Borderless Lullabies: Musicians and authors in defense of refugee children

A reading from “Figuring” with original music by Yo-Yo Ma, a stunning rendition of the 19-century parlor song “Beautiful Dreamer” by Esperanza Spalding, and a family of friends speaking out against injustice in the universal language of sympathy.

by Maria Popova

Borderless Lullabies: Musicians and Authors in Defense of Refugee Children

“You must cherish one another. You must work — we all must work — to make this world worthy of its children,” Pablo Casals, the greatest cellist of the first half of the twentieth century, counseled humanity in the final years of a long life filled with music as a conduit of beauty and cross-cultural understanding.

Casals’s words fall heavy on the heart in an era when the world’s children are not cherished but detained at national borders, treated not as radiant beacons of our shared future but as criminals. To any conscionable human, witnessing such inhumanity is at once utterly infuriating and utterly helpless-making — a devastating syncopation of feelings.

Moved by this injustice, my dear friend Morley — immensely gifted musician, U.N. Peace Ambassador, golden-hearted human being — set out to buoy the heavy, helpless heart with the universal language of sympathy and consolation: music. She summoned a family of friends to produce Borderless Lullabies — a compilation of twenty songs and spoken-word pieces, with 100% of proceeds benefiting KIND: Kids In Need of Defense, a wonderful nonprofit that partners with pro-bono attorney at law firms and law schools to represent unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children in their deportation proceedings, ensuring that no child stands in court alone. Most of the kids KIND serves have fled severe violence in their home countries, and many have been abandoned, abused, or trafficked, only to find new traumas in wait when they arrive in the alleged land of freedom and possibility in search of safety.

When Morley asked me to read from the prelude of Figuring as one of the two spoken-word pieces on the record, I in turn asked Yo-Yo Ma — the greatest cellist since Casals, and one of the most generous, largehearted humans and humanitarians I have the honor of knowing, who has spent more than two decades building cross-cultural bridges of collaboration and understanding with his Silkroad project — to accompany the reading with something beautiful and thematically apt. He found the perfect sonic and symbolic counterpart — the vintage folk lullaby “Nana” by Manuel de Falla, one of the greatest composers of Casals’s era and culture — and beckoned it back to life on his enchanted cello, with Kathryn Scott on piano. Please enjoy the free stream below and join us in making a dent in the monolith of injustice by purchasingBorderless Lullabies.

 

All of it — the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias aboard the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floor-boards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the yellow of the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality — it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego.

How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness? This veneer must have been what the confluence of accidents and atoms known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw through when he spoke of our “inescapable network of mutuality,” what Walt Whitman punctured when he wrote that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

[…]

We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins.

[…]

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

Also featured on the record is a stunning rendition of Stephen Foster’s 1862 parlor song “Beautiful Dreamer” by another titanic contemporary musician: the Grammy-winning jazz bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding, who has a penchant for breathing new life into centuries-old classics and who cites Yo-Yo Ma as one of her key influences — a lovely reminder that, as Pete Seeger observed, “all of us, we’re links in a chain, and if we do our job right, there will be many, many links to come.”Here is to unlinking the artificial chains of bordered bigotry so that we may honor the most natural linkage of human to human, generation to generation, dreamer to dreamer.

“Beautiful Dreamer” sheet music, first edition, 1864

Other original music and readings on the record include Lizz Wright, Somi, Jacqueline Woodson with Chris Bruce, Cellogram with Arian Saleh, Elio Villafranca, Travis Knapp, Alejandro Urias, Jamia Wilson with Travis Sullivan, Chris Connelly, and Morley herself. Also included are recordings of previously released music by Draco Rosa, Martha Redbone, Rosanne Cash, Tendor Dorjee, Leni Stern, Karavika, Taína Asili, and Meryl Streep (who sings the Victorian lullaby her mother used to sing to her), generously donated to the project by the artists. Special thanks to my pal Shantell Martin for making the lovely cover art.

Borderless Lullabies is available on a pay-what-you-can model — from the at-cost minimum of $18 to anything more you feel this labor of love is worth, to you and the world.

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