Music, Mortality, Memory - (Death in History, Culture, and Society) (Hardcover)

About the Book

Whether engaged in death, memory, or music studies, readers will find deep interest in these accounts of trauma and conflict, ritual and performance, and the monuments and memorials of human life in diverse musical, cultural, and worldview contexts.

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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).