals
Singing Style: soft, in two parts. One syllable to one note pattern broken by use of two tones on by. Three notes were used for the oh in the last line, and one for Lord. They sang the very last phrase slower.
Solo-Accompaniment Dynamics: guitar softly played arpeggios during the singing, between verses, and at the end.
Notes on Performance
Video: it opened with a picture of a full moon framed by bare tree branches. It pulled back to show an stone-lined arch suggesting a castle. The scene was lit by an oil lantern set on a table. She was wearing a floor length light-blue robe with a yellow band at the hem; the infant was in a rust-colored sleeper. His head was on her shoulder.
KidsLullabies posted the lyrics so people could sing along.
Notes on Movement
The woman’s hand moved with the rhythm of the song. It was the farthest from the infant when the rocking chair was the farthest forward, and on his back when the chair was back.
Audience Perceptions
One woman who watched the video commented on its affect on her:
"I have often thought that Kumbaya must be the most powerful song in the world because so many people make fun of it. I’ve sung ‘Come By Here’ in times of despair - in times of joy - outside of courthouses - inside of jail cells - holding the hands of the dying - and while cradling the fragile innocence of the newly born. This is a very sweet and simple version. Just what this weary minded woman needs at 4:41 in this deep, dark and quiet morning." [10]
Notes on Performers
The use of "come by here," instead of "kumbaya," paired with the reduction of the verses to just praying and sleeping suggested the video’s producer might have been a religious group trying to reach a conservative Protestant audience. The fact the song was accompanied by a video meant the producers had access to equipment and probably more money than others who uploaded songs to YouTube. However, I could learn nothing more than KidsLullabies was a subscription service on YouTube. It provided no information there or on its Facebook page about who owned it.
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by KidsLullabies on 19 February 2014.
End Notes
1. Sandra E. Trehub and Rebekah L. Prince. "Lullabies and Other Women’s Songs in the Turkish Village of Akçaeniº." Refereed E-Journal, October 2010. 4.
2. Trehub and Prince. 4.
3. Kreshnik Duqi. "The Cradle (Lullabies) Songs in the Villages of Tirana." European Journal of Language and Literature Studies 6:40-53:2016. 40.
4. "Lullaby." 9:93-94 in The Oxford English Dictionary. Edited by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 edition. 9:94.
5. Federico García Lorca. "Las nanas infantiles." Madrid lecture, 1928. Translated as "On Lullabies" by A. S. Kline in 2008.
6. García Lorca.
7. Colleen T. O’Neill, Laurel J. Trainor, and Sandra E. Trehub. "Infants’ Responsiveness to Fathers’ Singing." Music Perception 18:409-425:2001. 416.
8. O’Neill. 418.
9. S. E. Trehub and K. Fellegi. "Infant Preferences for Women’s and Children’s Songs." Society for Research in Child Development, 1997 meeting. Summarized by Sandra E. Trehub and Laurel Trainor. "Singing to Infants: Lullabies and Play Songs." Advances in Infancy Research 12:43-77:1998. 66.
10. Sing4peace. Posted to YouTube in 2014.
The animated video that ran with KidsLullabies’ version of "Kumbaya" showed a young woman in a rocking chair patting an infant on the back. She was not a nanny or a mammy because both she and the young boy had light complexions and full heads of brown hair.
The assumption that mothers are the ones who sing lullabies is deeply ingrained in our culture’s idyllic stereotypes of motherhood. In Turkey, Sandra Trehub and Rebekah Prince found that while "mothers assumed the principal duties of infant care," it was assumed they "required rest for several weeks after childbirth." Thus, grandmothers and other older women were the first to sing to newborn infants. [1]
This had the secondary effect of perpetuating the family’s tradition. Alevi Islam women in the Taurus mountains moved to their husband’s home when they married. [2] This rest period allowed the older women to teach both the infants and their mothers the local songs.
In Albania, Kreshnik Duqi said the lullabies sung in the mountains south of Tirana always were done by grandmothers. The area had been taken over by Rome in 228 BC, and Italian influence continued after the Ottomans took power. He was told, "when we take our grandchildren to bed, we would start singing with ‘ninna-nanna’ which were the main words." [3] The Oxford English Dictionary reported Italians were using ninne nonne for lullabies in 1779. [4]
The poet Federico García Lorca believed poor women were the ones who created the lullabies in Spain, and took them "into the homes of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy" when they worked as wet nurses. [5] However, he said,
"that lullabies are seldom sung to a newborn child. A newborn child may be entertained with a fragment of melody hummed under the breath, the physical rocking rhythm of the cradle being more important. The lullaby requires a listener who can follow its events intelligently and delight in the anecdote, character or evocation of landscape the song expresses. The child that is sung to can already talk, is beginning to walk, knows the meaning of words, and often sings alone." [6]
Researchers have been curious if the image of mothers singing lullabies was grounded in culture or in the ways infants behaved. One group had men sing songs alone and like they would with an infant. They then played the tapes to 80 infants six- to seven-months-old in a quiet alert state. [7] The youngsters paid more attention to the men, than a similar group of infants had done to women in a similar test. [8]
In another test, scientists compared the responses of six- to seven-month-old infants to singing by women and by young children. They discovered those who had older siblings preferred the children’s version, while those who were more isolated preferred singing by unknown women. [9]
One of the few lullaby versions of "Kumbaya" sung only by children was the one posted by KidsLullabies. They were old enough to sing two parts with some complexity in the use of glissandi on a few words. Their voices no longer were the high-pitched ones of young children and may not have had the same affect as those in the experiment. However, they did sing softly and slowly.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: children
Vocal Director: not identified
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: not use kumbaya
Verses: come by here, praying, sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: four-verse song
Ending: none
Unique Features: used come by here, instead of kumbaya
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: slow
Basic Structure: strophic repetition with verses demarcated by short instrumentals
Singing Style: soft, in two parts. One syllable to one note pattern broken by use of two tones on by. Three notes were used for the oh in the last line, and one for Lord. They sang the very last phrase slower.
Solo-Accompaniment Dynamics: guitar softly played arpeggios during the singing, between verses, and at the end.
Notes on Performance
Video: it opened with a picture of a full moon framed by bare tree branches. It pulled back to show an stone-lined arch suggesting a castle. The scene was lit by an oil lantern set on a table. She was wearing a floor length light-blue robe with a yellow band at the hem; the infant was in a rust-colored sleeper. His head was on her shoulder.
KidsLullabies posted the lyrics so people could sing along.
Notes on Movement
The woman’s hand moved with the rhythm of the song. It was the farthest from the infant when the rocking chair was the farthest forward, and on his back when the chair was back.
Audience Perceptions
One woman who watched the video commented on its affect on her:
"I have often thought that Kumbaya must be the most powerful song in the world because so many people make fun of it. I’ve sung ‘Come By Here’ in times of despair - in times of joy - outside of courthouses - inside of jail cells - holding the hands of the dying - and while cradling the fragile innocence of the newly born. This is a very sweet and simple version. Just what this weary minded woman needs at 4:41 in this deep, dark and quiet morning." [10]
Notes on Performers
The use of "come by here," instead of "kumbaya," paired with the reduction of the verses to just praying and sleeping suggested the video’s producer might have been a religious group trying to reach a conservative Protestant audience. The fact the song was accompanied by a video meant the producers had access to equipment and probably more money than others who uploaded songs to YouTube. However, I could learn nothing more than KidsLullabies was a subscription service on YouTube. It provided no information there or on its Facebook page about who owned it.
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by KidsLullabies on 19 February 2014.
End Notes
1. Sandra E. Trehub and Rebekah L. Prince. "Lullabies and Other Women’s Songs in the Turkish Village of Akçaeniº." Refereed E-Journal, October 2010. 4.
2. Trehub and Prince. 4.
3. Kreshnik Duqi. "The Cradle (Lullabies) Songs in the Villages of Tirana." European Journal of Language and Literature Studies 6:40-53:2016. 40.
4. "Lullaby." 9:93-94 in The Oxford English Dictionary. Edited by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 edition. 9:94.
5. Federico García Lorca. "Las nanas infantiles." Madrid lecture, 1928. Translated as "On Lullabies" by A. S. Kline in 2008.
6. García Lorca.
7. Colleen T. O’Neill, Laurel J. Trainor, and Sandra E. Trehub. "Infants’ Responsiveness to Fathers’ Singing." Music Perception 18:409-425:2001. 416.
8. O’Neill. 418.
9. S. E. Trehub and K. Fellegi. "Infant Preferences for Women’s and Children’s Songs." Society for Research in Child Development, 1997 meeting. Summarized by Sandra E. Trehub and Laurel Trainor. "Singing to Infants: Lullabies and Play Songs." Advances in Infancy Research 12:43-77:1998. 66.
10. Sing4peace. Posted to YouTube in 2014.
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Dany Rosevear - Kumbaya ya
Topic: Lullaby - Definition
Lullabies commonly are thought to have been written in 3/4 or 6/8 time. These were the meters used by Brahms, Chopin, and Schumann. [1] Albert Doja noted, in Albania, the rocking movement was asymmetric, that "the energy consumed in the ‘push’ is more important than that consumed in the ‘swing back’." That is, the beginning of a 6/8 measure was the push of the cradle, with the apex on the quiet fourth beat, and the remaining two beats the return of the pendulum. [2]
Like most aspects of lullaby genres these rhythmic preferences were culture bound, but may have had roots in infant experiences. Barbara Ayres headed a team that selected adult songs from 54 culture areas for which it also had information on the ways they handled infants. [3]
It uncovered three general patterns. In the Americas and much of Eurasia, the young spent the day confined in portable devices like cradle boards and cradles that were carried to a location where they remained while the mothers left to work. In sub-Saharan Africa infants were carried in slings, while they were secured within women’s clothing on their hips or backs in southeast Asia and on Pacific islands. [4]
Ayres’ group then looked at the rhythms used in their adult music and found those with simple or regular meters were the ones where infants were held, while those who used irregular meters were ones where infants were placed in cradles. The area stretching from North Africa to the far east utilized free rhythms that were tied to syllables. [5]
The last group was not mentioned by Ayres, but Sandra Trehub and Rebekah Prince visited women in a remote part of Turkey where
"the mother sat on the floor with the supine infant on her outstretched legs. After covering the infant’s face with a thin scarf, she began rocking her legs from side to side and singing." [6]
Trehub and Prince found their adult songs had "free rhythms, which are difficult to represent in Western notation" that were "linked to the syllabic pattern of lyrics, which followed a general form within each phrase." [7]
The relationship between infant experiences and adult music was thought provoking, and suggested that it was perpetuated when adults sang lullabies in the meters they had absorbed as infants. Gaye Soley and Erin Hannon discovered by the fourth month, infants had so internalized the musical patterns in their environments they preferred them.
The two exposed infants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and two Turkish cities to music with regular rhythms from western Europe, to irregular ones from the Balkans, and to arbitrary ones in synthetic tunes. The American children preferred western music, but the Turkish ones, who had heard more types of music, accepted both western and Balkan rhythms. Neither heeded the arbitrary ones. [8]
Ayres noticed an anomaly in European tradition. Her group’s research suggested infants should prefer irregular rhythms, but in fact responded better to regular ones. She believed there had been a break in musical practice when the Baroque music of Bach and Handle introduced orchestras that enforced regularity. Gregorian chant had been free form, depending on the syllabic length like the rhythms found in the Old High Culture areas of the east, while Renaissance meters shifted frequently. [9] This change occurred sometime between the emergence of the two lullaby genres mentioned in the post for 7 January 2018.
When I was a child, infants still spent time in buggies or strollers that could be rocked, if they had springs, or pushed back and forth. Since then, child carriers became the norm. Their rhythms were irregular, stemming from changes of speed in traffic, and the awkwardness of carrying them. The only times many modern American infants felt regular rhythms were when they were being held by someone who was walking, an experience they might have found more satisfying than the carriers. Bess Lomax Hawes noticed most of the lullabies in Berkeley’s folklore archives were in 4/4 time, which was a walking cadence. [10]
Kumbaya was transcribed in phrases composed of two 3/4 measures. This made it amenable to being treated like 6/8. However, many sang it in the more familiar 2/4, and almost none of the commercial versions have a lilt that would match the flow described by Doha.
Dany Rosevear sang "Kumbaya" while playing the guitar, but used neither her voice nor the accompaniment to set the rhythm. Instead, she rocked from side to side. Once in a while, when the playing required concentration, she paused briefly.
While she said "this version of the lullaby sent my baby grandson off to sleep in no time at all!", [11] her experience teaching children four- to seven-years-old probably made her aware of the egocentrism of that age group. She sang "children are sleeping," not someone.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Dany Rosevear
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: acoustic guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
One person asked "Is this a lullaby from Africa?" [12] She wrote back " I believe so." [13]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: when she introduced it, she said kum BY yah, with a falling intonation on yah. She sang COME by yah,
Verses: Come by yah, night, moon, stars, sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: none; she used children with sleeping
Term for Deity: none; she used ah ah
Special Terms: her version was based on The Weavers, but her verses were all natural descriptions of sky elements seen in the night. Her moon was shining, not smiling.
Basic Form: four-verse song framed by come by yah
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxxxxA
Ending: none
Unique Features: AAABB line repetition pattern
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Singing Style: one syllable to one note. She got very soft at the end.
Solo-Accompaniment Dynamics: she played a chord and single notes pattern both while she was singing and in the pauses between verses. They were soft and regular.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: making a video to support her Singing Games website.
Location: indoor or outdoor garden room with tropical plants near and shrubs in back.
Microphone: none
Costume: she was wearing a lavender, long-sleeved sweater and long lavender-and-green flowered scarf. Her hair was collar length and loose.
Notes on Movement
She swayed from side to side while she was singing.
Notes on Audience
Several earlier posts described women in audiences who rocked their infants while a group was singing "Kumbaya." One in southwestern England was mentioned on 21 September 2017. Another from Ontario, Canada, was noted on 15 November 2017.
Notes on Performers
She was born in 1946 in Brighton, England, to a Polish refuge and an Irish immigrant. [14] She came of age during the height of the commercial folk revival. She said, in her youth, she went "to international work camps (Poland, Finland and Turkey) where youngsters from many countries came to work, socialize and sing together." [15] Then she taught four- to seven-year-olds from immigrant neighborhoods in Birmingham, before moving to Oxfordshire. [16]
She also "sang regularly with my three children when they were younger." [17] She observed: "young children are much more comfortable than adults singing in an unfamiliar language even if they do not always understanding the meaning. So many songs and rhymes have nonsense words in them, just think of the pleasure these words give even us older souls when these words rhyme and have rhythm. Young children greet foreign and unknown words with the same interest and alertness! I remember stopping my older child as a three year old from persisting in ‘naughtiness’ with words that he had not heard before – it worked a treat." [18]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by Dany Rosevear on 22 September 2015.
End Notes
1. Johannes Brahms. "Wiegenlied." Opus 49, number 4, published in 1868 in 3/4. (Wikipedia. "Brahms’ Lullaby.")
Frédéric Chopin. "Berceuse." Opus 57, published in 1844 "begins and ends in 6/8 time" (Wikipedia. "Berceuse (Chopin)."
Robert Schumann. "Schummerleid." Opus 124, number 16, written in 1842 and published in 1845 in 6/8. (Blair Johnston. "Albumlätter (Album Leaves)." 1219 in All Music Guide to Classical Music. Edited by Chris Woodstra, Gerald Brennan, and Allen Schrott. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005.)
2. Albert Doja. "Socializing Enchantment: A Socio-Anthropological Approach to Infant-Directed Singing, Music Education and Cultural Socialization. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 45:115-147:2014. 131.
3. Ayres was working with the Cantometrics Team at Columbia University that produced Folk Song and Culture. Edited by Alan Lomax. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968. It drew its ethnographic data from the Human Relations Area Files organized at Yale by George Peter Murdock.
4. Barbara Ayres. "Effects of Infant Carrying Practices on Rhythm in Music." Ethos 1:387-404:1973. 393.
5. Ayres. 395.
6. Sandra E. Trehub and Rebekah L. Prince. "Lullabies and Other Women’s Songs in the Turkish Village of Akçaeniº." Refereed E-Journal, October 2010. 5.
7. Trehub. 13
8. "Gaye Soley and Erin E. Hannon." "Infants Prefer the Musical Meter of Their Own Culture: A Cross-Cultural Comparison." Developmental Psychology 46:286-292:2010.
9. Ayres. 401. The William Byrd madrigal-lullaby mentioned in the post for 7 January 2018 used fluctuating time signatures.
10. Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. "American parents seem to rely heavily on a straightforward, non-complex, swaying meter, normally 4/4, to produce a suitable quieting effect." 142.
11. Dany Rosevear. Comments on YouTube. 2015.
12. Ruth Barron. Question posted on YouTube. 2016.
13. Dany Rosevear. Response to Ruth Barron on YouTube. 2016.
14. Danuta Rosevear. "Life Story: A language story that spans two centuries." Posted to Raising a Trilingual Child website by Galina Nikitina. 1 December 2014.
15. Dany Rosevear. "About the author and the project." Singing Games for Children website. Last updated 2 September 2017. She established this website after she retired as a repository of songs, poems, and games for primary-school teachers. She wrote much of the material herself.
16. Rosevear, Trilingual Child.
17. Rosevear, Singing Games.
18. Rosevear, Trilingual Child
Lullabies commonly are thought to have been written in 3/4 or 6/8 time. These were the meters used by Brahms, Chopin, and Schumann. [1] Albert Doja noted, in Albania, the rocking movement was asymmetric, that "the energy consumed in the ‘push’ is more important than that consumed in the ‘swing back’." That is, the beginning of a 6/8 measure was the push of the cradle, with the apex on the quiet fourth beat, and the remaining two beats the return of the pendulum. [2]
Like most aspects of lullaby genres these rhythmic preferences were culture bound, but may have had roots in infant experiences. Barbara Ayres headed a team that selected adult songs from 54 culture areas for which it also had information on the ways they handled infants. [3]
It uncovered three general patterns. In the Americas and much of Eurasia, the young spent the day confined in portable devices like cradle boards and cradles that were carried to a location where they remained while the mothers left to work. In sub-Saharan Africa infants were carried in slings, while they were secured within women’s clothing on their hips or backs in southeast Asia and on Pacific islands. [4]
Ayres’ group then looked at the rhythms used in their adult music and found those with simple or regular meters were the ones where infants were held, while those who used irregular meters were ones where infants were placed in cradles. The area stretching from North Africa to the far east utilized free rhythms that were tied to syllables. [5]
The last group was not mentioned by Ayres, but Sandra Trehub and Rebekah Prince visited women in a remote part of Turkey where
"the mother sat on the floor with the supine infant on her outstretched legs. After covering the infant’s face with a thin scarf, she began rocking her legs from side to side and singing." [6]
Trehub and Prince found their adult songs had "free rhythms, which are difficult to represent in Western notation" that were "linked to the syllabic pattern of lyrics, which followed a general form within each phrase." [7]
The relationship between infant experiences and adult music was thought provoking, and suggested that it was perpetuated when adults sang lullabies in the meters they had absorbed as infants. Gaye Soley and Erin Hannon discovered by the fourth month, infants had so internalized the musical patterns in their environments they preferred them.
The two exposed infants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and two Turkish cities to music with regular rhythms from western Europe, to irregular ones from the Balkans, and to arbitrary ones in synthetic tunes. The American children preferred western music, but the Turkish ones, who had heard more types of music, accepted both western and Balkan rhythms. Neither heeded the arbitrary ones. [8]
Ayres noticed an anomaly in European tradition. Her group’s research suggested infants should prefer irregular rhythms, but in fact responded better to regular ones. She believed there had been a break in musical practice when the Baroque music of Bach and Handle introduced orchestras that enforced regularity. Gregorian chant had been free form, depending on the syllabic length like the rhythms found in the Old High Culture areas of the east, while Renaissance meters shifted frequently. [9] This change occurred sometime between the emergence of the two lullaby genres mentioned in the post for 7 January 2018.
When I was a child, infants still spent time in buggies or strollers that could be rocked, if they had springs, or pushed back and forth. Since then, child carriers became the norm. Their rhythms were irregular, stemming from changes of speed in traffic, and the awkwardness of carrying them. The only times many modern American infants felt regular rhythms were when they were being held by someone who was walking, an experience they might have found more satisfying than the carriers. Bess Lomax Hawes noticed most of the lullabies in Berkeley’s folklore archives were in 4/4 time, which was a walking cadence. [10]
Kumbaya was transcribed in phrases composed of two 3/4 measures. This made it amenable to being treated like 6/8. However, many sang it in the more familiar 2/4, and almost none of the commercial versions have a lilt that would match the flow described by Doha.
Dany Rosevear sang "Kumbaya" while playing the guitar, but used neither her voice nor the accompaniment to set the rhythm. Instead, she rocked from side to side. Once in a while, when the playing required concentration, she paused briefly.
While she said "this version of the lullaby sent my baby grandson off to sleep in no time at all!", [11] her experience teaching children four- to seven-years-old probably made her aware of the egocentrism of that age group. She sang "children are sleeping," not someone.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Dany Rosevear
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: acoustic guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
One person asked "Is this a lullaby from Africa?" [12] She wrote back " I believe so." [13]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: when she introduced it, she said kum BY yah, with a falling intonation on yah. She sang COME by yah,
Verses: Come by yah, night, moon, stars, sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: none; she used children with sleeping
Term for Deity: none; she used ah ah
Special Terms: her version was based on The Weavers, but her verses were all natural descriptions of sky elements seen in the night. Her moon was shining, not smiling.
Basic Form: four-verse song framed by come by yah
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxxxxA
Ending: none
Unique Features: AAABB line repetition pattern
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Singing Style: one syllable to one note. She got very soft at the end.
Solo-Accompaniment Dynamics: she played a chord and single notes pattern both while she was singing and in the pauses between verses. They were soft and regular.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: making a video to support her Singing Games website.
Location: indoor or outdoor garden room with tropical plants near and shrubs in back.
Microphone: none
Costume: she was wearing a lavender, long-sleeved sweater and long lavender-and-green flowered scarf. Her hair was collar length and loose.
Notes on Movement
She swayed from side to side while she was singing.
Notes on Audience
Several earlier posts described women in audiences who rocked their infants while a group was singing "Kumbaya." One in southwestern England was mentioned on 21 September 2017. Another from Ontario, Canada, was noted on 15 November 2017.
Notes on Performers
She was born in 1946 in Brighton, England, to a Polish refuge and an Irish immigrant. [14] She came of age during the height of the commercial folk revival. She said, in her youth, she went "to international work camps (Poland, Finland and Turkey) where youngsters from many countries came to work, socialize and sing together." [15] Then she taught four- to seven-year-olds from immigrant neighborhoods in Birmingham, before moving to Oxfordshire. [16]
She also "sang regularly with my three children when they were younger." [17] She observed: "young children are much more comfortable than adults singing in an unfamiliar language even if they do not always understanding the meaning. So many songs and rhymes have nonsense words in them, just think of the pleasure these words give even us older souls when these words rhyme and have rhythm. Young children greet foreign and unknown words with the same interest and alertness! I remember stopping my older child as a three year old from persisting in ‘naughtiness’ with words that he had not heard before – it worked a treat." [18]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by Dany Rosevear on 22 September 2015.
End Notes
1. Johannes Brahms. "Wiegenlied." Opus 49, number 4, published in 1868 in 3/4. (Wikipedia. "Brahms’ Lullaby.")
Frédéric Chopin. "Berceuse." Opus 57, published in 1844 "begins and ends in 6/8 time" (Wikipedia. "Berceuse (Chopin)."
Robert Schumann. "Schummerleid." Opus 124, number 16, written in 1842 and published in 1845 in 6/8. (Blair Johnston. "Albumlätter (Album Leaves)." 1219 in All Music Guide to Classical Music. Edited by Chris Woodstra, Gerald Brennan, and Allen Schrott. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005.)
2. Albert Doja. "Socializing Enchantment: A Socio-Anthropological Approach to Infant-Directed Singing, Music Education and Cultural Socialization. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 45:115-147:2014. 131.
3. Ayres was working with the Cantometrics Team at Columbia University that produced Folk Song and Culture. Edited by Alan Lomax. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968. It drew its ethnographic data from the Human Relations Area Files organized at Yale by George Peter Murdock.
4. Barbara Ayres. "Effects of Infant Carrying Practices on Rhythm in Music." Ethos 1:387-404:1973. 393.
5. Ayres. 395.
6. Sandra E. Trehub and Rebekah L. Prince. "Lullabies and Other Women’s Songs in the Turkish Village of Akçaeniº." Refereed E-Journal, October 2010. 5.
7. Trehub. 13
8. "Gaye Soley and Erin E. Hannon." "Infants Prefer the Musical Meter of Their Own Culture: A Cross-Cultural Comparison." Developmental Psychology 46:286-292:2010.
9. Ayres. 401. The William Byrd madrigal-lullaby mentioned in the post for 7 January 2018 used fluctuating time signatures.
10. Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. "American parents seem to rely heavily on a straightforward, non-complex, swaying meter, normally 4/4, to produce a suitable quieting effect." 142.
11. Dany Rosevear. Comments on YouTube. 2015.
12. Ruth Barron. Question posted on YouTube. 2016.
13. Dany Rosevear. Response to Ruth Barron on YouTube. 2016.
14. Danuta Rosevear. "Life Story: A language story that spans two centuries." Posted to Raising a Trilingual Child website by Galina Nikitina. 1 December 2014.
15. Dany Rosevear. "About the author and the project." Singing Games for Children website. Last updated 2 September 2017. She established this website after she retired as a repository of songs, poems, and games for primary-school teachers. She wrote much of the material herself.
16. Rosevear, Trilingual Child.
17. Rosevear, Singing Games.
18. Rosevear, Trilingual Child
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