Parts:
S: Wendy, Juliana
A: Sandy, Max, Louli
T: Marcus, Robin
B1: Phil
B2 (the lower part): Colin, Peter
Seal_Lullaby_SATB_Whitacre_CMajor_no_piano (and corrected bar numbers)
Seal_Lullaby_SATB_Whitacre_CMajor_with_piano
The Seal Lullaby all
The Seal Lullaby sop
The Seal Lullaby alto
The Seal Lullaby tenor
The Seal Lullaby bass
This song is based on the Rudyard Kipling poem, The Seal Lullaby. It’s a really sweet, simple, gentle song, and success in singing it is all down to expression, dynamics and tone. Here’s something I found on t’internet which explains the poet’s use of language which may help you when thinking about how to sing it.
I think that part of the poem’s appeal is its strong rhythmic quality. The lines have deep ebbs and flows that make you feel the waves of the ocean. The words that Kipling chooses also sound like water, with lots of “s” and “st” sounds. A good example is “slow swinging seas” in the last line. He also uses a lot of words with “o” vowel sounds: “The moon, o’er the combers looks downward…” This helps you to not only feel, but hear the ocean setting.
The poem has an affectionate, dreamlike quality particularly suited to a lullaby. Kipling uses the archaic familiar “thee” throughout, a convention he often uses in his work when animals speak. This sometimes indicated increased formality, but also implies that he is translating from another language (in this case seal language), which has retained the familiar which modern English has lost. The use of the familiar contributes to the sweet tone of the poem, helping the reader feel the deep love and care between a mother and her baby. All mothers are the same, Kipling seems to say, whether they rock their babies to sleep in wooden rockers or between ocean waves.
When you’ve printed off your sheet music, please go through it and mark all the dynamics symbols so that you can really pay attention to them when you’re singing – it makes all the difference in evoking the movement of the waves below the baby seal. I’ve taken care to add them to the myr file, so I hope they come through clearly enough – see esp bars 1 & 2, 3 & 4 etc, where successive crescendo and diminuendo symbols are used to create the illusion of waves. It will really make a difference to how we perform it!
Finally, please enjoy this: