Music and Death

Interdisciplinary Readings and Perspectives

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

• Verlag: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838679477
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Death in Sociology

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.

Section Three

Performing Death

The final section of this collection focuses on performance practises in connection with music, death and dying in the context of a solo flute piece intersecting with filmic culture; tinkering with danger and death in the contemporary circus; and the final single released during Freddie Mercury’s lifetime by the iconic rock group, Queen. Just as the earlier chapters in this volume explore the various ways in which music and grieving intersect and speak to one another, these three essays consider the intimate relationship between music and death with regard to the performer, composer and audience.

These three essays ultimately explore the ways in which the interconnected disciplines of performance, composition and film illustrate and further the discussion on the union between music, death and possible death. They also show how different musical styles may provoke or pacify listeners by considering the importance and significance of audiences and how they interpret performances.

Chapter 7

The Vision of Death: Time and Temporality

Sílvia Mendonça

Abstract

The artistic object is born from an initial moment or state that triggers a creative or creation process. This beginning is described by many as a fleeting moment during which a creative idea suddenly arises. I consider here that a creative vision is something that occurs in a very similar way, being able to capture a unified all like the finished artistic object, even if it amounts to a micro instant. This phenomenon uncovers a new form of capturing time and, therefore, a way to face temporality; the past, present and future are united and blend to originate new meanings.

The ‘vision of death’ is a concept that I explored in a musical composition, more specifically in the work Death Vision (On a January Day), in which performance becomes its possibility for representation and materialisation. The composition of the work arises from a personal vision of death, yet, to the performer, it is a construction of his or her own vision through musical interpretation. Be it in ‘vision’ as in ‘death’, some musical aspects connected with time stand out and communicate between themselves in a subtle manner. I will identify these moments through some examples of performances and representations in a cinematographic context, such as Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders (1987), Scena by Tomás Maia and André Maranha (2008) and Vai-e-vem by João César Monteiro (2003), where the visual plan is preponderant.

I will conclude that vision brings with it the possibility to intersect the real and give time back to what it has been missing: its unity. On the other hand, the vision of death in the musical performance finds its moment of fruition in linear time – in the possibility of openness and positivity that time itself gives.

Keywords: Death; vision; time; temporality; music composition; performance

Introduction

Death Vision (On a January Day) for solo transverse flute has its roots in a conceptual idea or theme of death. It is a brief piece of approximately three minutes’ duration for a solo instrument, the result of a commission by ANTENA 2/RTP for the 27th Edition of the Prémio Jovens Músicos, and meant to be interpreted in a music performance competition. The work is about a vision of death that is described in the following terms in the programme notes and the respective score:

This piece is about the mental concept of death on a day in January. Possessing the spectre of death is like slowly entering a labyrinth where time has been forgotten, where our perception borderlines are constantly changed, reshaping the meaning of everything that surrounds us.¹

This vision is described following an episode or reverie that the author situates on some January day, during which this same vision occurs. Despite the apparent ambiguity of the text that describes this particular vision, it was possible to construct the piece successfully, including the main cells, notes, rhythms, duration, articulation and dynamics. In treating a particular vision of death, it is suggested that, on the one hand, the confrontation of the composer with the idea of death, and on the other, the interpreter him/herself, are summoned to participate, through performance, in the materialisation of that same vision.

One of the fundamental features of this vision, and perhaps the most meaningful point in order for it to happen, is of temporal order. It is not in the instant of concretion from a physical standpoint and from the confrontation with death that this image is generated, but in another time and space, that are located outside temporality. The programme notes suggest the concept of a labyrinth, which is associated with the invisibility and unpredictability of a path, and that, while difficult, is something that must be negotiated. These elements are themselves associated with the idea of the inevitability and irreversibility of death.

Lastly, the phenomenon of vision opens the way to the sound realisation of the ‘death vision’, allowing us to comprehend the way in which the sonic artist can relate to matter – in this particular case, to sound.

Vision

Why does the vision take place? In creative and inventive work, visions occur often. But, what does it mean? What is this vision? It is the visualisation of a whole unified in perfection, a nexus of sensations, something that happens suddenly. It is the form, manifested while still being an idea, sensation or perception. It is an original event. The concept of vision can also be linked to others that are very close to it, such as the concepts of illumination, revelation, impression, thought, prophecy, reflection, idea, etc. The work of the creator (here we encompass the composer as well as the interpreter/performer) is to give shape to these visions. They are singular, personal and unique visions. It is very common to associate this occurrence during the creative process with ideas that arise suddenly from diverse sources. It could be a landscape, a sound, a colour, an event, a feeling, a poem, a memory. The German filmmaker Wim Wenders (1991) describes a kind of initial state of the creative process as follows:

At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a desire. That’s how it begins, making a film, writing a book, painting a picture, composing a tune, generally creating something. You have a wish. You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does. You want to give something to the world, something truer, more beautiful, more painstaking, more serviceable, or simply something other than what already exists. And right at the start, simultaneous with the wish, you imagine what that “something other” might be like, or at least you see something flash by. And then you set off in the direction of the flash, and you hope you don’t lose your orientation, or forget or betray the wish you had at the beginning. (1991, p. 73)

This concept of vision heralds something new – a change – something different that wants to manifest itself, illuminate itself, be brought to life and be projected by desire. Yet, something separates the present reality and the reality envisioned, a spatio-temporal distance. Associated with it, there is a path to roam, a path that leads to the materialisation of the vision. In the case of music, this path extends to the musical performance. There is another time, another space, that in reality does not yet exist, has not passed, has not been travelled, and so it is vision. Therefore, we have various types of reality coexisting: past and future merged in a present.

Through various scenes of the movie Wings of Desire by German filmmaker Wim Wenders (1987), one can come across the temporal simultaneity of those planes of reality, with the aforementioned merger of past and future in the present. The filmmaker wants to show two separate realities: the point of view of a child and that of an angel. The child looks up from below and the angel looks down from above. The child and the angel in this reflection, according to this horizontal axis, become one. The two gather among a crowded city of humans somewhere between the visible and the invisible. They wander in solitude, representing the space or distance that is created and exists between people.

The presence of design elements and the mise-en-scène further evoke this duality between people. For example, this is the case with the two pedestrians on the left and the two on the right, with two baby strollers surrounding the child; along with the two white stripes of the pedestrian walkway, one on each side, separated and divided. The child being placed in the centre is a mirror for the angel, and simultaneously, the viewer. Lastly, the use of black and white is part of the construction of this image, thus further reinforcing duality and transience.

The sky over Wenders’ war-scarred Berlin is full of gentle, trenchcoated angels who listen to the tortured thoughts of mortals and try to comfort them. One, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), wishes to become mortal after falling in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, Marion (Solveig Dommartin). Peter Falk, as himself, assists in the transformation by explaining the simple joys of a human experience, such as the sublime combination of coffee and cigarettes. Told from the angel’s point of view, the film is shot in black and white, blossoming into colour only when the angels perceive the realities of humankind. Ultimately, Damiel determines that he must experience humanity in full, and breaks through in to the real world to pursue a life with Marion.²

As can be seen from the film synopsis above, the sound that the angels hear is formed by the tortured thoughts of the everyday mortals. It is an internal sound, which is usually out of reach of others, as it is an internal dialogue. The role of the angels who possess this perceptive ability is to console the mortals. Colour is used as an expressive element and emerges only when the angels capture and understand the plan of human reality. This is also an element of the contact between the different realities, that of the angels and that of the mortals. It also represents an openness, a possibility, the hope that, somewhere in-between, these different realities can communicate. And this is simply made visible by the filmmaker. Just as the colour allows us to see what is not visible, so the sound we hear through the angels’ perception allows us to hear what is not audible.

Time in Vision

What you see in the sensations provided by vision is the schism in two planes (the visible and the invisible), that, without ceasing, resending each other...³

As I have already mentioned, vision encompasses the coexistence and interplay of visibility and invisibility that are connected to time itself, to both the past and to the future. It is mainly this temporal feature that is relevant for sound artists. Portuguese philosopher José Gil distinguishes three traits of literary vision in the poetic work of writer Fernando Pessoa:

(1) The transformation of the visible consists of the construction of an interior mode of the exterior, that is, an interior landscape from the perceived, actual image; (2) That the exterior that becomes interior is a duality of the actual, a vision of the present landscape, with the same visible elements, but very much different; (3) The vision is animated, it has life on the inside. When the image animates itself with intense life and moves itself as it was inhabited by a character, the vision occurs.⁴

What happens from the temporal standpoint in this process? For the Portuguese ...