“Music is love in search of a word.” ~ Colette
This post is dedicated to the memory of my father, who I lost to spinal cancer on January 25, 2007. My father, among other things, was a poet. He wrote and published some very poignant poems when he was a young man, and returned to writing when my mother died quite unexpectedly of a heart attack. There’s a comfort that comes from engaging in a creative activity that you love, especially if it helps you to cope when the worst things happen in your life. It can turn your sorrow into something beautiful.
In the last several months of his life, my father wrote numerous poems, and entered them
into a contest; he was quite disappointed when he didn’t win. At the time, I was editing a newsletter for music educators, which usually included a song or activity idea on the back page. I asked my father if he would compose a lullaby, and promised that it would be published. Dad rose to the challenge and wrote four stanzas, each about a sleepy little animal – a fish, a frog, a mouse and a bird. I loved the first two stanzas, but must confess that I made minor adjustments to the last two, partly to make the words flow more nicely with the melody I had composed, but also because the last two stanzas lacked the tenderness that came across so strongly in the first two. The words just didn’t communicate a parent’s love for their child quite in the way that I thought they should. My dad was not thrilled about my editing job, but at the time I was convinced that the end result justified the changes.
Later on, I realized that I didn’t simply want a lullaby for the newsletter. I wanted the words of the poem to speak to me; I guess I had hoped for a special message from father to daughter. But the stanzas I edited may in fact have been describing how he was feeling – about dying, about losing the abilities he once had. I became so focused on transforming the lullaby into a way to feel his affection, and to hold on to my father, knowing how soon I’d have to let him go, that I didn’t see he was not singing to me. In some ways, the lullaby is symbolic of the difficulties we both had with verbalizing our feelings, but through our combined efforts – his poem and my melody – we managed somehow to transform our sorrow into something beautiful.
With the help of two enormously talented and generous friends, Penelope Dale, an opera
singer, and Richard Maddock, a pianist and composer, the piece was recorded on time for my father to hear it at Christmas, just a few weeks before he died. I have long wanted to do something more with the lullaby and at last I was able to create images to accompany the music, to honour the memory of someone I still love very much, and miss every day. Though it is five years since I have bid my father his last good-night, I have a lullaby I can listen to any time I need to feel him near me, and I am so pleased to finally be able to share it.
I hope you enjoy The Little Animals’ Lullaby.