Mothertune
BEGINNER’S EAR | 5.9.21
My earliest musical memory is of my mother singing. Most nights she would set up her ironing board outside my room and sing: German folk songs about the moon and the mist rising over the woods, songs about the spendthrift richness of God’s creation; walking songs about the pleasures of hiking through grass sparkling with dew. As I grew sleepy, the sound of her clear, steady soprano was as reassuring as the smell of hot cotton and the light filtering in under my door.
As I grew older she tried to get me to join in: not at night (nobody needed singing to sleep anymore), but as a way to pass the time while doing the dishes or sitting in traffic. By then I was perfectly able to carry a tune, could play the recorder, violin and piano. I would have been able to hold my own in one of the canons my mother was so fond of. But I refused. Singing by then seemed like an act of twee, mortifying self-exhibition.
My aversion to singing ran so deep that in college I once asked a professor to give me a zero on a sight-singing assignment rather than take a stab at the Schumann song that had been placed in front of me. A few moments earlier I had completed the recital part of my exam, and I was terrified that my accompanist might still be within earshot and hear me croak.
Something changed the morning after I gave birth to my first child. A nurse ushered me into a room just large enough to hold a photocopying machine and a chair, plonked my infant into my arms and told me to feed her. This was Jerusalem, and there had been so many deliveries during the night that I had slept in a corridor with dozens of other new mothers.
Now I was alone with my daughter for the first time and I felt frightfully unqualified. I wanted to apologize to her. Instead, I began to sing. As I maneuvered her tiny mouth into position, I found myself humming a tune from a recording of Mexican baroque music I been listening to on repeat. As the looping melody wove a spell around both of us, I began to relax. She began to drink.
In the first month of her life, I sang that tune over and over. Other songs followed, as did two more children. My repertoire grew to encompass my mother’s folk songs along with “Hey Jude,” snippets of Mozart, and a calypso song about an anthropomorphic donkey that our Grenadian nanny taught us. When one of my kids got hurt I chanted the same incantation about rain and the sunshine that follows that generations of German mothers have sung while bandaging boo-boos.
I have to confess: the way I tell the story isn’t 100% true. I did sing a fair amount in my teens and twenties. I even kind of enjoyed it. I just made sure no-one could hear me.
So motherhood didn’t suddenly unmute me. But it provided me with a purpose for singing that had nothing to do with me being heard. Singing has become just another way to deliver love, sleep or healing. I don’t fret whether my hugs are good enough to share, either — so why hold back?
Corinna
For anyone in need of a hug, here is a bedtime playlist with that Mexican baroque number, a heartbreakingly beautiful lullaby in Yiddish by the great Anna Netrebko, and a choral setting of Matthias Claudius’ Evening Song. (This English translation is amazingly close to the beautiful original poem.)
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Image: ‘Singing Madonna’ by Brian Kershisnick