What struck me about Gershwin’s “Summertime” was how it was able to simultaneously blend a sense of musical drama and tension with the serenity required of a lullaby.  Like most arias we have encountered in the course thus far, this one, too, provides the audience with insight on the character who sings it. Here, as the mother sings to her child about the ease and peace of summertime, we can imagine the sense of protection and warmth she feels towards her child. However, what was interesting to me was how the soft and pleasant lyrics are not always complemented by sweet sounds, but accompanied by tense musical undertones instead.

For example, when the song opened, I felt the sense of calmness I would expect listening to a lullaby. The song begins with a low bass sound (0:00 to 0:05) that creates a soothing affect. However, this peace is fleeting due to the quick transition to the minor key (0:06 to 0:16). Moreover, the prominent repetition of a short, low tune at 0:10, 0:11, and 0:13 sounds ominous. However, before any substantial feeling of unease could really settle within me, I heard pleasant bell chimes (0:17, 0:19, 0:20). These bells softened any sense of foreboding I was beginning to feel. Just within the first twenty seconds, Gershwin’s lullaby is thus both sweet-sounding and slightly tense.

When the mother begins her aria, the instrumentation is soft and takes a subsidiary role to her singing. However, at 0:50, the instrumentation takes over, and there is a crescendo and repetition of a short, quick, ascending tune. The rapid repetition of this tune contrasts with the drawn out singing style that we hear from the mother just seconds before. Moreover, at 0:55, this tune repeats again, but is presented in a much lower, darker form. Yet, once the mother starts singing again, the content of her words are fully devoid of tension. The mother says, “Your daddy’s rich/ And your mamma’s good lookin.’” The apparent incongruity between what the mother sings and the music that precedes her could be due to the fact that Clara, the mother who sings this lullaby in Porgy and Bess, is actually married to a fisherman who does not make much money at all. My interpretation of this lyrical and instrumental incompatibility is that it conveys the discrepancy between what the mother wants her daughter to hear in this lullaby and what the nature of their actual life is. This could explain the duality in affect (tense, ominous vs. sweet, soft) that pervades the lullaby.

Perhaps the most striking moment of contrast for me was in the final twenty seconds of the song, once the mother has stopped singing. Her final words are “There’s a’nothing can harm you / With daddy and mamma standing by.” I expected these words to be followed by soft, mellifluous sounds, or even just to conclude the song themselves. Instead, the mood becomes extremely dark at 3:05. There is a crescendo that begins at 3:08, and the instrumentation takes on more complexity as the music loudens, with a trumpet adding to the mix at 3:12 and a cymbalic crash at 3:15. The notes that follow are rapid, like the footsteps of someone trying to escape, not like someone who is entering into a peaceful sleep. Whenever I felt a rise in tension in the earlier parts of the song, I was almost always quickly relieved, by the introduction of soft bells or vocals, for example, and I was somehow once again brought back to the mode of a lullaby. However, the very end of this song created a great deal of tension with no release, and I lost the sense of a lullaby by this point. Keeping in mind that this aria was part of a larger opera, it is possible that Gershwin intentionally did not provide a release of tension here in order to remove his audience from the mindset of a lullaby and transition them to the next scene in the program. Either way, I found his dualistic, complex musical depiction of a lullaby to be fascinating and useful as a plot device.