Sowash: "Lullabye for Kara” for cello and piano

A lullaby is exceptional among art forms insofar as it aims to induce its audience into a state of non-perception, to cease regarding it!  You’re not listening to music when you are asleep!

What other art form does this?  Imagine a poet writing stanzas with the explicit intention of making your eye lids seem to grow heavier and heavier as you read them.  Or a painter wishing to create canvasses that elicit somnolence to such an extent that couches and cots must be set up in the galleries where they are exhibited, along with comforters and pillows.  Or a play that means to have everyone snoring by intermission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2002, my graphic artist friends Randy and Michelle Wright asked me to write a lullaby for their newborn daughter, Kara.  If you have my CDs, you’ve seen Randy’s work; he designs my CDs and also my books.  (If you don’t have my CDs, say the word and I’ll send you a box of them, free.)

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

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

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

To hear cellist Jeff Schoyen and pianist Phil Amalong perform "Lullabye for Kara,” click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/lullabye_kara.mp3

To see the score, click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/lullabye_kara.pdf