Tag Archives: voice

Beyond lullabies: the mother’s music.

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Marianne Stokes, Mother and Child at Menguszfalva

“After birth, the child further develops this primal resonance. This doesn’t happen haphazardly. The child achieves a kind of symbiosis with the mother through its creative imitations of her sounds and facial expressions; in this way, it will feel what she feels. As it takes on its mother’s happy expression, it also feels her joy; if it takes on her sad expression, it shares in her unhappiness.

“Something similar applies to the exchange of sounds: In the clinking and clanging of the mother’s language trembles the well and woe of her being, and the child who imitates that language resonates with it on the same psychological wavelength. This early resonance between child and its (social) environment leads to a unique phenomenon: The young child’s body gets ‘loaded’ with a series of vibrations and tensions that become embedded in the deepest and finest fibers of its body. They form a kind of ‘body memory’ that not only programs the function of the musculature, glands, nerves, and organs, but also predisposes the child to certain psychological conditions, or disorders.

“The human body is, in the most literal sense, a stringed instrument. The muscles that span the skeleton, and the body’s other fibers, are put on a certain tension in early childhood through imitative language exchanges. This tension determines with which (social) phenomena one will resonate; it determines the frequencies to which one will be sensitive in later life. That’s why certain people and certain events can literally strike a chord; they touch the body and, as such, touch the soul. It is for this reason that the voice can make the body ill. Or, conversely, heal it. That is why the voice is of vital importance, especially at an early age. Lack of a voice is fatal to the young child.”

–Mattias Desmet

Dmitri Petrovs

A good narrator lets me get lost.

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Earlier this year I was prompted to think about who were my favorite audiobook narrators. It was soon revealed how very many I have! I was glad the request was for the narrators who I find truly add to the reading experience, and not the ones to avoid, because that would not be as pleasant an activity as I was engaged in, perusing through the titles I have listened to.

I’m thankful that the “bad” narrators are much fewer than the good. A good narrator lets me get lost in the story, and the bad ones are distracting in the various ways they draw one’s attention to their reading instead. I will list the narrators along with one or more books that made me love them:

Ralph Cosham (Geoffrey Howard) in How Green Was My Valley and many C.S. Lewis books, e.g. the Ransom Trilogy.

Peter Bishop in The Witness of Poetry.

Mike Fraser in The Timeless Way of Building.

Ellie Heydon in Mary Stewart novels.

 Arthur Morey in The Technological Society.

Andrew Sachs in Silas Marner.

Tom Stechschulte in Up and Down California.

Julie Harris in Out of Africa (unfortunately abridged).

Derek Perkins in G.K. Chesterton books.

Flo Gibson

Flo Gibson, in books about adventurous women, such as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, and Letters of a Woman Homesteader.

Eleanor Bron in Elizabeth von Arnim books.

Neil Hunt and David Rintoul in Nevil Shute novels.

Stefan Rudnicki I first heard reading The Aviator, and I thought he was perfect for that story told in the first person. I began searching on Audible to see what other books he had narrated, and that is how I came to read Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich.

I started listening to a Joseph Conrad novel done by him, and was amazed at how differently, but also smoothly, he narrated that character’s voice — and not just the accent.  Seeing that he was the narrator of the Ursula LeGuin novel City of Illusions made me willing to try it, and his narration of The Captive Mind was just right for conveying Czeslaw Milosz’s writing voice.

Stefan Rudnicki

The protagonist of The Aviator is Russian, and I wondered if the narrator was Russian — how did he get that accent so well, but not overdo it? That’s why I researched Stefan Rudnicki more than any other narrator, and I learned that he was born in Poland. I also found this video in which he, along with other skilled veteran readers, leads a Round Table Discussion with several relatively new narrators, on the topic of improving their narration.

The whole narration “industry” is fascinating. It seems that participating in it is a satisfying way for older actors to keep working, at a pace that fits their slower stage of life. From reading reviews, I can tell that we listeners don’t all appreciate the same narration style. Are any of these your favorite narrators, too?

From Earthsea to Alexander

books, poetry, travel, , , , , , ,

To prepare for a recent road trip, I visited the public library looking for a book on CD. I ended up with a whole stack of boxes to take along in the car later that morning and was very pleased with a few of them.

My car was also loaded down with a Thanksgiving turkey, baking pans and tablecloths and some already cooked food, things to contribute to a feast at Pippin’s house. I was taking myself early to help prepare, and Mr. Glad would follow later.

Ray Bradbury

Two slim library cases held one disk each of an introduction to a book in the Big Read program of the National Endowment for the Arts. I was only vaguely familiar with the list and the program, not having any family member that I know of participating. But of the offerings I browsed I was interested in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin because of recent recommendations from someone, I can’t remember who. And Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury was a book my reading group discussed a decade or so ago. The recordings were about 30 minutes each.

When I slid the Wizard introduction into the player and the narrator’s voice came into my car, it took me a few seconds to realize that it was Dana Gioia, my favorite book reviewer, poetry critic, and literature teacher. His voice was recognizable, but his intonation was all jazzed up, brighter and more dramatic, I suppose to keep the average somewhat reluctant American reader listening.

His commentary was in brief snatches, and mostly introductory to several other authors who talked about the book, including LeGuin herself, and to short passages read from the text. None of the comments or readings was longer than a minute or so, and most were much briefer than that, which made it easy for me to pay attention; I’m sure this feature was also designed for listeners of diverse ages who are used to having their short attention spans catered to.

The Big Read program is intended to reverse or at least slow the decline in the number of readers in our nation, and I haven’t heard if it is working. But this recording was a wonderful introduction to LeGuin. I enjoyed myself thoroughly while listening to what seemed like a sort of CliffsNotes in audio technicolor. There is music in the background that also adds to the drama.

CliffsNotes (Yes, they do squish the name together like that nowadays) seems to have some videos out, and digital flashcards, but for literature I think these NEA audio files would be much preferable, being a better bridge to visual and private reading activity than listening to a talking head, as I assume the CliffsNotes videos are.

The general plot and themes of the novel were discussed, and the particular skills of that writer. LeGuin talked about her background as a reader and writer and how she developed into the writer she is. Her childhood was spent in an intellectually rich household in Berkeley, where her father founded the anthropology department at the university and her mother wrote a book on Ishi.

There were many refugees from Europe in town then, such that “everyone had an accent.” It seems that her exposure to many cultures nourished her imagination to create new worlds and people groups. The Earthsea books do sound appealing to me now, and if I keep looking at that cover illustration I pasted here I’ll be bound to buy the first one soon.

But the first CD I took out of the box from my library stash was not from the NEA; it was a 2-disk collection of Popular Poetry, Popular Verse, Volume II from Naxos AudioBooks, a broad offering of everything from Shakespeare and Longfellow to Donne and Robert Herrick. It’s not surprising that I didn’t remember hearing most of the poems before  — but I’d like to listen again. The many love poems made me miss my husband whom I had only seen a couple of hours before.

Quite a bit of music was interspersed between groupings of poems. I skipped most of this because I was impatient to hear more poems, and I had no idea how long I might have to wait through the instrumental portions. The poems were read by Tony and Jasper Britton, and by Emma Fielding, all of whose voices and reading were not over-dramatic or annoying in any way. Here are some of the rich words that fell upon my ears:

Prayer (I) 
By George Herbert

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

Out of the 5+ hours I was on the road on the way up the state, there were only 10 minutes or so that I didn’t need my windshield wipers. The rain was often drenching, so when I had to stop for refueling and resting I was back in the car lickety-split and pushing the Play button again.

I tried a speech by author David McCullough, his Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities from 2003, but he was very dry, in content and delivery. I have found from Mars Hill Audio Journals that some writers of the most fascinating books are not good at speaking even in interviews.

The last thing I was listening to when I arrived home again the day after Thanksgiving was Alexander the Great and His Time by Agnes Savill. It is nine CD’s and I only heard three of them, but it was the most detail I’ve ever read on Alexander, who is certainly a fascinating ancient man. The descriptions of battles sometimes were hard for me to follow, but overall it was an easy “read” and I’m trying to figure out when I might finish it.

I kept thinking about the great contrast between my comfortable life — just sitting in my heated car snacking on food that I had easily bought at the store — and that of the high-achieving, fighting, indomitable but gracious man who slogged all over his world under the harshest conditions and must have had comparatively little ease in his relatively short life.

Alexander in The Battle of Issus

And the other Big Read disk? That was my favorite of the two I tried, because I still remembered Fahrenheit 451. It was wonderful to hear the author tell how he and his brother would run, not walk, to the library, and spend hours there every week. He started writing stories as a young child, and never stopped.

Here’s a list of books in the Big Read program. I’m planning to listen to more of the introductory recordings, which are lots of fun even if I never get around to reading the actual book.

A Lullaby Sound

family, music, ,

My definition of lullaby presupposes a woman’s voice, though I will allow for poetic license in lines such as “The rain made a lullaby sound on the roof,” which phrase I’m pretty sure stuck in my mind from reading The Maggie B. a hundred times. But some people must think a lullaby is anything boring enough to make a child flee in desperation to the Land of Nod. That is my conclusion after listening to a recording titled “Lullabies” in the car today.

Before I set off this morning for a long drive, I rummaged through the box of CD’s temporarily in storage during the remodel, and spied two collections of such songs, which made me think, “Why not brush up on your lullaby repertoire?” So I brought them along, and as I was listening to the Lifescapes CD I realized that it was for the first time.

When I had babies in the house, I never thought of playing a recording for them at bedtime. When I borrowed LP’s from the library or bought lullaby songbooks it was so that I might discover a new soothing melody to croon myself. For years Mr. Glad and I would sit on the children’s beds or on the floor at night and sing to them for a long time as they drifted off.

I did know a grandma, long before I was a grandma myself, who played recorded music for her grandchildren in their beds when they came to visit, but at least it was of a woman singing sweetly — though it was admittedly too sweet for my taste. One young mother filled me with dismay, and pity for her children’s impressionable souls, when she complained that she couldn’t get her kids to settle down unless she played the “Christian rock” radio station at nap time.

My own children had their father and me to sing to them, or they had silence, or in the case of one baby, she got to the point where she groused at me when I stood by her crib singing, and when I gave up and left the room, she contentedly babbled herself to sleep.

Some favorite bedtime songs that come to mind, of the family collection, were: the Italian “Nina, Nana, Cocolo Della Mama,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “All the Pretty Little Horses,” “Summertime,” “Hush, Little Baby, Don’t Say a Word,” and many Psalms that had been put to folksy tunes by Jesus People. “Trot Along, My Little Pony” was a huge favorite. My most recent acquisition is “A La Na Nita Nana,” which may actually be a Christmas song, but I think babies don’t mind.

I didn’t pick up any new ideas from the Lifescapes anthology. There were many traditional lullabies that I already knew, but bereft of any lyrics, and with minimalist and s-l-o-w string renditions even on “Dance to Your Daddy.” I hit the skip button many times because I couldn’t stand the dragging sensation, kind of like being tranquilized by annoyingly tasteless sweets.

The last fifteen minutes of the CD is pretty much equally divided among non-tunes. Not rain-on-the-roof, but “Running Water,” “Womb,” and “Heartbeat.” Running water I didn’t think was a good idea. It immediately made me think of the bathtub overflowing, and I wondered how was a child eventually to learn to be alarmed at the sound of water trickling in a house? Womb sounds were not so boring, but reminded me of a recording of humpback whales we once had, and whose songs I found more lovely. “Heartbeat” was, of course, tedious to an old woman, whereas it might be comforting to an infant. Perhaps the producers put five minutes of an adult-speed beating heart at the very end, thinking that if nothing else had lulled the baby to sleep after the first tiresome hour, that fundamental lub-dub might do the trick.

It’s likely that these sounds would calm a child, especially if the same recording were played every night. That could be true, though, of many sounds coming from a machine. It seems right to give my children what I myself like and what seems most wholesome. In a real live human voice you can be embraced and loved even after you are in your cradle. If the babies could tell us, I think that is what they would say.