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.
Monday, January 15, 2018
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
Sunday, January 7, 2018
Susie Tallman - Kumbayah
Topic: Lullaby - Definition
Calming and lulling serve universal functions arising from the interaction of newborn infants with their parents. They occasionally crystallize into genres that vary by culture. Alan Lomax noted the ones he heard in Spain each had an identifiable chorus of nonsense syllables. [1] Sandra Trehub and Rebekah Prince found women in Turkey knew few tunes. They were used with multiple sets of words, each of which was considered a separate song. [2]
When Mizuki Miyashita and Shirlee Crow Shoe wanted to reintroduce the Blackfoot language, they decided they would be more successful if they taught the vocabulary in songs. However, the native musical tradition relied primarily on vocables. They collected lullabies because they were more likely to contain words. [3]
A lullaby genre seems to have developed in England during the reign of Elizabeth I when men began exploring the oceans and Protestantism was being established. The Oxford English Dictionary reported the first use of the word lullaby around 1566 in an ambiguous context, [4] but by 1588 it had a clear meaning. It was used by Shakespeare [5] and Robert Greene. The later wrote: "The good wife learned to sing lullaby at home with her young babe." [6]
Interesting, Grove’s dictionary of music suggested the first musical example, William Byrd’s "Lullaby, my sweet little baby," also appeared in 1588 [7] in a collection of Psalms, Sonets and Songs. It was a madrigal for five voices accompanied by viols. Jeremy Grimshaw said it also was known as the "Lullaby for Holy Innocents." It alternated between Mary comforting her son in "tranquil duple meter," and a narrator who used "dramatic triple meter" to describe Herod. [8]
The characteristics of the domestic lullabies probably are known only from fragments. In the post for 5 January 2018, I mentioned the many reasons lulling songs were not collected by folklorists. The Scots and English collectors active in the 1700 and 1800s were interested in preserving what they thought were the relics of older medieval traditions, not contemporary genres. They were more likely to have noticed medieval carols sung to the baby Jesus that contained lulling refrains. [9]
The OED recorded a new use for the word lullaby in the mid-nineteenth century that probably signaled the development of the modern genre. In 1842, Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote: "You thought you heard the lullaby which a fairy might sing to some fretful changeling." [10] This was the same year Robert Schumann wrote his "Schummerleid." It was published in 1845, the year Chopin’s "Berceuse" became public. [11]
This was the Romantic period that stressed the emotions of the individual and created the image of innocent childhood. Books about fairies, elves, and other supernatural creatures were published with drawings of a magical, idealized wild nature. The one song from this period that entered camp tradition, [12] and later was used as a lullaby, [13] was "Baby’s boat’s a silver star." [14]
The Weaver’s version mentioned in the post for 3 October 2017 treated the moon and trees anthropomorphically; the one was able to smile, the other to sleep. These images were expanded by Amy Cope in the version described in the post for 3 January 2018.
Few of the versions of "Kumbaya" on Amazon or YouTube deviated from the standard set of verses. This may be because the recordings were seen as public events that should adhere to the written word, not the private lullings when new words were substituted for the usual gerunds and the someone pronoun.
One woman who did use dreaming and sleeping verses was Susie Tallman. She created a version that appealed to the nostalgic images of lullabies held by parents who had heard "Kumbaya" on records made specifically for children when they were young. Many in those years were inspired by Peter, Paul and Mary’s Peter, Paul and Mommy. [15] One of Tallman’s customers said the CD
"Brings back fond memories of when I was small, like the feeling you get when paging through a children’s book your mother read to you when you were a child..." [16]
She achieved her affects by using a guitar playing soft arpeggios in the background. Her own soprano voice had a slightly child-like quality which was emphasized by pronouncing Lord as Lordt to soften the hard terminal consonant sound. Her voice was further mellowed by Merrie Amsterburg, who sang parallel thirds on the refrains.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Susie Tallman, soprano
Vocal Group: Merrie Amsterburg
Vocal Director: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: harmonica, acoustic guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Recording copyrighted (P) 1998 Susie Tallman
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: cum BYE ya; Lordt, with a soft /d/
Verses: kumbaya, singing, dreaming, crying, sleeping, come by here
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: six-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Seekers
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: alternated one instrumental verse with three sung ones (IvvvIvvv)
Singing Style: unadorned, with slightly childish sound; used two notes in the last lines for Lord and bye.
Solo-Group Dynamics: a second woman joined on the refrains of the three lines, singing a parallel third lower.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: a harmonica played the complete melody with guitar arpeggios in the introduction. The guitar continued while Tallman was singing, and never changed its pattern. In the interlude, the harmonica and guitar played two competing melodies against the arpeggios.
Notes on Performance
Cover: it had the same gauzy historicism as the recording with a Paul Gauguin child dropped into a Henri Rousseau landscape. Irene Hardwicke Olivieri featured a Polynesian child in a skirt of red leaves holding a bouquet of composite flowers at the ends of long stems marked by lance-shaped leaves. The stems curved down so the slightly chubby, hermaphroditic child was standing in a bed of greenery.
Audience Perceptions
The harmonica-guitar duet may have been too complicated for a very young infant, and disrupted the calming mood. However, infants soon adapt to their parents’ tastes. Parents’ comments on Amazon indicated that Tallman had succeeded in creating an album that adults could listen to while it calmed their young charges. One person wrote:
"Some lullaby cd’s we tried would eventually do the job for my infant daughter, but would leave me wanting to get out of the nursery ASAP. Susie Tallman’s songs let me enjoy the experience of rocking my baby to sleep, even when she was fussy." [17]
The mental state of the parent is an important as that of the infant. If the one is upset, the other will not calm down. One remembered, "When my baby was up at night with colic, it really helped relax him as well as myself." [18]
While parents have mentioned using the CD since their children were very young, the appeal to adult sensibilities meant it could continue to be used with slightly older children. One mother, after remarking "it will not get on your nerves like some baby/toddler music!," observed "Our 5 year old still enjoys listening to it while she does art or other quiet projects." [19]
Another woman mentioned still another use of lullaby CDs for toddlers. She wrote, "My 3-year-old has gone to sleep to this wonderful music every night for the past year, and we even have to travel with a copy of it." [20]
Notes on Performers
Tallman studied music at UCLA and at the New England Conservatory Workshop. Most of her singing experience was with choral groups in Paris and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Her official biographies did not mention children. [21]
Amsterbrg was born in Ludington, Michigan, where her "mother used to sing ‘Clementine’ to me and my brother when she was rocking him." She settled in Boston where she expanded the folk tradition with international instruments like bouzoukis. [22]
Hardwick Olivieri was raised in McAllen, Texas, and went to Brazil after high school. She returned to New York where she worked as The New York Botanical Garden and earned a masters from New York University. She moved to "the high desert of central Oregon." [23]
The instrumentalists were not named.
Availability
CD: Lullaby Themes for Sleepy Dreams. CD Baby. 1 April 1999.
YouTube: uploaded by CDBaby on 20 October 2015.
End Notes
1. Alan Lomax and Edith Crowell Traeger. "Phonotactique du chant populaire." L’Homme: Revue Française d’Anthropolge 4:5:1964. Reported by his sister, Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 142-143.
2. Sandra E. Trehub and Rebekah L. Prince. "Lullabies and Other Women’s Songs in the Turkish Village of Akçaeniº." Refereed E-Journal, October 2010. 12.
3. Mizuki Miyashita and Shirlee Crow Shoe. "Blackfoot Lullabies and Language Revitalization." 183-190 in Indigenous Language Revitalization: Encouragement,Guidance and Lessons Learned. Edited by Jon Reyhner and Louise Lockard. Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University, 2009. 183.
4. "when my mistress lay in and we sang lulley by baby and bore ye." Misogonus, act IV, scene 1, line 76. Most likely by Thomas Richardes, 1566. Published by Alois Brandl. Quellen des Weltlichen Dramas in England vor Shakespeare. Strassburg : K. J. Trübner, 1898. Cited by The Oxford English Dictionary. "Lullaby." Edited by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 edition. 9:93.
5. William Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus, act II, scene 3, line 29, from 1588. Also, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, act II, scene 2, lines 14-19, from 1590. Quoted by OED. 9:93.
6. Robert Greene. Pandosto. London: Thomas Orwin for Thomas Cadman, 1588. 27. Quoted by OED. 9:93.
7. Maurice J. E. Brown. "Lullaby." 11:313-314 in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan, 1980.
8. Jeremy Grimshaw. "William Byrd: Lullaby, my sweet little baby." All Music website.
9. Brown. 11:313.
10. Edward Bulwer Lytton. Zanoni. Leipzig: Frederick Fleischer, 1842. 24. Quoted by OED. 9:94.
11. Brown. 11:313.
12. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. It was reported by 19 camps or individuals. One person described how she used the melody to recall the lyrics. 191.
13. Hawes reported it was one of six songs commonly reported as lullabies in the United States. The others were "Rockabye Baby," "Bye Baby Bunting," "All the Pretty Little Horses," "Sleep Baby Sleep," and "Hush Little Baby." 146.
14. Jessie L. Gaylor and Alice Cushing Donaldson Riley published "Baby’s Boat" in Playtime Songs for the Schoolroom. Chicago: Clayton F. Summy Co., 1911.
15. The collection of children’s songs was released in 1969. It included "Puff the Magic Dragon." It did not include "Kumbaya."
16. A customer. Posted to Amazon on 23 September 1999.
17. T. Wilson. Posted to Amazon on 28 February 2008.
18. Predalien. Posted to Amazon on 20 February 2003.
19. Toddler Mama. Posted to Amazon on 3 January 2014.
20. Andrea Palmer. Posted to Amazon on 8 June 2000.
21. Tallman’s website.
22. Amsterburg’s website.
23. Debbie Williamson Smith. "‘Contemporary Oregon Visions: Jo Hamilton and Irene Hardwicke Olivieri’ Opens at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art." University of Oregon press release. 17 March 2014.
Calming and lulling serve universal functions arising from the interaction of newborn infants with their parents. They occasionally crystallize into genres that vary by culture. Alan Lomax noted the ones he heard in Spain each had an identifiable chorus of nonsense syllables. [1] Sandra Trehub and Rebekah Prince found women in Turkey knew few tunes. They were used with multiple sets of words, each of which was considered a separate song. [2]
When Mizuki Miyashita and Shirlee Crow Shoe wanted to reintroduce the Blackfoot language, they decided they would be more successful if they taught the vocabulary in songs. However, the native musical tradition relied primarily on vocables. They collected lullabies because they were more likely to contain words. [3]
A lullaby genre seems to have developed in England during the reign of Elizabeth I when men began exploring the oceans and Protestantism was being established. The Oxford English Dictionary reported the first use of the word lullaby around 1566 in an ambiguous context, [4] but by 1588 it had a clear meaning. It was used by Shakespeare [5] and Robert Greene. The later wrote: "The good wife learned to sing lullaby at home with her young babe." [6]
Interesting, Grove’s dictionary of music suggested the first musical example, William Byrd’s "Lullaby, my sweet little baby," also appeared in 1588 [7] in a collection of Psalms, Sonets and Songs. It was a madrigal for five voices accompanied by viols. Jeremy Grimshaw said it also was known as the "Lullaby for Holy Innocents." It alternated between Mary comforting her son in "tranquil duple meter," and a narrator who used "dramatic triple meter" to describe Herod. [8]
The characteristics of the domestic lullabies probably are known only from fragments. In the post for 5 January 2018, I mentioned the many reasons lulling songs were not collected by folklorists. The Scots and English collectors active in the 1700 and 1800s were interested in preserving what they thought were the relics of older medieval traditions, not contemporary genres. They were more likely to have noticed medieval carols sung to the baby Jesus that contained lulling refrains. [9]
The OED recorded a new use for the word lullaby in the mid-nineteenth century that probably signaled the development of the modern genre. In 1842, Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote: "You thought you heard the lullaby which a fairy might sing to some fretful changeling." [10] This was the same year Robert Schumann wrote his "Schummerleid." It was published in 1845, the year Chopin’s "Berceuse" became public. [11]
This was the Romantic period that stressed the emotions of the individual and created the image of innocent childhood. Books about fairies, elves, and other supernatural creatures were published with drawings of a magical, idealized wild nature. The one song from this period that entered camp tradition, [12] and later was used as a lullaby, [13] was "Baby’s boat’s a silver star." [14]
The Weaver’s version mentioned in the post for 3 October 2017 treated the moon and trees anthropomorphically; the one was able to smile, the other to sleep. These images were expanded by Amy Cope in the version described in the post for 3 January 2018.
Few of the versions of "Kumbaya" on Amazon or YouTube deviated from the standard set of verses. This may be because the recordings were seen as public events that should adhere to the written word, not the private lullings when new words were substituted for the usual gerunds and the someone pronoun.
One woman who did use dreaming and sleeping verses was Susie Tallman. She created a version that appealed to the nostalgic images of lullabies held by parents who had heard "Kumbaya" on records made specifically for children when they were young. Many in those years were inspired by Peter, Paul and Mary’s Peter, Paul and Mommy. [15] One of Tallman’s customers said the CD
"Brings back fond memories of when I was small, like the feeling you get when paging through a children’s book your mother read to you when you were a child..." [16]
She achieved her affects by using a guitar playing soft arpeggios in the background. Her own soprano voice had a slightly child-like quality which was emphasized by pronouncing Lord as Lordt to soften the hard terminal consonant sound. Her voice was further mellowed by Merrie Amsterburg, who sang parallel thirds on the refrains.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Susie Tallman, soprano
Vocal Group: Merrie Amsterburg
Vocal Director: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: harmonica, acoustic guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Recording copyrighted (P) 1998 Susie Tallman
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: cum BYE ya; Lordt, with a soft /d/
Verses: kumbaya, singing, dreaming, crying, sleeping, come by here
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: six-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Seekers
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: alternated one instrumental verse with three sung ones (IvvvIvvv)
Singing Style: unadorned, with slightly childish sound; used two notes in the last lines for Lord and bye.
Solo-Group Dynamics: a second woman joined on the refrains of the three lines, singing a parallel third lower.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: a harmonica played the complete melody with guitar arpeggios in the introduction. The guitar continued while Tallman was singing, and never changed its pattern. In the interlude, the harmonica and guitar played two competing melodies against the arpeggios.
Notes on Performance
Cover: it had the same gauzy historicism as the recording with a Paul Gauguin child dropped into a Henri Rousseau landscape. Irene Hardwicke Olivieri featured a Polynesian child in a skirt of red leaves holding a bouquet of composite flowers at the ends of long stems marked by lance-shaped leaves. The stems curved down so the slightly chubby, hermaphroditic child was standing in a bed of greenery.
Audience Perceptions
The harmonica-guitar duet may have been too complicated for a very young infant, and disrupted the calming mood. However, infants soon adapt to their parents’ tastes. Parents’ comments on Amazon indicated that Tallman had succeeded in creating an album that adults could listen to while it calmed their young charges. One person wrote:
"Some lullaby cd’s we tried would eventually do the job for my infant daughter, but would leave me wanting to get out of the nursery ASAP. Susie Tallman’s songs let me enjoy the experience of rocking my baby to sleep, even when she was fussy." [17]
The mental state of the parent is an important as that of the infant. If the one is upset, the other will not calm down. One remembered, "When my baby was up at night with colic, it really helped relax him as well as myself." [18]
While parents have mentioned using the CD since their children were very young, the appeal to adult sensibilities meant it could continue to be used with slightly older children. One mother, after remarking "it will not get on your nerves like some baby/toddler music!," observed "Our 5 year old still enjoys listening to it while she does art or other quiet projects." [19]
Another woman mentioned still another use of lullaby CDs for toddlers. She wrote, "My 3-year-old has gone to sleep to this wonderful music every night for the past year, and we even have to travel with a copy of it." [20]
Notes on Performers
Tallman studied music at UCLA and at the New England Conservatory Workshop. Most of her singing experience was with choral groups in Paris and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Her official biographies did not mention children. [21]
Amsterbrg was born in Ludington, Michigan, where her "mother used to sing ‘Clementine’ to me and my brother when she was rocking him." She settled in Boston where she expanded the folk tradition with international instruments like bouzoukis. [22]
Hardwick Olivieri was raised in McAllen, Texas, and went to Brazil after high school. She returned to New York where she worked as The New York Botanical Garden and earned a masters from New York University. She moved to "the high desert of central Oregon." [23]
The instrumentalists were not named.
Availability
CD: Lullaby Themes for Sleepy Dreams. CD Baby. 1 April 1999.
YouTube: uploaded by CDBaby on 20 October 2015.
End Notes
1. Alan Lomax and Edith Crowell Traeger. "Phonotactique du chant populaire." L’Homme: Revue Française d’Anthropolge 4:5:1964. Reported by his sister, Bess Lomax Hawes. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 142-143.
2. Sandra E. Trehub and Rebekah L. Prince. "Lullabies and Other Women’s Songs in the Turkish Village of Akçaeniº." Refereed E-Journal, October 2010. 12.
3. Mizuki Miyashita and Shirlee Crow Shoe. "Blackfoot Lullabies and Language Revitalization." 183-190 in Indigenous Language Revitalization: Encouragement,Guidance and Lessons Learned. Edited by Jon Reyhner and Louise Lockard. Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University, 2009. 183.
4. "when my mistress lay in and we sang lulley by baby and bore ye." Misogonus, act IV, scene 1, line 76. Most likely by Thomas Richardes, 1566. Published by Alois Brandl. Quellen des Weltlichen Dramas in England vor Shakespeare. Strassburg : K. J. Trübner, 1898. Cited by The Oxford English Dictionary. "Lullaby." Edited by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 edition. 9:93.
5. William Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus, act II, scene 3, line 29, from 1588. Also, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, act II, scene 2, lines 14-19, from 1590. Quoted by OED. 9:93.
6. Robert Greene. Pandosto. London: Thomas Orwin for Thomas Cadman, 1588. 27. Quoted by OED. 9:93.
7. Maurice J. E. Brown. "Lullaby." 11:313-314 in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan, 1980.
8. Jeremy Grimshaw. "William Byrd: Lullaby, my sweet little baby." All Music website.
9. Brown. 11:313.
10. Edward Bulwer Lytton. Zanoni. Leipzig: Frederick Fleischer, 1842. 24. Quoted by OED. 9:94.
11. Brown. 11:313.
12. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. It was reported by 19 camps or individuals. One person described how she used the melody to recall the lyrics. 191.
13. Hawes reported it was one of six songs commonly reported as lullabies in the United States. The others were "Rockabye Baby," "Bye Baby Bunting," "All the Pretty Little Horses," "Sleep Baby Sleep," and "Hush Little Baby." 146.
14. Jessie L. Gaylor and Alice Cushing Donaldson Riley published "Baby’s Boat" in Playtime Songs for the Schoolroom. Chicago: Clayton F. Summy Co., 1911.
15. The collection of children’s songs was released in 1969. It included "Puff the Magic Dragon." It did not include "Kumbaya."
16. A customer. Posted to Amazon on 23 September 1999.
17. T. Wilson. Posted to Amazon on 28 February 2008.
18. Predalien. Posted to Amazon on 20 February 2003.
19. Toddler Mama. Posted to Amazon on 3 January 2014.
20. Andrea Palmer. Posted to Amazon on 8 June 2000.
21. Tallman’s website.
22. Amsterburg’s website.
23. Debbie Williamson Smith. "‘Contemporary Oregon Visions: Jo Hamilton and Irene Hardwicke Olivieri’ Opens at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art." University of Oregon press release. 17 March 2014.
Friday, January 5, 2018
Amy Robbins-Wilson - Kumbaya
Topic: Lullaby - Definition
Much of the problem in identifying the characteristics of lullabies comes from the fact they exist as both a function and a genre. [1] The latter is a mental abstraction, and varies by culture. The other is about as universal as anything in human experience, because it is driven by the needs of newborn infants.
Infants spend much of their first weeks sleeping, usually about sixteen hours a day broken into two to four hour-long segments. Their stomachs are still small, and they need constant feeding. [2] When they are about six to eight weeks old, they begin to sleep less during the day, and more in the night. [3] By three months, they sleep through the night. [4]
Their sleep goes through the same phases as adults, from drowsiness to non-REM sleep to REM sleep and back. Unlike adults, about half their sleep time is in the rapid-eye-movement phase associated with developments in their brains as they adjust to the non-uterine world. [5]
The ideal wake state is the quiet alert when their eyes are "wide and bright" and their breathing is regular. This is the period they can learn and should be fed. When they begin to be hungry or feel some other discomfort, their eyes lose their brightness, they become fussy, and breathe less regularly. If their needs are not recognized in the active alert state, they begin to cry and may not be able to eat. [6]
Crying is seen by physicians as a crisis situation, in which the first need is to calm the infant so it returns to an alert state when he or she can eat. [7] Pediatricians and nurses train young mothers to watch for signs of distress before crying begins. In the past, such knowledge was intuitive or passed among women.
The ability to deal with hunger or mild infections improved since World War II, so fewer babies in the United States continue crying because food is scarce or they are ill. In the past and in other countries, food for the mother may have been scarce and supplemental food and effective medicines less available. [8] In those cases, more time was spent calming the young.
One reason lullabies are so universal is infants socialize their parents in the first few days after their birth. When they need to be calmed, the only things that work seem to be body contact, slight movements, and soothing sounds. How parents calm and rock is cultural, and, infants very quickly adapt to those things offered that are satisfying, and nosily reject the others.
Scientists studying the behavior of prematurely born infants have determined music works by slowing the heartbeat and altering the oxygen levels in the blood. [9] Parents use lullabies in three situations. In crises, they use them to calm infants so they can be treated. Later, when infants need to be trained to sleep, they use lullabies to move them from the quiet alert state into drowsiness. They then may use lulling to put them so sleep.
Calming and lulling serve two different functions, and can be met differently. Calming can be done with any music that’s slow and quiet. No particular continuity needs to exist beyond mood. A parent can sing one song over and over, or several songs in a row. The Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia even suggested this was the time when they could use one of the commercial lullaby disks. [10]
When a child is in a crisis state or when a parent wants to sing an infant to sleep, the music differs in form, because it must continue uninterrupted until its goal has been met. When parents find a song that seems to work, then may begin to improvise words or substitute vocables to maintain the melody.
Calming may be a public event, but lulling is often an intensely private one. When folklorists collected lullabies, they almost always heard the ones used in calming. If singers happened to begin lulling, the collectors often thought it meant they had forgotten a section, and did not transcribe nonsense syllables that did not follow some syntactical pattern. [11]
Most of the lullaby versions of "Kumbaya" are on Amazon where they are included on discs intended for calming. Many of the versions on YouTube are essentially promotions for such products. There are no purely lulling versions.
The most interesting was posted by Amy Robbins-Wilson, as a promotion for a CD. On the professionally recorded version she sang a capella with no ornamentation. She drew out the final syllables of phrases to maintain the sound. She also eliminated any hard consonant sounds that would have interrupted the flow of music and attracted an infant’s attention.
On YouTube, she was demonstrating how to sing a lullaby. She began by rocking back and forth and singing the melody with lu lu’s. When she started to sing the one verse, she closed her eyes. She sang softly, with her mouth only slightly open. By the end she could barely be heard.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Amy Robbins-Wilson
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
She introduced her YouTube video by saying, "This is a lullaby from coastal South Carolina. It’s called kumbaya or come by here."
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: com by yah in statements, cum by yah in refrains; barely pronounced the hard /d/ in Lord.
Verses
CD: kumbaya, sleeping, singing
YouTube: lu lu, come by here
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: potentially open-ended, edited to fit expectations of CD buyers and YouTube watchers.
Verse Repetition Pattern
CD: AxxA
YouTube: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: use of vocables in YouTube version
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: slow
Basic Structure: strophic repetition, with no pauses between verses
Singing Style: one note to one syllable, with quick transition on final Lord. Final syllables were held until they faded away.
Notes on Performance
CD
The cover was peacock blue with a white circle in the center containing an outline drawing of angel wings.
YouTube
She was in a living room, with her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Some strands had come loose, so she looked very much like a young mother trying to put a child to sleep.
Notes on Movement
Her rocking was in multiples of 3/4 time. She started phrases when she was erect, and held them until she had moved both forward and back so she was taking a breath just before she had returned to the erect position.
Audience Perceptions
Most of the comments on Amazon simply praised Robbins-Wilons’ singing. A few described their children’s reactions. One woman described her son moving from active alert to quiet alert to sleep:
"When I first put this cd on in the car Yukon, who’s was 4 1/2 months at the time, sat up still in his car seat. I looked back to see if he was ok, he wasn’t moving, his head was perfectly straight, usually he’s looking out the window, looking down, trying to chew on his car seat or devour a toy, ‘that’s strange,’ I thought, he was completely silent, no crying, no fussing, just absolutely silent, then I realized he was listening intently with every fiber of his body to the music, and after a good ten minutes of this he was sound asleep. Awesome!!!" [12]
Her comments made clear modern life had created another time when calming was needed with young children. Traffic is stressful for drivers and their passengers. The youngest are confined in carriers. It is one time parents cannot personally attend to upset infants. CD technology created a way they could be calmed by music that did not communicate the anxieties of the drivers.
Another woman indicated the need was not limited to the very young. She wrote: "My 3yo daughter has had ‘Lullaby and Goodnight’ for 3 weeks now and it has become without question our favorite music for rest time, nighttime, and quiet driving time." [13]
Notes on Performers
Robbins-Wilson majored in theater at Bates College, and continued studying voice to hone her skills as a music therapist "to use music to open transformational, healing spaces for listeners where they can find deep relaxation and peace." She had one son, and she, he, and her husband lived in coastal Maine. [14]
Availability
CD: Lullaby and Goodnight. Angelsong Creations. 6 August 2010.
YouTube: "How to Sing Kumbaya - Melody and First Verse." Uploaded by Amy Robbins-Wilson on 3 August 2009.
End Notes
1. Bess Lomax Hawes saw this difference as one of academic perspective: "is a song a function of its lexical content or its social usage?" Anthropologists chose the second, literary analysts the first. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 141.
2. "Newborn-Sleep Patterns." Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia website.
3. "Baby Sleep Basics: Birth to 3 Months." Johnson and Johnson’s BabyCenter website.
4. Children’s Hospital.
5. Johnson and Johnson.
6. University of Washington, Nursing Child Assessment Satellite Training. "The Six States of Consciousness." University of Washington website.
7. Children’s Hospital.
8. Samuel B. Coles, an African-American missionary in Angola, had the importance of hunger brought to his attention by a friend who told him at midnight "not a baby in Gongo was crying." He asked "why should the babies be crying," and was told "they are not crying because their mothers and fathers have learned to work as you have been teaching them." Once aware of the difference, he noted he "had occasion to pass through a village where the people had not learned to work the river bottom with the plows and hoes we brought them. There the babies were hungry and crying constantly. Some of them were not even able to cry. They only whimpered." Preacher with a Plow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. 237-238.
9. A number of studies have been made of music therapy in newborn ICU’s. The results sometimes were contradictory because scientists were looking at infants with different health problems and had different measures of success. Ashley L Hodges and Lynda Law Wilson did a useful review of the literature between 1970 and 2010 in "Preterm Infants’ Responses to Music: an Integrative Literature Review." Southern Online Journal of Nursing Research 10(3).
10. Children’s Hospital. "Playing soft music while your baby is getting sleepy is also a good way to help establish a bedtime routine."
11. Hawes commented on the failure of collectors to report the use of humming. 143.
12. Gretchen Heilman Piper. Posted to Amazon on 30 September 2010.
13. Maureen R. Posted to Amazon on 3 October 2010.
14. "My Story." Her website
Much of the problem in identifying the characteristics of lullabies comes from the fact they exist as both a function and a genre. [1] The latter is a mental abstraction, and varies by culture. The other is about as universal as anything in human experience, because it is driven by the needs of newborn infants.
Infants spend much of their first weeks sleeping, usually about sixteen hours a day broken into two to four hour-long segments. Their stomachs are still small, and they need constant feeding. [2] When they are about six to eight weeks old, they begin to sleep less during the day, and more in the night. [3] By three months, they sleep through the night. [4]
Their sleep goes through the same phases as adults, from drowsiness to non-REM sleep to REM sleep and back. Unlike adults, about half their sleep time is in the rapid-eye-movement phase associated with developments in their brains as they adjust to the non-uterine world. [5]
The ideal wake state is the quiet alert when their eyes are "wide and bright" and their breathing is regular. This is the period they can learn and should be fed. When they begin to be hungry or feel some other discomfort, their eyes lose their brightness, they become fussy, and breathe less regularly. If their needs are not recognized in the active alert state, they begin to cry and may not be able to eat. [6]
Crying is seen by physicians as a crisis situation, in which the first need is to calm the infant so it returns to an alert state when he or she can eat. [7] Pediatricians and nurses train young mothers to watch for signs of distress before crying begins. In the past, such knowledge was intuitive or passed among women.
The ability to deal with hunger or mild infections improved since World War II, so fewer babies in the United States continue crying because food is scarce or they are ill. In the past and in other countries, food for the mother may have been scarce and supplemental food and effective medicines less available. [8] In those cases, more time was spent calming the young.
One reason lullabies are so universal is infants socialize their parents in the first few days after their birth. When they need to be calmed, the only things that work seem to be body contact, slight movements, and soothing sounds. How parents calm and rock is cultural, and, infants very quickly adapt to those things offered that are satisfying, and nosily reject the others.
Scientists studying the behavior of prematurely born infants have determined music works by slowing the heartbeat and altering the oxygen levels in the blood. [9] Parents use lullabies in three situations. In crises, they use them to calm infants so they can be treated. Later, when infants need to be trained to sleep, they use lullabies to move them from the quiet alert state into drowsiness. They then may use lulling to put them so sleep.
Calming and lulling serve two different functions, and can be met differently. Calming can be done with any music that’s slow and quiet. No particular continuity needs to exist beyond mood. A parent can sing one song over and over, or several songs in a row. The Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia even suggested this was the time when they could use one of the commercial lullaby disks. [10]
When a child is in a crisis state or when a parent wants to sing an infant to sleep, the music differs in form, because it must continue uninterrupted until its goal has been met. When parents find a song that seems to work, then may begin to improvise words or substitute vocables to maintain the melody.
Calming may be a public event, but lulling is often an intensely private one. When folklorists collected lullabies, they almost always heard the ones used in calming. If singers happened to begin lulling, the collectors often thought it meant they had forgotten a section, and did not transcribe nonsense syllables that did not follow some syntactical pattern. [11]
Most of the lullaby versions of "Kumbaya" are on Amazon where they are included on discs intended for calming. Many of the versions on YouTube are essentially promotions for such products. There are no purely lulling versions.
The most interesting was posted by Amy Robbins-Wilson, as a promotion for a CD. On the professionally recorded version she sang a capella with no ornamentation. She drew out the final syllables of phrases to maintain the sound. She also eliminated any hard consonant sounds that would have interrupted the flow of music and attracted an infant’s attention.
On YouTube, she was demonstrating how to sing a lullaby. She began by rocking back and forth and singing the melody with lu lu’s. When she started to sing the one verse, she closed her eyes. She sang softly, with her mouth only slightly open. By the end she could barely be heard.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Amy Robbins-Wilson
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
She introduced her YouTube video by saying, "This is a lullaby from coastal South Carolina. It’s called kumbaya or come by here."
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: com by yah in statements, cum by yah in refrains; barely pronounced the hard /d/ in Lord.
Verses
CD: kumbaya, sleeping, singing
YouTube: lu lu, come by here
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: potentially open-ended, edited to fit expectations of CD buyers and YouTube watchers.
Verse Repetition Pattern
CD: AxxA
YouTube: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: use of vocables in YouTube version
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: slow
Basic Structure: strophic repetition, with no pauses between verses
Singing Style: one note to one syllable, with quick transition on final Lord. Final syllables were held until they faded away.
Notes on Performance
CD
The cover was peacock blue with a white circle in the center containing an outline drawing of angel wings.
YouTube
She was in a living room, with her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Some strands had come loose, so she looked very much like a young mother trying to put a child to sleep.
Notes on Movement
Her rocking was in multiples of 3/4 time. She started phrases when she was erect, and held them until she had moved both forward and back so she was taking a breath just before she had returned to the erect position.
Audience Perceptions
Most of the comments on Amazon simply praised Robbins-Wilons’ singing. A few described their children’s reactions. One woman described her son moving from active alert to quiet alert to sleep:
"When I first put this cd on in the car Yukon, who’s was 4 1/2 months at the time, sat up still in his car seat. I looked back to see if he was ok, he wasn’t moving, his head was perfectly straight, usually he’s looking out the window, looking down, trying to chew on his car seat or devour a toy, ‘that’s strange,’ I thought, he was completely silent, no crying, no fussing, just absolutely silent, then I realized he was listening intently with every fiber of his body to the music, and after a good ten minutes of this he was sound asleep. Awesome!!!" [12]
Her comments made clear modern life had created another time when calming was needed with young children. Traffic is stressful for drivers and their passengers. The youngest are confined in carriers. It is one time parents cannot personally attend to upset infants. CD technology created a way they could be calmed by music that did not communicate the anxieties of the drivers.
Another woman indicated the need was not limited to the very young. She wrote: "My 3yo daughter has had ‘Lullaby and Goodnight’ for 3 weeks now and it has become without question our favorite music for rest time, nighttime, and quiet driving time." [13]
Notes on Performers
Robbins-Wilson majored in theater at Bates College, and continued studying voice to hone her skills as a music therapist "to use music to open transformational, healing spaces for listeners where they can find deep relaxation and peace." She had one son, and she, he, and her husband lived in coastal Maine. [14]
Availability
CD: Lullaby and Goodnight. Angelsong Creations. 6 August 2010.
YouTube: "How to Sing Kumbaya - Melody and First Verse." Uploaded by Amy Robbins-Wilson on 3 August 2009.
End Notes
1. Bess Lomax Hawes saw this difference as one of academic perspective: "is a song a function of its lexical content or its social usage?" Anthropologists chose the second, literary analysts the first. "Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby." The Journal of American Folklore 87:140-148:1974. 141.
2. "Newborn-Sleep Patterns." Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia website.
3. "Baby Sleep Basics: Birth to 3 Months." Johnson and Johnson’s BabyCenter website.
4. Children’s Hospital.
5. Johnson and Johnson.
6. University of Washington, Nursing Child Assessment Satellite Training. "The Six States of Consciousness." University of Washington website.
7. Children’s Hospital.
8. Samuel B. Coles, an African-American missionary in Angola, had the importance of hunger brought to his attention by a friend who told him at midnight "not a baby in Gongo was crying." He asked "why should the babies be crying," and was told "they are not crying because their mothers and fathers have learned to work as you have been teaching them." Once aware of the difference, he noted he "had occasion to pass through a village where the people had not learned to work the river bottom with the plows and hoes we brought them. There the babies were hungry and crying constantly. Some of them were not even able to cry. They only whimpered." Preacher with a Plow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. 237-238.
9. A number of studies have been made of music therapy in newborn ICU’s. The results sometimes were contradictory because scientists were looking at infants with different health problems and had different measures of success. Ashley L Hodges and Lynda Law Wilson did a useful review of the literature between 1970 and 2010 in "Preterm Infants’ Responses to Music: an Integrative Literature Review." Southern Online Journal of Nursing Research 10(3).
10. Children’s Hospital. "Playing soft music while your baby is getting sleepy is also a good way to help establish a bedtime routine."
11. Hawes commented on the failure of collectors to report the use of humming. 143.
12. Gretchen Heilman Piper. Posted to Amazon on 30 September 2010.
13. Maureen R. Posted to Amazon on 3 October 2010.
14. "My Story." Her website
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
Heidi Cope - Kumbaya
Topic: Lullaby - Definition
Pete Seeger probably was the first commercial performer to use the "sleeping" verse with "Kumbaya." [1] He was singing it in Chicago in 1957. [2] When he recorded the song in a Carnegie Hall concert in December of that year the people in the audience already knew the verse. [3]
The Weavers were responsible for the popular perception of "Kumbaya" as a lullaby. [4] In 1958, they said: "It came to us as a song supposedly from Africa, and it only had one word. The pretty tune suggested that it might be a lullaby, so we added a few lines to make it that." [5]
What it was about the melody that signaled lullaby is a conundrum. Ontario researchers presented a sample of songs from "several regions of the world" to university students and asked them which were the lullabies in matched sets of adult and infant songs. They made sure each pair was the same tempo, since they knew if they did not, people would select the slower. 63% were able to identify the lullabies. [6]
More interesting were the error patterns. Some 85% were able to recognize lullabies from Ireland, Czechoslovakia, the Creek, and Pygmies. Nearly all had problems identifying infant songs from Chad, Ecuador, Samoa, and Ukraine. [7]
When Sandra Trehub’s team obscured the voices, most could no longer identify the lullabies on musical traits alone. The researchers thought the tone of voice was a determining factor. The students said their criteria were simplicity and repetitiveness. [8]
Repetition was easy to define, and certainly characterized "Kumbaya." The AAAB line pattern was mirrored by an AA1AB melody. The lines were broken into statements and refrains, with only the statements changing from stanza to stanza. The refrains constituted the final B lines. Melodically, the statement phrases all used the same musical pattern; only the refrains on the A lines distinguished the second line from the first and third.
Simplicity was harder to define scientifically. In a followup study, the group made tapes of pairs of adult and infant songs from thirty cultures, making sure many were non-western. This time they simply asked students which ones were simpler. In most cases, the simpler ones were the lullabies, and again people were consistent in their mistakes. [9]
Anna Unyk transcribed the songs, and classified them by musical attrbutes the group thought might signify simplicity. A computer then compared the traits against the student identifications. The attributes related to the tone of voice were not significant. They speculated that might have been because they field recordings of lullabies were not done with infants present. [10]
The purely musical attributes that did correlate with the lullabies students thought were simpler were the higher numbers of descending phrases and fewer changes in melodic direction. When compared with the adult songs, the median pitches were higher. [11]
"Kumbaya" relied on musical phrases with one change of direction. The A lines initially ascended through a triad, and repeated the top note several times in the statement, before rising slightly and descending in the refrain. [12] The second, A1, line used the same broken chord for the statement, but descended in the refrain. [13] The final line undulated around the base note of the chord. [14]
The team did not define high, and did not publish musical details on the songs they used [15] so it was impossible to know if "Kumbaya" would have been considered a higher or a lower song. Its standard range was from middle C to the orchestra’s A. The Weavers’ version was one tone higher, from D to B.
The only other change The Weavers made to the melody was to simplify it by altering the Xxx rhythm to some form of Xx. They sang the A lines in 3/2 and the B lines in 2/2 or 2/4. As for the tempo, they simply said they used "lullaby tempo."
The words they added were probably what cemented its linkage with a lullaby. They changed the pronoun "someone" to nature nouns, one of which, moon, was associated with the evening. Heidi Cope’s version dropped The Weavers’ trees verse and expanded the night symbols. Her moon was shining while her stars were twinkling. Her final verses were even more specific: the penultimate was baby’s sleeping, and the last was a series of uh’s.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Heidi Cope, soprano
Vocal Group: none
Vocal Director: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: harp
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Amazon
(C) 2008 Heidi Cope
CD Baby [16]
© Copyright - Cope Productions
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: koom bye yah, with slight emphasis on second syllable
Verses: kumbaya/moon/stars/sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: moon, stars, baby
Term for Deity: none, used "oh"
Special Terms: nature images
Basic Form: five-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: repeated last line of "oh" verse
Unique Features: use of vocables
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: repetition with variations in ornamentation and accompaniment
Singing Style: Cope altered the melody in one line of the second verse, changed the key in the third, and used glissandi in the fourth and fifth iterations.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: the harp was subdued. It played arpeggios between the phrases of the first and second verses. In the stars verse, the style changed to a tinkling on the word "twinkling." In the fourth verse, the playing more resembled a keyboard instrument.
Notes on Performance
CD cover was plain lavender with a anthropomorphic yellow quarter moon and some scattered stars. The moon had closed eyes and a smile.
Cope assumed an audience that could understand the words, and would be bored by simple repetition. The testimonials she published suggested she sent copies to daycare centers for use during after-lunch rest periods.
One director wrote: "We use this in our nap rooms. It is wonderfully soothing music." [17]
A Montessori owner echoed: "We are enjoying Lullaby and Goodnight and it truly works at naptime. Thank you!!" [18]
Daycare centers are noisy places, even during their rest periods. Erin Carole Patterson noted in ones she visited in Florida it never really was quiet. The facilities’ layouts meant teachers and others had to walk through nap areas to get from one place to another. Other disruptions included "children being picked up by parents, construction outside the building, sick children." [19] and changes to the schedule that altered start times. [20]
She experimented with playing a Disney instrumental lullaby CD and one with rain sounds to see if simly masking the noise would help the children fall asleep. The lullaby worked best the first day, but once the children were used to both CDs, they fell asleep faster with the rain sounds. She had no control group to give her information about how quickly they would have napped with nothing to calm them. [21]
Audience Perceptions
Several participants in on-line forums have commented on "Kumbaya" as a lullaby. Echoing The Weavers, one wrote: "Kumbaya is, after all, a luulaby, not a protest song." [22]
Another responded, "I don’t think I’ve heard it sung for at least 32 years. I can remember singing it then because it makes a great lullabye, and I sang it to both my kids." [23]
A third told readers to "think of Kumbaya stripped of words. The rhythm and melody invite (almost compel) gentle rocking and swaying -- like a lullaby. Humans of any age will always need that from time to time." [24]
Notes on Performers
No information available.
Availability
CD: Lullaby and Goodnight. 7 November 2008.
End Notes
1. I suspect it already was in tradition in some of the camps where the song was treated as an open-ended song sung slowly in the evening.
2. Pete Seeger. "Kumbaya." Pete Seeger Live '57. Goldenland Records MP3. 2013. Thomas Stern identified this tape as a performance for the Folklore Society of the University of Chicago, 13 October 1957. (Reply to query "Pete Seeger Live '57". Mudcat Café website, 2 May 2016.)
3. Pete Seeger. "Kum Ba Ya" in "Goofing Off Suite." Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry. Folkways Records FA2412. Carnegie Hall, 27 December 1957; released 1958.
4. Their version was discussed in the post for 3 October 2017.
5. "Kumbaya." 156-158 in The Weavers Song Book. Edited by Ronnie Gilbert with musical arrangements by Robert De Cormier. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. 156. This transcription was the one used for this post. They had to have heard Seeger’s version with sleeping; they could not have reproduced his form from hearing a single word.
6. Sandra E. Trehub, Anna M. Unyk, and Laurel J. Trainor. "Adults Identify Infant-Directed Music across Cultures." Infant Behavior and Development 16:193-211:1993. Summarized by Sandra E. Trehub and Laurel Trainor. "Singing to Infants: Lullabies and Play Songs." Advances in Infancy Research 12:43-77:1998. 58.
7. Trehub, Adults. Discussed by Anna M. Unyk, Sandra E. Trehub, Laurel J. Trainor, and E. Glenn Schellenberg. "Lullabies and Simplicity: A Cross-Cultural Perspective." Psychology of Music 20:15-28:1992. 19.
8. Trehub, Adults. Unyk, Simplicity. 17.
9. Unyk, Simplicity. 19.
10. Unyk, Simplicity. 23.
11. Unyk, Simplicity. 24.
12. C-E-G-G-G-A-A-G. Arc in bold.
13. C-E-G-G-G-F-E-D. Descent in bold.
14. F-E-C-D-D-C. Base note in bold.
15. Unyk did list all the recordings.
16. "Lullaby and Goodnight by Heidi Cope." CD Baby website.
17. Lori W. Director, Children’s World Center. CD Baby website.
18. Phyllis B. Director, Mountainside Montessori. CD Baby website.
19. Erin Carole Patterson. "The Effect of Lullaby Music versus Rain Sounds on Inducing Sleep in the First 20 Minutes of Daycare Naptime." Master’s thesis. Florida State University, 2011. 19.
20. Patterson. 20.
21. Patterson was a music major, not a science one. She believed repetitive sound was a critical factor and wanted to determine if the sounds of rain were as effective as lullabies. Given the logistics of fieldwork, she may not have been able to observe the infants before her experiment. However, it would have helped if she had talked with the teachers about what they normally did and asked to see any CDs they were using.
22. BuckMulligan. Mudcat Café website. "Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?" Thread begun 16 February 2008. Comment added 19 February 2008.
23. Nancy King. Mudcat Café website. "Holding Hands and Singing ‘Kumbaya’." Thread begun 29 January 2007. Comment added 7 January 2007.
24. mj. 31 August 2006. Comment on Eric Zorn. "Someone’s dissin’, Lord, kumbaya." Chicago Tribune website. 31 August 2006.
Pete Seeger probably was the first commercial performer to use the "sleeping" verse with "Kumbaya." [1] He was singing it in Chicago in 1957. [2] When he recorded the song in a Carnegie Hall concert in December of that year the people in the audience already knew the verse. [3]
The Weavers were responsible for the popular perception of "Kumbaya" as a lullaby. [4] In 1958, they said: "It came to us as a song supposedly from Africa, and it only had one word. The pretty tune suggested that it might be a lullaby, so we added a few lines to make it that." [5]
What it was about the melody that signaled lullaby is a conundrum. Ontario researchers presented a sample of songs from "several regions of the world" to university students and asked them which were the lullabies in matched sets of adult and infant songs. They made sure each pair was the same tempo, since they knew if they did not, people would select the slower. 63% were able to identify the lullabies. [6]
More interesting were the error patterns. Some 85% were able to recognize lullabies from Ireland, Czechoslovakia, the Creek, and Pygmies. Nearly all had problems identifying infant songs from Chad, Ecuador, Samoa, and Ukraine. [7]
When Sandra Trehub’s team obscured the voices, most could no longer identify the lullabies on musical traits alone. The researchers thought the tone of voice was a determining factor. The students said their criteria were simplicity and repetitiveness. [8]
Repetition was easy to define, and certainly characterized "Kumbaya." The AAAB line pattern was mirrored by an AA1AB melody. The lines were broken into statements and refrains, with only the statements changing from stanza to stanza. The refrains constituted the final B lines. Melodically, the statement phrases all used the same musical pattern; only the refrains on the A lines distinguished the second line from the first and third.
Simplicity was harder to define scientifically. In a followup study, the group made tapes of pairs of adult and infant songs from thirty cultures, making sure many were non-western. This time they simply asked students which ones were simpler. In most cases, the simpler ones were the lullabies, and again people were consistent in their mistakes. [9]
Anna Unyk transcribed the songs, and classified them by musical attrbutes the group thought might signify simplicity. A computer then compared the traits against the student identifications. The attributes related to the tone of voice were not significant. They speculated that might have been because they field recordings of lullabies were not done with infants present. [10]
The purely musical attributes that did correlate with the lullabies students thought were simpler were the higher numbers of descending phrases and fewer changes in melodic direction. When compared with the adult songs, the median pitches were higher. [11]
"Kumbaya" relied on musical phrases with one change of direction. The A lines initially ascended through a triad, and repeated the top note several times in the statement, before rising slightly and descending in the refrain. [12] The second, A1, line used the same broken chord for the statement, but descended in the refrain. [13] The final line undulated around the base note of the chord. [14]
The team did not define high, and did not publish musical details on the songs they used [15] so it was impossible to know if "Kumbaya" would have been considered a higher or a lower song. Its standard range was from middle C to the orchestra’s A. The Weavers’ version was one tone higher, from D to B.
The only other change The Weavers made to the melody was to simplify it by altering the Xxx rhythm to some form of Xx. They sang the A lines in 3/2 and the B lines in 2/2 or 2/4. As for the tempo, they simply said they used "lullaby tempo."
The words they added were probably what cemented its linkage with a lullaby. They changed the pronoun "someone" to nature nouns, one of which, moon, was associated with the evening. Heidi Cope’s version dropped The Weavers’ trees verse and expanded the night symbols. Her moon was shining while her stars were twinkling. Her final verses were even more specific: the penultimate was baby’s sleeping, and the last was a series of uh’s.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Heidi Cope, soprano
Vocal Group: none
Vocal Director: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: harp
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Amazon
(C) 2008 Heidi Cope
CD Baby [16]
© Copyright - Cope Productions
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: koom bye yah, with slight emphasis on second syllable
Verses: kumbaya/moon/stars/sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: moon, stars, baby
Term for Deity: none, used "oh"
Special Terms: nature images
Basic Form: five-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: repeated last line of "oh" verse
Unique Features: use of vocables
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: repetition with variations in ornamentation and accompaniment
Singing Style: Cope altered the melody in one line of the second verse, changed the key in the third, and used glissandi in the fourth and fifth iterations.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: the harp was subdued. It played arpeggios between the phrases of the first and second verses. In the stars verse, the style changed to a tinkling on the word "twinkling." In the fourth verse, the playing more resembled a keyboard instrument.
Notes on Performance
CD cover was plain lavender with a anthropomorphic yellow quarter moon and some scattered stars. The moon had closed eyes and a smile.
Cope assumed an audience that could understand the words, and would be bored by simple repetition. The testimonials she published suggested she sent copies to daycare centers for use during after-lunch rest periods.
One director wrote: "We use this in our nap rooms. It is wonderfully soothing music." [17]
A Montessori owner echoed: "We are enjoying Lullaby and Goodnight and it truly works at naptime. Thank you!!" [18]
Daycare centers are noisy places, even during their rest periods. Erin Carole Patterson noted in ones she visited in Florida it never really was quiet. The facilities’ layouts meant teachers and others had to walk through nap areas to get from one place to another. Other disruptions included "children being picked up by parents, construction outside the building, sick children." [19] and changes to the schedule that altered start times. [20]
She experimented with playing a Disney instrumental lullaby CD and one with rain sounds to see if simly masking the noise would help the children fall asleep. The lullaby worked best the first day, but once the children were used to both CDs, they fell asleep faster with the rain sounds. She had no control group to give her information about how quickly they would have napped with nothing to calm them. [21]
Audience Perceptions
Several participants in on-line forums have commented on "Kumbaya" as a lullaby. Echoing The Weavers, one wrote: "Kumbaya is, after all, a luulaby, not a protest song." [22]
Another responded, "I don’t think I’ve heard it sung for at least 32 years. I can remember singing it then because it makes a great lullabye, and I sang it to both my kids." [23]
A third told readers to "think of Kumbaya stripped of words. The rhythm and melody invite (almost compel) gentle rocking and swaying -- like a lullaby. Humans of any age will always need that from time to time." [24]
Notes on Performers
No information available.
Availability
CD: Lullaby and Goodnight. 7 November 2008.
End Notes
1. I suspect it already was in tradition in some of the camps where the song was treated as an open-ended song sung slowly in the evening.
2. Pete Seeger. "Kumbaya." Pete Seeger Live '57. Goldenland Records MP3. 2013. Thomas Stern identified this tape as a performance for the Folklore Society of the University of Chicago, 13 October 1957. (Reply to query "Pete Seeger Live '57". Mudcat Café website, 2 May 2016.)
3. Pete Seeger. "Kum Ba Ya" in "Goofing Off Suite." Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry. Folkways Records FA2412. Carnegie Hall, 27 December 1957; released 1958.
4. Their version was discussed in the post for 3 October 2017.
5. "Kumbaya." 156-158 in The Weavers Song Book. Edited by Ronnie Gilbert with musical arrangements by Robert De Cormier. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. 156. This transcription was the one used for this post. They had to have heard Seeger’s version with sleeping; they could not have reproduced his form from hearing a single word.
6. Sandra E. Trehub, Anna M. Unyk, and Laurel J. Trainor. "Adults Identify Infant-Directed Music across Cultures." Infant Behavior and Development 16:193-211:1993. Summarized by Sandra E. Trehub and Laurel Trainor. "Singing to Infants: Lullabies and Play Songs." Advances in Infancy Research 12:43-77:1998. 58.
7. Trehub, Adults. Discussed by Anna M. Unyk, Sandra E. Trehub, Laurel J. Trainor, and E. Glenn Schellenberg. "Lullabies and Simplicity: A Cross-Cultural Perspective." Psychology of Music 20:15-28:1992. 19.
8. Trehub, Adults. Unyk, Simplicity. 17.
9. Unyk, Simplicity. 19.
10. Unyk, Simplicity. 23.
11. Unyk, Simplicity. 24.
12. C-E-G-G-G-A-A-G. Arc in bold.
13. C-E-G-G-G-F-E-D. Descent in bold.
14. F-E-C-D-D-C. Base note in bold.
15. Unyk did list all the recordings.
16. "Lullaby and Goodnight by Heidi Cope." CD Baby website.
17. Lori W. Director, Children’s World Center. CD Baby website.
18. Phyllis B. Director, Mountainside Montessori. CD Baby website.
19. Erin Carole Patterson. "The Effect of Lullaby Music versus Rain Sounds on Inducing Sleep in the First 20 Minutes of Daycare Naptime." Master’s thesis. Florida State University, 2011. 19.
20. Patterson. 20.
21. Patterson was a music major, not a science one. She believed repetitive sound was a critical factor and wanted to determine if the sounds of rain were as effective as lullabies. Given the logistics of fieldwork, she may not have been able to observe the infants before her experiment. However, it would have helped if she had talked with the teachers about what they normally did and asked to see any CDs they were using.
22. BuckMulligan. Mudcat Café website. "Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?" Thread begun 16 February 2008. Comment added 19 February 2008.
23. Nancy King. Mudcat Café website. "Holding Hands and Singing ‘Kumbaya’." Thread begun 29 January 2007. Comment added 7 January 2007.
24. mj. 31 August 2006. Comment on Eric Zorn. "Someone’s dissin’, Lord, kumbaya." Chicago Tribune website. 31 August 2006.
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