Singing Death ─ Reflections on Music and Mortality

Death is an unanswerable question for humanity, the question that always remains unanswered, since 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. 'Singing Death' ranges across genres from medieval love song to twenty-first-century horror film music. Each chapter offers readers an encounter with music as a distinct way of speaking or responding to human mortality. The chapters cover a wide range of disciplines: musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, history, philosophy, film studies, psychology and psychoanalysis. Each chapter 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? The collection is accompanied by a website including some of the music associated with each of its chapters.

Helen Dell is a research fellow in the School of Culture and Communication (English and Drama Studies), University of Melbourne. Her main research is in the fields of medieval music and literature, especially when joined together as song. She has until recently combined her research into medieval music with directing and performing in a medieval music ensemble, Troveresse. Since her PhD Helen has been conducting research into recent receptions and inventions of medieval music. One current project extends this work; she has now nearly completed a second book: Music and the Medievalism of Nostalgia: Fantasies of Medieval Music in the English-speaking World, 1945 to 2010. Since 2013 when, with Helen Hickey she co-convened a symposium entitled ’Singing Death’, the central focus of her research has been the nexus between music and death. Helen Hickey has a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Melbourne. Areas of research include the history of early Western medicine, trauma and medieval poetics. Her next publication is ’Legal Personhood and the Inquisitions of Insanity in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series’ in Theorising Legal Personhood in Premodern England, edited by Andreea Boboc (Brill, 2015).