Music Book Review: Mortality and Music: Popular Music and the Awareness of Death by Christopher Partridge

Mortality and Music: Popular Music and the Awareness of Death
by Christopher Partridge (Music 781.64 Par)

 Music plays a complex and lifelong role in so many of our lives, and that relationship often extends to the very end of life and beyond, as we use music to celebrate those who we have lost, or to help us work through our grief. Many literary and musical forms exist for this purpose: the funeral march, the dirge, the requiem, the threnody, the lamentation, the elegy, sounds of the oppari, ululation and keening, and from the opposite kind of perspective, the murder ballad tradition

 

As its title suggests, Mortality and Music: Popular Music and the Awareness of Death by Christopher Partridge explores this ongoing relationship between music and our collective sense of mortality. The musical focus here is on relatively contemporary popular music, and Western pop music at that. As we learn in the introduction, Partridge chose the modern era for this survey because our cultural conception of and exposure to death has shifted in the modern era, particularly in Western countries. That is to say that historically, when we all lived shorter lives and modern medicine wasn’t so modern, everyone was still exposed more directly to death. Death happened all around us then, relatively speaking, and now it more often happens behind the walls of hospitals or care facilities. And when you’re not exposed to something as frequently, it becomes more mysterious. So we should see new dimensions in our musical relationship to death, or the way mortality is represented in music, as our exposure to death changes.

 

I don’t envy anyone trying to organize a book around such a difficult subject. Partridge handles this by breaking up the book into different cultural conceptions of death, more or less: the sacred versus the profane, our cultural conceptions of the undead or immortal, violence and death in transgressive art, and devotion and myth-making around departed musical celebrities. These kinds of divisions end up being handy because different kinds of musical contrasts fit into them nicely. The first of five sections, called “Mortality and Immortality,” serves as a bit of an historical overview of that shift in our cultural exposure to death that’s changed in the modern era, as alluded to in the introduction. While it’s not an exhaustive survey, you will find some references to historical literature and historical music, and how they reflected the relationship to death held in previous eras, which is a useful comparison. I’m glad he took a chapter to further establish this shift, because it seems like one of those situations you really have to think about — it’s hard to “feel” it, per se. Just like it’s difficult for us to really hear old monophonic plainchant music the way it was originally heard — our ears are too trained to listen for the implications of harmony and chords — it’s hard to imagine living in previous eras where everyone is dead around 40 years of age, some even younger. As Partridge reflects, “Death has shifted from the center of Western culture, where it was accepted as a natural part of everyday life, to its edges, where as far as possible, its grotesque reality is excluded from peoples’ minds.”

 

So how is this shown in our music? It’s hard to summarize such a nuanced book, which goes on to discuss many perspectives on mortality found in modern music, but broadly speaking, we address death as something philosophical or symbolic, mostly. We play with it, contrasting it with sex, another extreme in human experience. Sometimes when it seems like we’re engaging with it more directly in transgressive forms of art and music, it still turns out to function mostly symbolically, as the “transgressive” or “profane” must frame its dialogue in the language of the more commonly-held morality, or “sacred.” It’s a fascinating read — I hadn’t thought about the relationship quite like Partridge presents it here, but he makes a compelling argument. And while doing so, he weaves lots of popular music styles into the narrative, from goth rock to death metal to indie rock to punk to hip hop and more. I feel like there are a few weaknesses in the book — in particular the audience appeal and demographic for genres like death metal and gangsta rap aren’t fully understood by the author, by my estimation. Those issues aside, there is a lot of substance to wrestle with here.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Singing Death: Reflections on Music and Morality edited by Helen Dell and Helen M. Hickey or Opera’s second death by Slavoj Žižek.)

 

( Wikipedia page for Christopher Partridge )

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

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