Exploring Lullabies

“Rock-a-bye-baby, on the tree top,When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, And down will come baby, cradle and all”

There is something magical about a lullaby. The experience of listening to one is quite unlike anything else. It is almost impossible listening to one without responding to it with an emotion that one never fully understands. Even without knowing the words we know exactly what a lullaby intends, even if we are unable to put the words to that deep source of knowledge. 

On the face of it, lullabies soothe, comfort and lull the awake into sleep; indeed that is their essential function. They help babies feel protected and cocooned as they slip into the tender arms of sleep. Mothers envelop their little ones with a musical translation of the overwhelming and unconditional love they feel.

Why do they tremble with some deep indefinable sense of liquid melancholy? Why do they ache with a nameless yearning for things lost and things that cannot be found?

Think of a lullaby and you will be struck by a tinge of sweet sadness that accompanies it. Often the words too, like in the case of the all-time favourite - Rock-a-bye-baby, are less than soothing. Across cultures, the lullaby carries traces of sorrow, an imprint of some final and inconsolable incompleteness.

The purpose of a lullaby is anything but sad. The baby needs comforting and absolute protection from all sources of fear. The lullaby imitates the rocking motion of a cradle with simple repetitive phrases and basic melody. But unlike the nursery rhyme, where the melody produces little emotional effect, the lullaby infuses everyone listening with a powerful sense of longing.

In some ways perhaps the musical structure of lullabies in their desire to soothe, comes close to that of dirges. The slowness and tenderness of the tune makes it tinged with an unmistakable air of melancholia. In this sense, sadness is not intrinsic but merely a musical by product.

There is a sense of separation and the baby’s going away to distant lands that evokes a certain gloomy feeling, that is all the more powerful because it is not real.The lullaby is nothing but a song of the baby being cast adrift ever so slowly on the solitary journey called 'Life'. As adults when we hear this song, we are reminded what we have lost and what we can never hope to regain.

All of our lives we are driven to pursue the idea of individuality, of shining in our special separateness. The paradise of completeness has been lost to a quest for individualism. The lullaby draws us back, without our becoming quite aware of it, to the ideal we might truly desire, one where we are never singular, never incomplete.

The lullaby is a bridge to infinity of longing, and ode to the illusion of belonging. 

It tells what is the most beautiful and what makes us feel the purest emotions is also the most transient. 

The lullaby is a tender chronicle of life told in reverse.