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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