Lullabies

On the basis of a qualitative study  of 20 Norwegian lullaby-­‐singing parents, this article  explores the human Bildung potential  of parents’ lullaby singing  to their children at bedtime. Some parents may experience a personal re-awakening when singing as they more easily can express themselves openly and rich and get in contact with emotional layers of their own childhood. Secondly, the act may afford a sort of “musical mindfulness" - a unique as well as collective mindful and  calm  self-­‐with other-­‐cultivation.

Silencing doesn’t always refer to the removal of sound; it can also refer to the overwriting of a narrative or a recontextualization of events. Instead of removing a narrative – censorship that then leaves a gap to be questioned – changing the dialogue, inserting a new narrative, or changing the circumstances of remembering the events in question can reshape, obscure or even erase memories or associations of trauma.
Consider, for example, the juxtaposition of lullabies and trauma in Disney films, specifically “Aloha Oe” in Lilo and Stitch, “Baby Mine” from Dumbo, and “You’ll Be in My Heart” from Tarzan. All three of these lullabies are situated in these films in the context of some sort of physical or emotional violence or trauma: in Tarzan the song helps to re-establish a sense of home after the audience witnesses the death of the eponymous character’s human parents; in Dumbo the lullaby recontextualizes the rather violent situation of the caged/enslaved elephants; and “Aloha Oe” is sung by Nani to Lilo in Lilo and Stitch to soften the trauma of their family being broken up by a government agency. 
However, music from Disney soundtracks exists both within the context of the films and outside of it: they are decontextualized as part of compilation albums, lullaby albums, played on the radio, and are incorporated into children’s choir and school concerts. Memory of music is complicated, and as Disney often plays lullabies over very sad moments, it is important to examine how the songs function in different spaces both within and outside of the films, and how the viewer then constructs meaning in between these varied contexts.
As these songs are featured elsewhere, the songs become removed from the association they have with their particular placement in the films, and the connotations associated with them change. In effect, we can see through these instances, not only how music might shape perception and memory, but also, how memory of trauma or violence can be obscured.

Lullabies serve two functions: lulling infants to sleep, and calming those too irritable to sleep. The younger the child, the more the development of the ear defines which sounds work: lowpitched or normal, vocal or instrumental, male or female, spoken or sung. While the purpose is universal, attempts to define the genre's musical and textual traits fail for several reasons. First, lullabies are sung in private to infants, but folklorists usually collect them in public places without the distractions of crying children. Second, unless they heard lullabies sung to younger siblings, individuals do not remember their own lullabies; the first songs they recall are those for toddlers. Third, by the time the ear has fully developed an infant has begun absorbing the musical aesthetics of his or her culture. Industrialized and urbanized societies are less tolerant of the demands for lulling than traditional ones, and substitute more mechanical devices like narcotics, sound machines, and compact discs that repeat all night. This essay examines The Weavers' contribution to the perception that "Kumbaya" is a lullaby, before reviewing some versions uploaded to YouTube and Amazon.

Throughout history, gender has directed roles and actions in life. Lullabies and femininity come together through the biological role of child-bearer, and the societal role of caregiver to the extent that femininity and motherhood are often embedded into and implicit within lullaby singing. These attributes strongly support the assumption that lullabies are traditionally a form of feminine practice and narrative discourse. This article acknowledges the woman’s voice within lullabies as well as the flexibility of the narrator’s identity. Through textual analysis of several Irish traditional lullabies, more diverse and ambiguous narrator identities are considered, broadening perceptions of the caregiver and helping to move the lullaby beyond strict associations with single-gender and maternal caregiving.

En este capítulo se defiende la idea de que la canción de cuna tradicional es, estrictamente, el primer contacto de los niños portugueses y españoles (y quizá de casi todos los niños) con el mundo del arte verbo-musical; un mundo que les llega por la vía auditivo-literaria y los coloca, ya en la vida fetal, en el centro mismo de un proceso de construcción de afectividades, identidades y sentimientos estéticos.
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This chapter argues that traditional lullaby is, strictly speaking, the first contact between Portuguese and Spanish children (and perhaps among almost all children) in the world of verbal-musical art, a world that reaches them through the auditory and literary pathways, and places them, even while they are still in the womb, at the very center of a process of construction of affections, identities and aesthetic feelings.

Estonian folk lullabies belong to the common heritage of Baltic-Finnic runosong tradition. The article surveys the older layer of lullaby recordings that are kept in the Estonian Folk Archive, in order to throw light on the essence of Estonian lullabies. The history of collecting lullabies, their content, form, performance and use will be discussed. The author concludes that performed lullabies were created by combining the traditional elements on the one hand, and improvised, situation-based elements on the other. Archived recordings represent mostly the more stable, traditional parts of lullabies. Nevertheless, several features of the corpus indicate the importance of improvisation in the performance of traditional lullabies.

U ovom radu smo se bavili konceptom deteta u uspavankama. Teorijski okvir analize čini teorija govornih činova. Utvrđeno je da se govorni čin uspavljivanja javlja kao najbrojniji makročin cele uspavanke, ali se javljaju i drugi performativi (pre svega naredba), ali i sami konstativi. Koncept deteta je analiziran kroz ilokuciju uspavljivača – reprezentovanu sa jedne strane potrebom da se dete zaštiti, a sa druge strane željama upućenim detetu, ali i kroz sam čin obraćanja detetu. Kako je cilj rada bio uporediti pogled na dete i detinjstvo nekada i sada, kao građa su korištene narodne (usmene) uspavanke, odnosno savremene umetničke uspavanke. Analiza ukazuje na promenu u posmatranju deteta u odnosu na prošlost, što bi se moglo objasniti promenom društvenog uređenja, ali i podizanjem starosne granice deteta kojem je uspavanka upućena.

[In this paper, we dealt with the concept of a child in lullabies. As a theoretical framework of the analysis, we used the theory of speech acts. It was found that the speech act of putting a child to sleep appears as the most frequent macroact of the whole lullaby, but also that there are other performatives (primarily commands), as well as constatives. The concept of a child is analyzed through illocution of the one who puts them to sleep – represented by the need to protect the child, on one hand, and through directing wishes to the child, on the other, but also through the very act of addressing the child itself. Since the goal of this study was to compare the concepts of child and childhood then and now (in the past and in the present), as the corpus we used both folk (oral) and contemporary lullabies. The analysis indicates a shift in the perception of children through the course of time, which could be explained by changes in the social organization, but also by the increase in the age of the child to whom a lullaby is directed.]

La  poesía  infantil  es  un  género  literario  con  características  propias,  tanto  en  su  forma  como  en  su  contenido,  que  cumple  una  función social de gran importancia en todas las  culturas.  En  este  estudio  se  presenta,  en  primer  lugar,  un  análisis  de  las  características  fundamentales  de  la  poesía  infantil  de  tradición  oral  sefardí.  La  segunda  parte  del  artículo  está  dedicada  al  estudio  de  las  nanas  y  las  canciones  infantiles  compuestas  por  dos  autoras  contemporáneas,  Beatriz  Mazliah  y  Ada  Gattegno  Saltiel,  quienes  escriben poesía infantil en judeoespañol en un momento  en  que  esta  lengua  se  encuentra  cercana a la extinción. Se plantea entonces la
pregunta de cuál es el significado cultural de escribir poesía infantil en una lengua que ya no hablan los niños.

Abstract: This essay examines  the poetic production connected to the occasion of the symposium (seventh ‒ fifth cent. BCE), a production that underwent different stages of submersion determined by diverse cultural and political factors, and further examines the lullaby as a different type of monodic poetry, composed by and large by women. The author argues that lullabies are a perpetually emergent typology of text on the synchronic level, due to the recursive nature of their compositional occasion, and explores the dynamics which conversely resulted in the total submersion of the individual texts on the diachronic level, partly due to the failure to secure their written transmission.

The paper deals with the peculiarities of functioning of sound iconic words in folklore for children in the Finno-Ugric languages. The author defines sound iconic vocabulary and its subclasses, discusses its primary function in text and the difference between folklore of children and folklore for children. Further we present the results of the research of sound iconic words and refrains in lullabies and discusses their origin and etymology. Furthermore the usage of sound iconic words in nursery rhymes (pestushki and poteshki) is discussed. In these genres we can find both unusual and specific sound iconic/refrain words.

Published in: Иванов В.А. Изобразительная лексика в фольклоре для детей (на материале финно-угорских языков) // Сибирский филологический журнал. 2018. №3. С. 206-221.

Traditional lullabies comprise the most widespread repertoire of Yiddish functional songs. The traditional corpus was most likely consolidated during the eighteenth century at the latest, and despite its dissemination throughout Eastern Europe, it comprised only a handful of textual formulas and a dozen melodies. In some aspects traditional Yiddish lullabies resemble Eastern Slavic ones, and yet several prominent characteristics distinguish the Jewish repertoire from neighboring counterparts. These are the dominance of the music over the words, clear affinity to the Ashkenazi-German heritage, and a circumscribed set of functions. By virtue of its poetic and musical specificity, the traditional Yiddish lullaby became emblematic of East European Jewry in the eyes of maskilim already in the second half of the nineteenth century, concomitantly with the rise of modern Jewish national consciousness. In that period, songs of literary origin seeped into the folkloric repertoire.
While resonating with traditional patterns, these newer songs reflected contemporary fashions, in poetry as well as music. Thus, even folklorized lullabies of literary origin bore a recognizable ideological function and targeted enlightened Jews, in that their phraseology and imagery conveyed either socialist messages or the ideals of the proto-Zionist movement Ḥibbat Zion [Love of Zion]. Indeed, during the twentieth century, many of these new Yiddish lullabies were translated into Hebrew, becoming folk songs in turn. Traditional lullabies, however, remained different: their addressee was still the baby, and their words and tunes served the three traditional functions of the genre in Jewish society – soothing, safeguarding, and initiation.

The lullaby is considered as a distinct and stable genre in folk music. Unlike the ritual hymns, which are perhaps the oldest in the history of music, the lullaby or cradle-song can be described as one of the first pillars of secular singing oral tradition. In ancient times, lullabies were born from primitive onomatopoeia and ideophonic words which received melodic rhythmic tone. On one hand, they were used as blessing songs dedicated to the child, and on the other hand they also had a practical purpose to create a relaxing atmosphere for the child and to lull him to sleep.

Along with the development of the society and the lifestyle, lullabies have undergone significant changes. By  eveloping and acquiring new features, the many varieties of lullabies often have received a much greater content and style than being merely a song bouquet of wishes and blessings sung to the child. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we find examples of lullabies, which somehow carry the influence of other folklore genres. In many lullabies, song elements belonging to historical, lament, love, and other genres can be distinguished. In this paper, an attempt is made to identify the above-mentioned strata that were originally spurious to the very essence of lullabies and are actually the result of the impact of various genres.

The study shows that the interaction and interpenetration of different music folklore genres in Armenian folk lullabies have been expressed in different ways: through wandering plots and thematic mergers, through the use of already created melodies, and from the result of women’s multifunctional work. These elements have a noticeable impact on certain lines and images, as well as on the melody originated from them.

On the basis of a qualitative study of 20 Norwegian lullaby-singing parents, this article explores the human Bildung potential of parents’ lullaby singing to their children at bedtime. Some parents may experience a personal re awakening when singing as they more easily can express themselves openly and rich and get in contact with emotional layers of their own childhood. Secondly, the act may afford a sort of “musical mindfulness”, which is a unique as well as collective mindful and calm self-with-other-cultivation. The lullaby singing then becomes an important part of the forming and exploring of the parent-child intimate and social relationship through a musical journey that facilitates the creation and sharing of a personal family signature and convivial atmosphere. Parents’ singing also fosters children’s love of music and singing. The children may also experience and learn about the language of intimacy, self-regulation, sensitive timing and musical taste through their parents’...

La poesía infantil es un género literario con características propias, tanto en su forma como en su contenido, que cumple una función social de gran importancia en todas las culturas. En este estudio se presenta, en primer lugar, un análisis de las características fundamentales de la poesía infantil de tradición oral sefardí. La segunda parte del artículo está consagrada al estudio de las nanas y las canciones infantiles compuestas por dos autoras contemporáneas, Beatriz Mazliah y Ada Gattegno Saltiel, quienes escriben poesía infantil en judeoespañol en un momento en que esta lengua se encuentra cercana a la extinción. Se plantea entonces la pregunta de cuál es el significado cultural de escribir poesía infantil en una lengua que ya no hablan los niños.

In its simplest form, the lullaby is a song for soothing, “a vocal piece de- signed to lull a child to sleep, with repeated formulae” (Porter 2017). The genre is spread across cultures and contexts, with common characteristics including simple, descending melodic lines, a narrow pitch range, ballad fragments, repeated non-lexical syllables, terms of endearment, and refrains. These characteristics also spread into many other genres of song, leading to their classi!cation as lullabies, in some cases.

L. Verderame, «Perché non dormi bambino?» Scongiuri babilonesi del II millennio per quietare un bambino,  in A.M.G. Capomacchia - E. Zocca, Antiche infanzie. Percezioni e gestione sacrale del bambino nelle culture del Mediterraneo e del Vicino Oriente (Quaderni di Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 25), Brescia, 20-31
In this article I deal with IInd millennium Mesopotamian incantations to sooth a baby. Four Babylonian incantations are hereby analysed and their structure and motives discussed. A translation of the texts is presented in the Appendix. Incantations to soothe a baby are often associated or directly identified with lullabies, with which they share the aim and some motives, but both show fundamental differences. In incantations, the restlessness of the baby is perceived as an element that disturbs human and superhuman beings of the house. The baby’s cry wakes up the gods of the house, whose wrath may cause harm to the house and their human inhabitants. Thus the baby is the noxious being the incantations aim at exorcising through menaces of evoking supernatural beings (Enkidu, kusarikku).

Lullabies are one of the genres of Armenian folk music. Their roots reach back to prehistoric times. This newly discovered recording presented here with its notation is notable both for its musical and poetic structures. Its melody is notable for its ornaments towards the tonic and it begins and ends with skips (fifth and fourth), which is characteristic of Armenian folk melodies. The poetic text stands out with its structure based on a dialogue between a child and a mother and the poetic text can be found in publications dated earlier than 1850. The versification and the expressive forms make us suppose that the poem is an urban creation.

"Ciara Thompson examines the genre of Irish lullabies. Though we might assume that lullabies epitomised the tenderness and care of an idealised mother-child relationship, Thompson argues for a more nuanced appreciation of the expressive function of the lullaby. While the musical conventions were intended to be soothing and soporific, to provide a sense of security and happiness, lullabies were also an outlet for mothers to express anxiety and worry. Lullabies contained lyrics about fear of disease, desertion, treats of child abduction, and otherworldly mischief. As Thompson argues, the Irish lullaby conveys the rich complexities of child-rearing and the fear and happiness which accompanied it. Lullabies served as a means of emotional expression and regulation - a way for parents, as well as children, to feel relaxed and secure." (Hatfield, 2021:11-12)

Chapter in the book "Children and Globalization - Multidisciplinary Perspectives", Routledge 2019. See link below for details about the book.
Abstract:
Among the greatest challenges in writing the history of childhood, especially in non-Western societies, is the paucity of primary sources, especially the scarcity of documents that reveal children’s perceptions. This chapter explores how Arabic lullabies and nursery rhymes can serve as window into the emotional world of mothers and children and make it possible not only to analyze shifting attitudes toward children and childhood in 19th-century Greater Syria but to lay bare aspects of life, including the texture of maternal-child relationships and emotional sensibilities, otherwise difficult to recover. The chapter identifies certain recurrent themes—including paternal absence, maternal suffering, mothers’ fraught relationship with their husbands’ families, and the challenges mothers faced in protecting their children from various threats to their well-being—that illuminate cultural attitudes toward the goals of parenting, contrasting attitudes toward children among urban middle-class and lower-class villagers and evolving standards of emotional expression.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429261633

Poetry  for  children  is  a  literary  genre  with  its  own  characteristics,  both  in  the  form  and  in  the  content,  which  plays  an  important social role in all cultures. Firstly, we propose an analysis of the main characteris-tics  of  poetry  for  children  in  the  Sephardic  oral tradition. The second part of the article is  devoted  to  the  study  of  the  lullabies  and  nursery rhymes composed by two contempo-rary  authors,  Beatriz  Mazliah  and  Ada  Gat-tegno  Saltiel,  who  write  poetry  for  children  in  Judeo-Spanish  in  a  moment  when  this  language  is  close  to  extinction.  The  ques-tion  asked  is  what  the  cultural  significance  of  writing  poetry  for  children  in  a  language  which is no longer spoken by children is.

  This clinical trial tested the pain relieving effect of live lullaby singing on behavioral and physiological pain responses during venepuncture in 38 preterm and full term neonates. Acute and repeated pain, as well as the use of analgesic drugs, may have long-term negative impact on infants’ development and future behaviour. This emphasizes the need for complementary approaches to pain management such as music therapy. Parent-preferred lullabies were performed live and standard care was provided for all neonates. Behavioral responses with regard to pain were assessed with Premature Infant Pain Profile-Revised (PIPP-R) and Behavioral Indicators of Infant Pain (BIIP). Heart rate, respiratory rate and oxygen saturation were measured each tenth second.Although the live lullaby singing did not show a statistically significant effect on the infants’ pain score, there was a significantly calmer breathing pattern in the lullaby intervention versus the control condition in the pre-needle s...

Mistral sigue teniendo una presencia fuerte en la identidad nacional chilena, pero el enfoque en la imagen de la poeta ha cambiado. En vez de ser vista como la madre asexuada y conservadora del régimen de Pinochet, ahora hay un entendimiento de Mistral como una mujer plena y sexual en busca de satisfacer sus propias necesidades. Mi objetivo principal es plantear una nueva posibilidad de lo que se considera como maternal desde un estudio de la maternidad cuir en la poesía y vida de Gabriela Mistral. Intento añadir al cuerpo crítico de lo que ya se ha estudiado respecto a la maternidad cuir mistraliana estudiando la presencia de la naturaleza en su poesía, específicamente el agua, la cual, a través de alusiones al movimiento, muestra un deseo de escape. Mi análisis se enfoca principalmente en la canción de cuna “Meciendo”, de Ternura, el segundo poemario de Mistral, publicado en 1924.

In this study, a collection of lullabies which have an important place in Turkish culture and which form an important genre in folk literature are examined to find out distribution and presentation of geographical terms in the lullabies in this collection. In the study, 2480 lullabies in Turkish Lullabies [10] which is one of the leading collections in Turkey and 1320 lullabies, which were still being collected when the study was conducted, have been examined. These lullabies were accepted as linguistic sample of the study. Content analysis and discourse analysis were used in the study. Lullabies were transformed to the computers, their word counts and lists have been obtained. Among these words, the one related to geography were grouped and content analysis was conducted. Later on, the lullabies were submitted to content analysis, and the researcher depicted how geographical terms were presented. Results of the study indicated that approximately 10% of the words in the lullabies are related to geography. The lullabies presented environmental and geographic information from immediate environment to remote environment and starting from concrete and experiences. In the respects, lullabies can be used as instructional materials to teach geography to children aged 0 to 6. It is suggested that lullabies should be collected, saved and used in education as primary source of information in linguistic development and in other fields in preschool period.

... Réflexion sur les enjeux éthiques de la collecte en ethnomusicologie. Frédéric Léotar. p. 27-43. ... Haut de page. Auteur. Frédéric Léotar. Frédéric LÉOTAR, après un doctorat obtenu à l'Université de Montréal (Ph. D), a achevé un post-doctorat à l'University of Alberta (2007-2009). ...

"Ciara Thompson examines the genre of Irish lullabies. Though we might assume that lullabies epitomised the tenderness and care of an idealised mother-child relationship, Thompson argues for a more nuanced appreciation of the expressive function of the lullaby. While the musical conventions were intended to be soothing and soporific, to provide a sense of security and happiness, lullabies were also an outlet for mothers to express anxiety and worry. Lullabies contained lyrics about fear of disease, desertion, treats of child abduction, and otherworldly mischief. As Thompson argues, the Irish lullaby conveys the rich complexities of child-rearing and the fear and happiness which accompanied it. Lullabies served as a means of emotional expression and regulation - a way for parents, as well as children, to feel relaxed and secure." (Hatfield, 2021:11-12)

Abstract: This essay examines the poetic production connected to the occasion of the symposium (seventh ‒ fifth cent. BCE), a production that underwent different stages of submersion determined by diverse cultural and political factors, and further examines the lullaby as a different type of monodic poetry, composed by and large by women. The author argues that lullabies are a perpetually emergent typology of text on the synchronic level, due to the recursive nature of their compositional occasion, and explores the dynamics which conversely resulted in the total submersion of the individual texts on the diachronic level, partly due to the failure to secure their written transmission.

The lullabies were examined from many scientific disciplines in Greece as the fixed result of a process in the past and of importance were at first the repertoire and the conceptual site of the speech in lullabies. The problem is that there was not studied the way that the lullabies affect on the infants. In this paper we examine the aural and perform site from lullabies, which are of most significance for the way these songs achieve their goals. Some results from the research in the psychology can be helpful in this direction. In the second part we focus our attention on a platonic text, where the philosopher tries to explain very detailed the influence of the lullabies. His main point is that the music in this case operates homoeopathic. This explanation seems to be justified in results from the modern science and in the all-day experience.