The Power of Singing to a Lysol Tube
Hello and welcome to the second and last blog for January. If you haven't done so already, read yesterday's blog. Please also watch some of my music videos and consider buying the sheet music of my original songs and/or donate to my website!
Before you begin reading the story of today's blog, consider reading my blog called I Sigh to Sing which tells the story of how I started to take voice lessons in college. Just after getting into the vocal program, I met with my private teacher to choose the songs I would sing for that semester. One of those songs was a lullaby and it was the first of many lullabies I would learn at school. You may have also noticed that a few of my YouTube videos have lullaby songs in them. Why am I so interested in lullabies? It all began long ago when I was about 15 years old.
As I have mentioned before, I am a Christian. One time as a teenager, I walked home from church with one of my youth leaders and had a conversation with her. The young women in my church can choose to do projects to help them spiritually grow. I was asking this leader, who I admired very much, for some project ideas. I can't remember the full conversation we had, but when we got to her house and I said goodbye to her I reflected back on the lesson she had just taught me and my peers. Near the end of the lesson, she told us that a relative of hers had written one of our church songs and she then shared it with us. At this time in my adolescence, I had already started writing songs.
As I continued to walk home, I thought about how much I love music. I thought about some of the values I could do projects for, and the value called Divine Nature came to my mind. I consider Divine Nature to mean that as a woman it is in my nature and divinely given to me by God to be a mother. Whether by caring for my own children or taking care of another person's child for a moment, it is something that I am capable of doing.
As I pondered those thoughts, I started thinking of scenes from movies, such as The Lion King, when a child wakes up their parents and the couple argues on who has to wake up. Then I started to visualize myself in that scenario:
It's many years in the future when I have gotten married and we have a baby sleeping in the same room as us. Suddenly the baby wakes us up crying and, rather than arguing with my husband, I imagine myself quickly sitting up in bed and stubbornly pushing my husband back down if he gets up. Then I would rush to our baby's crib and start singing a lullaby to it.
It was in this moment as I walked home and thought of this scenario that I decided what I wanted to do for my Divine Nature project. I was going to write a lullaby.
Now let's fast forward to that first semester of voice lessons I was previously talking about. One day during my lesson my teacher was helping me with American Lullaby by Gladys Rich , which was the lullaby I had chosen that semester. At first it was just another typical lesson where she was playing the piano part and listening to my voice and I was trying to follow her instructions and change the way I sang whenever she stopped playing the piano. But on one of those moments that she stopped playing, she said something that really surprised me. "You need a baby!"
She then got up from the piano and grabbed a Lysol Wipes Tube that she had in her room. After a few minutes, she found some fabric to wrap around it and gave it to me. She instructed me to hold it like a baby and sing to it. Then she began playing the piano introduction of the song. I started to sing the first phrase of the song, "Hush-a-bye you sweet little baby.."
But in that moment as I held this fake baby and sang those words, it felt like I was suddenly transported into that scenario I made up when I was 15. Even though this baby wasn't real, singing to it felt real and I realized that I wanted this scenario to become a reality. I wanted it so badly, and in this moment it felt like it was so close to becoming a reality that I choked on my words and started to cry!
My teacher stopped playing the piano and came over to me. She explained that sometimes in the past she would sing in performances such as Operas. During some practices, she would try to see how far she could go emotionally into the character before being unable to sing. Then she knew how far into the character was too far as a singer. She then explained to me that I now knew that I shouldn't go emotionally as far as whatever caused me to get emotional. Still, experiencing that moment was really special to me and ever since then I would look for songs to add to my lullaby repertoire for when I would finally be in that moment and sing to my baby.
Later in the summer, I was taking voice lessons with a different teacher who taught during the summer time. I told her that I love lullabies and wanted to learn Wiegenlied by Bach for my first German song. When she heard this, she told me that my previous teacher told her about the experience we had with that Lysol Tub. My teacher told her that when I had started singing with that fake baby, something magical happened. I certainly don't remember singing well enough to earn my teacher's approval, but I agree that it was definitely a magical experience. In the Fall of that same year I found several Christmas lullabies and it wasn't long before she learned that I love lullabies so much!
It seems very fitting that the first song I put on YouTube is a Christmas Hymn which I consider to be a lullaby. There's even lullabies I sang in my Senior Recital for my April video and my October video is an arrangement of the two lullabies from the two Mary Poppins movies. Please click the links to listen to those songs. Please also consider subscribing to my channel so that you can be notified of future videos that just might include a lullaby or two. I hope you enjoyed reading my blog. Do you have a favorite lullaby? Comment your thoughts down below and don't forget to keep on dreaming!
