July 2007

The Lullaby Project Records Songs of Love

By Cheryl Murfin Bond

Rock-a-bye baby
in the treetop
when the wind blows
the cradle will rock
when the bough breaks
the cradle will fall
and down will come baby
cradle and all…

It’s not the most comforting image. The wind-whipped bough cracking, that little cradle and its occupant falling to the ground. But neither is the spider washed away in a torrent of rain. And what about the poor kid whose mother keeps giving him broken gifts … the songless mockingbird, the tarnished diamond ring?

So how is it that the popular lullabies with these lyrics, and similar ones from every corner of the world, have been lulling little ones to sleep for as long as any of us and our grandmothers can remember?

Seattle resident Masguda Shamsutdinova has a theory.

“Lullaby comfort is not in words,” says Shamsutdinova, a Russian-born and trained composer and former professor of ethnomusicology who has collected and recorded more than 200 “berceuse,” or lullabies, in the last year.

“Lullaby’s magic is in mother’s sound. It is in her voice, and in the calm that is first created in her own body. In singing her lullaby, mother creates a rhythm of love and calm in herself first, and then gives that to her child.”

That said, Shamsutdinova believes there is a more primal reason so many lullabies contain disturbing images (often followed by heroic interventions on the part of mothers).

“In the lullaby, mother and child pass through all of evolution together. They experience all the stages of humanity as she sings – fear, sorrow, joy, affection . . . love. The song shows baby that mother will protect him. It is trust,” says Shamsutdinova, whose tiny Queen Anne apartment is home to the Lullaby Project, her tireless effort to collect and record lullabies from more than 50 countries. Her overriding goal is to document and record as many American lullabies as possible. The apartment is also home to her husband and two sons – now university students – whom she lulled to sleep with triple-meter song.

Shamsutdinova calls the Lullaby Project her “gift of love.”

“I’ve collected lullabies that will be lost if I don’t do this,” she says. “More than 200 people in this country have sent me their lullabies – they have sung to me as if I were their child … sung to me with such love. I don’t know who loves this country more than I with the love they have breathed on me. So I must create this love for others. I must do this.”

From Grand Music Halls to the Halls of Harborview

The first chords of the Lullaby Project came to Shamsutdinova while standing in front of a stainless steel sink at Harborview Medical Center, where she had worked as a dishwasher since immigrating to the United States in 2002.

Shamsutdinova graduated from Kazan State Conservatoire in the Republic of Tatarstan and spent the next 20 years composing and researching folk music and tatar culture. She has written four symphonies and has composed music for television, dance companies and theater. She received a doctorate from St. Petersburg State University, where she focused on the culture and folklore of Islamic music and art.

She found herself in the “musical laboratory” of Harborview’s main kitchen for the same reason that many immigrants who have reached the pinnacles of achievement in their homelands find themselves in labor-intensive jobs in America: She spoke little English when she arrived in Seattle.

While Shamsutdinova says she doesn’t know any composers in her country who wash dishes to make ends meet (the state pays them), her placement at Harborview was fortuitous. The environment of the public hospital, she says, was a perfect setting for a musicologist. With its whirl of sounds and constant murmur of different languages, the kitchen and hallways are alive with culture and the noise of life.

Being in the hospital also heightened her interest in music as a healing tool.
“Something about lullabies was always ringing in my head,” she says. She had a gut feeling that lullabies might have a healing or calming impact on people in pain or those with sleep disorders. In fact, Harborview’s sleep disorder program may use her recordings in a pilot program to study lullabies’ impact on sleep.

Songs from All Over

Shamsutdinova started her Lullaby Project by recording lullabies of co-workers at Harborview. Then she took to the streets and interviewed homeless people. In her desire to reach as many people as possible, she sometimes considers the option of standing outside downtown buildings to survey people coming and going. Over Memorial Day Weekend, she set up a recording shop at the Folklife Festival at Seattle Center, and invited people young and old to share their lullabies. Her efforts have been written up in Seattle newspapers and aired on National Public Radio’s Weekend America show.

She has been overwhelmed by the strong emotional memory people have around lullabies and how important sharing them has been to many people she has met.

“One woman came to me and shared such a beautiful lullaby. Afterward, she was in tears. She said she could die now because her family’s lullaby was in good hands,” Shamsutdinova says. So far she has collected lullabies sung by immigrants from Haiti, India and countries all over Europe and Asia. Some of those she has collected are versions of well-known songs, changed by a specific family. Others were made up altogether by a mother for a specific child.

Shamsutdinova has found that lullabies, no matter their history, have several things in common. They seem to replicate in tone or timing the “shhhhhh” sounds of the womb. They tend to be slow and quiet in tune and are constructed in a minor-third interval. They lend themselves to a rocking motion of the body. Their magic is not dependent on their musicality.

“I had one mother come to me and she said ‘My mother used to sing this lullaby out of tune and so I sing it out of tune, and when I hear something out of tune, it is like music to my ears,’” she says. “So the magic is not the music, either. It’s something in how the mother is.”

The Innate Call to Sing

She uses mother almost exclusively when discussing the passing of lullabies from one generation to the next, although she recognizes that children are charmed by lullabies no matter the singer. But for a mother, she believes, the need to create a unique song or assume a traditional lullaby for calming a baby, is innate.

“When a woman creates a child, everything sings in her,” she says. “Women have sung their babies to sleep from all time.”

What makes a lullaby different from any other song? Shamsutdinova says the difference is in direction. Almost all music is directed outward, to a public. Her symphonies, ballets and other compositions have an audience in mind, she says. They are written for a general public.

“The lullaby is sung by one person for one person. It is a ritual sharing of love,” she says.

It is the ritual that connects generations of women and children. Shamsutdinova gets a smile when she recalls her own mother singing her to sleep. She used the same lullaby for her children:

“Sleep my Baby, a twinkle of my pupil,
In your dreams you’ll fly to the Sky
on little horses with silver hooves.
You will bring to your mother a lot of Stars.”

“I am a mother. Even though I am a composer, I am first a mother who sang lullabies,” she says. “I sang to motive my sons to do great things.”

Shamsutdinova no longer works at Harborview. But a hospital spokeswoman says Harborview remains supportive of the Lullaby Project, calling Shamsutdinova an “amazing former employee with an incredible personal story of immigration and artistic triumph.”

She continues to add to her collection daily, and hopes to garner even greater public support for the project. Extremely proud of her new home country, she says she will continue to collect and protect lullabies sung in America.

“This lullaby collection will survive, and it will say on my gravestone, ‘She had this project and it was her gift to America.’”

The Story’s Not Over

Like most lullabies, Rock-a-bye Baby doesn’t leave us hanging with the fallen cradle. It may date from the 1600s, and goes on through all the emotions of human connection in its last official verses:

Baby is drowsing
Cosy and fair
Mother sits near
In her rocking chair
Forward and back
The cradle she swings
And though baby sleeps
He hears what she sings

From the high rooftops
Down to the sea
No one’s as dear
As baby to me
Wee little fingers
Eyes wide and bright
Now sound asleep
Until morning light

To Share Your Lullaby: Contact Masguda Shamsutdinova through her Web site, www.tatars.com. (Click on “Feedback.”)

Cheryl Murfin Bond is a Seattle-area writer and the director of the Seattle Midwifery School.

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