A Chorus of Cuteness: "Lullaby Project" pairs Rowan music students with area families

“It’s the little moments with you, I love you through and through,” sang Marionne Bansing of Sewell, NJ, while 10-month-old-daughter Keily watched happily in her father Norly’s arms. Accompanied by senior music therapy major Desiree Biczel, the two sang and played piano and flute for a room filled with families and loved ones as part of the celebration concert for Rowan’s chapter of the Lullaby Project. 

Founded by Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute (WMI), the Lullaby Project is an international initiative that brings together new or expecting parents with musicians to write and record personalized lullabies for their babies. They provide training for the musicians and resources for participants, including a collection of activities for families and children that encourage learning, discovery and play. The program is designed to help new caregivers bond with their child and build a community through music. 

On a recent Friday evening, Rowan’s music therapy faculty and students brought families together to share their songs and stories with the community they built over the last several months, turning a Wilson Hall classroom into their own personal performance space. Strollers crowded the room as eight heartfelt lullabies were performed and played for the group on a small, acoustic set, complete with foam playmat and tiny noisemakers for the little ones in attendance.

“I just jumped at the chance,” said Bansing of performing her lullaby, “Little Moments,” live to the group during the celebration, “It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” 

In partnership with ACENDA Integrated Health, Rowan’s lullaby project is the first in the state of New Jersey, joining hundreds of projects around the world. 

Shaping it into something singable
After receiving approval from Carnegie, Rowan and ACENDA began preparations for the project. In late 2022, ACENDA began recruiting participants from its patient network while Rowan recruited student volunteers. Eight South Jersey families with infants ranging from one year to just a couple weeks old were paired with music therapy students and adjunct professor and music therapist Dr. Lynn Gumert, Rowan’s lead on the project. 

While the majority of projects are led by musicians, Rowan’s choice to involve music therapy students and faculty brought a new perspective to the work. According to Gumert, Rowan’s project focused on relationship-building, acknowledging songwriting is a very personal process and having a level of familiarity and trust makes things easier for both parties involved. 

Carnegie provides a packet of prompts for the families to work through, outlining favorite memories with their child, nicknames, hopes and dreams for the future and even asking families to write a letter to their baby. 

“It’s the family’s lullaby,” Gumert said of working with the participants. “We’re listening and thinking through their words and shaping it into something singable.” 

You can feel the love in their lyrics
Biczel from Blackwood, NJ was one of the students to answer Gumert’s call for applicants. With experience working for hospice, she says she was immediately interested in the Lullaby Project. 

She was paired with two families and met with each once a week throughout the spring semester, moving to two times a week as the project progressed. Biczel connected with each family to get a sense of their vision for the genre, tempo and mood of the song and what they wanted it to say, which she notes is very vulnerable and can be challenging.

“My job was to make them as comfortable as possible and listen to whatever they were willing to share with me,” she says of working through the song-writing process. Biczel even took it one step further, gifting sheet music for “Little Moments” and “Ulysses’ Lullaby” to the families to keep for the future. 

Hannah Rose Lafferty-Zoltowski, a recent music therapy graduate and another volunteer, was drawn to the project as a new challenge for her own songwriting abilities. She met with both her families virtually and had one participant, with no music experience, finalize their lullaby, “A Song for Leighton” in just one, one-hour session. The other came prepared with lyrics already drafted and Lafferty-Zoltowski was able to see their baby responding to the music live as they were writing, “Siempre seras mi bebe Milo Romeo.” 

“To get to work on a project that is so intimate was fulfilling and also humbling to be welcomed into someone’s family like that,” Lafferty-Zoltowski says, who lent both her voice and instrumental abilities to the families for the recording.  “You can feel the love in their lyrics.”

Once the families had something they were happy with, the students worked on the final recording, using their smartphones and applications like GarageBand to produce the final piece, some even added the baby’s laughter onto the track. 

Next movement 
As a music therapist and composer with a history of working with community projects, Gumert is hopeful this pilot project will generate more interest and allow it to expand in future years, providing a research component, involving other types of students like audio engineers and music educators, or even building a course for students to get practicum-type experience. 

The Lullaby Project is Rowan Music Therapy’s second community programming initiative in recent years. In collaboration with Rowan’s College of Humanities and Social Science, the Camden Expressive Arts Collaborative (CEAC) was created in response to a call from CAMcare Pediatric Services for community-based arts programming for teens. Launched in 2021, the program provides mental health support and wellness for Camden youth through songwriting and recording. Felicity Sims, music therapy major and Lullaby Project participant, also worked on the CEAC project. 

“It seemed like a really natural fit and another outlet for our students to work with real people and in real scenarios,” says professor and director of music therapy Dr. Andrea Hunt, who worked on the CEAC project. 

As Biczel prepares for her final undergraduate semester this fall, she says she is grateful for the opportunity to be part of this challenging, inspiring and beautiful project.

“As they share how much they love their child, we turn that love into music and give it back to them. ” 

Read the lyrics to the lullabies here. Listen to the lullabies here.