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Music, Mortality, Memory
Series: - Death in History, Culture, and Society, Volume: 3
Music comes to our aid when confronted with a sense of our own mortality as here revealed in a variety of contexts and moods. Musical composition and performance significantly influence and draw from personal loss and group trauma, gaining force in kaleidoscopic patterns of shared grief; so, too, with spiritual, devotional, and ritual participation. The chapters of this book, rooted in cultural, historical, and social case studies, exemplify these musical dynamics. Alert to a variety of diverse academic disciplines, the introduction and conclusion provide additional analysis and not only indicate directions for future research, but also for contemporary study across the humanities and social sciences.
Contributors are: Janieke Bruin-Mollenhorst, Jonathan Clinch, Douglas Davies, Benjamin Goodman, Thomas Graves, Erin Johnson-Williams, Daithí Kearney, Wolfgang Marx, Matthew McCullough, and Maximillian Rosenthal.
Contributors are: Janieke Bruin-Mollenhorst, Jonathan Clinch, Douglas Davies, Benjamin Goodman, Thomas Graves, Erin Johnson-Williams, Daithí Kearney, Wolfgang Marx, Matthew McCullough, and Maximillian Rosenthal.
Douglas J. Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion at Durham University and Director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies. His major monographs include Death, Ritual and Belief (3rd ed., 2017), Mors Britannica (2015), Emotion, Identity and Religion (2011), and Theology of Death (2008). He was Series Editor for the six-volume Cultural History of Death (2024) and is an elected Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, The Learned Society of Wales, and The British Academy. He has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award (2025) from Association for the Study of Death and Society.
Matthew McCullough is a musicologist specialising in British music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests in death, trauma, and memory. He is an Associate Fellow of Van Mildert College and sits on the advisory board of the Centre for Death and Life Studies. He completed his PhD in Musicology and Analysis in 2024 with a thesis on British composers’ musical responses to the First World War, and is co-editor of the four-volume series Death, Loss, Memory and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780–1914 (Routledge, 2025).
Matthew McCullough is a musicologist specialising in British music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests in death, trauma, and memory. He is an Associate Fellow of Van Mildert College and sits on the advisory board of the Centre for Death and Life Studies. He completed his PhD in Musicology and Analysis in 2024 with a thesis on British composers’ musical responses to the First World War, and is co-editor of the four-volume series Death, Loss, Memory and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780–1914 (Routledge, 2025).
Acknowledgements
List of Figures, Examples and Tables
Notes on Contributors
1 Lamenting the Carceral: Hymns as Colonial Memory
Erin Johnson-Williams
2 A Traumatic Monument of Fragmented Memories: Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem for a Young Poet
Wolfgang Marx
3 Babi Yar Memorialised: in Soviet Poetry, Art, and Music
Benjamin Goodman
4 Death, Memory, and Cultural Dynamics in an English Elegy
Jonathan Clinch
5 The Fair Woman Lay Upon the Bed: Death, Jubilation, and Juxtaposition in Qawwālī
Thomas Anthony Graves
6 The Inclusivity of Personalised Funeral Music
Janieke Bruin-Mollenhorst
7 Music and Memory in the Monuments of the Sliabh Luachra Region
Daithaí Kearney
8 Poetic, Prophetic, Popular: Aspects of Reception in the Memorial Compositions for Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
Maximilian Rosenthal
Appendix 1: Memorial works for Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847) between 1847 and 1857
Index
List of Figures, Examples and Tables
Notes on Contributors
PART 1: Trauma and Conflict
1 Lamenting the Carceral: Hymns as Colonial Memory
Erin Johnson-Williams
2 A Traumatic Monument of Fragmented Memories: Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem for a Young Poet
Wolfgang Marx
3 Babi Yar Memorialised: in Soviet Poetry, Art, and Music
Benjamin Goodman
PART 2: Ritual and Performance
4 Death, Memory, and Cultural Dynamics in an English Elegy
Jonathan Clinch
5 The Fair Woman Lay Upon the Bed: Death, Jubilation, and Juxtaposition in Qawwālī
Thomas Anthony Graves
6 The Inclusivity of Personalised Funeral Music
Janieke Bruin-Mollenhorst
PART 3: Times and Contexts
7 Music and Memory in the Monuments of the Sliabh Luachra Region
Daithaí Kearney
8 Poetic, Prophetic, Popular: Aspects of Reception in the Memorial Compositions for Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
Maximilian Rosenthal
Appendix 1: Memorial works for Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847) between 1847 and 1857
Index
This book is particularly relevant for scholars of death and memory studies; musicologists and anthropologists; university libraries and those in the wider public with a general interest in history or books on music, memory, or death; and independent scholars or undergraduates and postgraduates across disciplines.