“A dormir, a soñar, sueña dulce cometa que nos vamos de paseo por las nubes de algodón…”

I’m sure you can hum along to this melody. This was a song I grew up hearing in English but most recently I heard sung in Spanish during my time working with infants in Puerto Rico.

“Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep my little baby…”

Perhaps you heard this version, this was the one I grew up listening to. Maybe you know it best as…

“Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht, mit Näglein besteckt, schlupf′ unter die Deck!”

Brahms Lullaby.

It’s interesting how most people can hum along to this melody, or perhaps even sing the lyrics the way that their caregivers have done so in the past. Almost everybody you ask has a different version of this song. Why does this resonate with so many? How come I can sing this song to babies in Puerto Rico and also babies in Germany? When you ask anyone about this song, they will immediately agree that it is soothing and/or reminds them of their childhood. As a Music Therapy student I was curious to answer these questions.

In an article written from the perspective of musicologists, and developmental and comparative psychologists titled, “The Origins of Music: Innateness, Uniqueness, and Evolution” by McDermott and Hauser, I found some of my answers. The musical structure of lullabies are catered to what babies tend to give attention and seem happier to. For uses of comparison, it is the difference of infant-directed speech and regular speech. When babies come into a world filled with overstimulating sensory experiences, they don’t yet know how to differentiate or focus on one specific thing. If you sit down to think about all the lullabies from your youth, you’ll probably realize that:

1. There is a simple repeated melody across the entirety of the song
2. Intervals are kept to steps of thirds, seconds or fifths.
3. There is an abundance of descending notes or intervals.
4. The tempo is slow.

However, experts in music development argue that music traditions are reliant on the nature of ones upbringing and that atonal music can sound normalized to those who are used to it. Although this is true, the structural integrity of our brains and the way our ears are formed beg for consonance as heard in nature. The sounds humans have been normalized to are based on the way our ears have been structured through evolution and thus structured through nature.

It might be interesting to do further research on the question of differences in nature worldwide. Not everyone grows up with the Amazon forest in their backyard or the icy hilltops of the Himalayas. Nature sounds are different depending on where we grow up and yet lullabies such as Brahms Lullaby still seems to capture infants attention.

To quote one of my favorite composers,

Perhaps many of the perplexing problems of the new music could be put into a new light if we were to reintroduce the ancient idea of music being a reflection of nature. -George Crumb

I feel the sudden urge to go write a lullaby now…