Singing death : reflections on music and mortality / edited by Helen Dell and Helen M. Hickey.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Dell, Helen, editor.

Hickey, Helen, 1949- editor.

Sabin W. Colton, Jr., Memorial Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Death in music.

Bereavement--Psychological aspects.

Bereavement.

Physical Description:

xii, 202 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017.

Summary:

Death is an unanswerable question for humanity, the question that always remains unanswered because it lies beyond human experience. Music represents one of the most profound ways in which humanity struggles, nevertheless, to accommodate death within the scope of the living by giving a voice to death and the dead and a voice that responds. This book engages with the question of how music expresses and responds to the profound existential disturbance that death and loss present to the living. Each chapter offers readers an encounter with music as a way of speaking or responding to human mortality. Each chapter, in its own way, addresses these questions: How are death and the dead made present to us through music? How does music, as composed, performed and heard, respond to the brute fact of death for the living, the dying and the bereaved? These questions are addressed from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives: musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, history, philosophy, film studies, psychology and psychoanalysis. Singing Death also covers a wide range of musical genres from medieval love song to twenty-first-century horror film music. The collection is accompanied by a website including some of the music associated with each of its chapters. Book jacket.

Contents:

Into the Profound Deep: Pulled by a Song / Samuel Curkpatrick

'Farewell Vain World, I'm Going Home': Negotiating Death in the Sacred Harp Tradition / Frances Miller

Crossing Over, Returning Home: Expressions of Death as a Place in George Crumb's River of Life / Abigail Shupe

Public Mourning, The Nation, and Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings / Kip Pegley

Swinging in Heaven, Boppin' in Hell: Jazz and Death / Walter van de Leur

'Sad and Solemn Requiems': Disaster Songs and Complicated Grief in the Aftermath of Nova Scotia Mining Disasters / Heather Sparling

Moving between worlds: Death, the otherworld and traditional Irish song / Mary McLaughlin

Dying for Love in trouvère song / Helen Dell

To the Tune of "Queen Dido": The Spectropoetics of Early Modern English Balladry / Lindsay Ann Reid

'Break on through to the other side': Songs of Death in Supernatural Horror Films / Penny Spirou and Natalie Lewandowski

'And the Stars Spell out Your Name': The Funeral Music of Diana, Princess of Wales / Helen M. Hickey

Barthes's Orphic Quest: music and mourning in Camera Lucida / Henriette Korthals Altes.

Notes:

"An Ashgate Book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Sabin W. Colton, Jr., Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9781472474407

1472474406

OCLC:

953792539