Music and Death

Interdisciplinary Readings and Perspectives

Marie Josephine Bennett, David Gracon, Marie Josephine Bennett, David Gracon

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781838679460
• eBook ISBN: 9781838679453
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: Social Sciences

Music is often our companion when dealing with the incomprehensibility of loss, and yet death and dying are topics that are rarely discussed or analysed in the academic space, especially in combination with music studies. This edited collection examines several ways in which diverse music cultures and societies imagine, express and provide a means of coping with death, grief and remembrance. 

Written from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including both personal essays and academic studies, the nine chapters are divided into three subsections focusing respectively on mourning, underground scenes, and performance. The authors speak to the multifarious and complex ways in which music accompanies, supplements, and complements aspects of death and dying, whether this is the death of a loved one, or a celebrity from popular culture. 

The book cuts across disciplines such as musicology, death studies, funeral studies, cultural studies, media studies, celebrity studies, sociology, anthropology and theology, and includes perspectives from Australia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Table of contents

• Music and Death
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Authors
• About the Editors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Exploring Connections between Music and Death
• Section One: Music and Mourning
• Chapter 1: Funeral Music between Heaven and Earth
• Chapter 2: On the Funeral and Bereavement Rituals Depicted in Folk Songs: ‘The Folk Requiem’ by Adam Strug and Kwadrofonik
• Chapter 3: The Posthumous Nephew: An Auto-Ethnographic Exploration of Belated Mourning and Fresh Divinations
• Section Two: Underground Scenes, Alternative Music and Transformation
• Chapter 4: You’re Nothing: Punk and Death
• Chapter 5: Healing the Mother Wound: Metal Performance and Grief Management
• Chapter 6: Bienvenue au Canada: The Nonlanguage of Music and Dreams
• Section Three: Performing Death
• Chapter 7: The Vision of Death: Time and Temporality
• Chapter 8: Music and Embodied Movement: Representations of Risk and Death in Contemporary Circus
• Chapter 9: Mercury’s Message to Go On with the Show
• Index