Theron’s Lullaby

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Theron’s Lullaby for Concert Band was commissioned by the Lee High School Band, Lee, Massachusetts, Joanne Nelson, director.  The work was begun in August 2023 with most of the composing having been finished by September that year.  It was completed in November 2023.

As every new parent learns, one of the biggest challenges of a newborn is getting your baby to fall asleep (and to find enough of it for yourself too).  My son, Theron, has been a wonderful blessing in our lives and we love him so much, but getting him to sleep, especially during his first year, has been very difficult at times.  One of the best strategies, and certainly the most beautiful, has been singing and playing lullabies for him.  As a composer, I naturally wanted to express my love for him in music, so writing a lullaby seemed like the perfect choice, especially as I had a very simple yet beautiful melody come to me in a dream at some point during the first few months of his life which I wanted to use.  Now this melody that itself came from sleep can lull Theron, and other listeners, back into the dream world.

As every parent also learns, having a child gives you this overwhelming sense of love for them and an immense desire to keep them as safe and protected from harm as possible.  As I thought about how to create the most comforting music for Theron’s lullaby, I decided to alternate between two harmonies, a tonic and subdominant chord (or I and IV, also called “plagal” motion that is well-known for accompanying the “Amen” at the end of hymns) which I find so serene and even blissful.

But when I thought deeper about it, I realized that I don’t just want to comfort him, but to teach him to comfort himself.  We can’t always protect him, so we need to eventually teach him to become independent.  I want him to know that some things that are scary at first can later become comforting if he is open to learning about and exploring them.  I want him to have the courage to step outside his comfort zone in order to expand it. 

In a musical context, this expansion of my comfort zone happened for me in the past few years with a certain harmony: a major and minor chord played at the same time, also known as a “split-3rd” chord.  This harmony produces a strong dissonant clash between the different 3rds of each chord.  For a long time, this harmony simply sounded ugly or “wrong” to me, but in the past few years I have found more and more examples and contexts where this chord “works”—where it can be made to sound natural and beautiful, such as in many of the works of Gerald Finzi, Andrzej Panufnik, and even in some works by renaissance and baroque composers like Thomas Tallis and Henry Purcell. 

In my piece, after the comforting I-IV progression is explored for a few minutes, the split-3rd harmony enters, which may sound to most listeners like an interruption or a perhaps a “bad dream” entering one’s sleep, but then this harmony gets developed through different contexts where I hope it will change the listener’s mind and show them that it can “fit”, it can be beautiful, and it can sound “good”.  (Interestingly, and I didn’t realize this until well after I began using it in the piece, the first chord of the I-IV progression is actually a major-7th chord which I used to think was very ugly back when I started composing music.  But as a teenager, I went through the same kind of process with this chord, trying to find examples and different contexts where it “worked”, and now I’ve used it as my example of the ultimate comfort harmony!  My, how much my musical “comfort zone” as expanded since then!)  So when you listen to this lullaby and hear something that sounds “wrong”, I hope you will have the courage to try and hear this harmony differently, and that by the end of the piece you might find beauty and comfort in it as well.

Premiered Feb. 6, 2014 by the Lee High School Band with the composer conducting in Lee, MA.