Full Description
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.
Contents
Section One. Music and Mourning Chapter 1. Funeral Music Between Heaven and Earth; Janieke Bruin-Mollenhorst
Chapter 2. On the Funeral and Bereavement Rituals Depicted in Folk Songs: 'The Folk Requiem' by Adam Strug and Kwadrofonik; Marek Jeziński
Chapter 3. The Posthumous Nephew: An Auto-ethnographic Exploration of Belated Mourning and Fresh Divinations; Gary Levy
Section Two. Underground Scenes, Alternative Music and Transformation
Chapter 4. You're Nothing: Punk and Death; David Gracon
Chapter 5. Healing the Mother Wound: Metal Performance and Grief Management; Nachthexe
Chapter 6. Bienvenue au Canada: The Nonlanguage of Music and Dreams; Brendan Dabkowski
Section Three. Performing Death
Chapter 7. The Vision of Death: Time and Temporality; Sílvia Mendonça
Chapter 8. Music and Embodied Movement: Representations of Risk and Death in Contemporary Circus; Jenny Game-Lopata
Chapter 9. Mercury's Message to Go On With the Show; Marie Josephine Bennett
