Tracks for Projects Hush Lullay

Hush, Lullay is a setting of verse by the American poet Léonie Adams (1899–1988), titled Lullaby. It appears in her collection High Falcon and Other Poems, published by The John Day Company in New York in 1929. Adams describes herself as a ‘lyric’ poet, expressing her personal feelings through her writing, which typically takes a ‘first person’ perspective. The text of Lullaby is as follows:

Hush, lullay.
Your treasures all
Encrust with rust,
Your trinket pleasures fall
To dust.

Beneath the sapphire arch,
Upon the grassy floor,
Is nothing more
To hold,
And play is over-old.
Your eyes
In sleepy fever gleam,
Their lids droop
To their dream.
You wander late alone,
The flesh frets on the bone,
Your love fails in your breast,
Here is the pillow.
Rest.

The music of Hush, Lullay is ‘expressionist’ in style, a term used to describe the compositions of Arnold Schoenberg and his colleagues, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, working in the so-called Second Viennese School during the first part of the 20th century. Characteristics of expressionistic music include angular melodies with wide leaps; a high level of dissonance with an avoidance of conventional tonal tropes such as cadences; and structural fragmentation coloured by dynamic extremes and constantly changing textures.

The opening three lines of the text of Lullaby are set to two fragments of melody that between them use each of the 12 available pitch classes (that is, all the notes from a complete chromatic scale) once. However, the music that follows is not serial in nature (in which a twelve-tone series is constantly repeated or transformed), but cellular: a short sequence of pitches serves as the source of subsequent melodic and harmonic material.

The pitch cell used in Hush, Lullay comprises a descending minor 2nd and perfect 4th followed by an ascending major 7th. The four notes naturally divide into two groups of two, corresponding to the words ‘hush’ and ‘lullay’. Thus, each half of the cell comprises a single melodic interval: the first, a minor second, and the second, a major seventh. These intervals are ‘complementary’ in that together they make up the leap of an octave, and so have a certain, strident similarity in the way they sound. However, they are likely to have a very different affective impact. The initial descending semitone is intended to offer a sense of resolution, whereas the ascending major 7th will in all likelihood convey a sharp rise in tension. The two intervals are separated by a perfect fourth, which eschews major or minor implications. Hence, the melodic opening of Hush, Lullay is likely to evoke a high level of emotional tension; clearly, this is not going to be a conventional lullaby.

There are 45 tracks available to support learning and performances of Hush, Lullay: