Description
Lullaby-singing is seen as a key element to our musical repertoire as well as musical upbringing and socialisation of infants and children. In the German speaking regions, hundreds of lullabies have been composed and handed down from generations to generations. Lullabies have been linked to sleep inducing qualities, a dynamic that still must be decisively connected with specific musical characteristics (e.g. Unyk et al 1992, Scarrat et al 2022, Trahan et al 2018), and until then may above all be linked to the multisensorial practice and voice quality of lullaby singing (e.g. Turkmen et al 2022, Kragness et al 2021, Trehub et al 2015). In times of new media and a noticeable decline in amateur musicking in the western world, however, one must ask whether lullabies are still sung to infants and children as part of bedtime rituals. In our survey, we ask parents from up to ten-years-old children how they create their children’s bedtime ritual and whether music plays a role in it. To provide a cross cultural perspective, the study is being conducted in German speaking countries, the US, Morocco and the English-speaking population of Lagos, Nigeria. O behalf of the whole team, I will present how our survey is being conceptualized, how an interdisciplinary perspective can widen the methodological horizon, which questions we’d like to find answers to and what the eventual outcome could tell us about regular, informal singing in the upbringing of children today.
| Names, affilations and contact information | franziska.weigert,@psk.uni-regensburg.de |
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| Bio | Franziska Weigert is currently working on her music-historical dissertation on German lullabies in the long 19th century, supervised by Prof. Katelijne Schiltz (University of Regensburg) and Prof. Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild (University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna). Together with Franziska Degé, she’s conducting an interdisciplinary, transnational survey on today’s lullaby singing practice at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main. |