Through the Ages - Music of the Soul

Through the Ages: A Timeline of Western Grief Music

9,000 BCE., China. Date attributed to the oldest playable flute, made from the hollow bone of a red crane bird, with holes carved out for fingering. Six flutes and thirty more fragments were recovered from the Jiahu Neolithic archaeological site. Though this is not considered “western,” this Jiahu site reveals the Chinese had established village life, with parts of the city for different community functions. Additionally, this musical craftsmanship notes a sophistication and importance of the arts in everyday life.

4500 BCE, Babylon. Oldest known bell found near Babylon.

3100 BCE, and following, the “Dynastic” or “Pharaonic” Period. Hieroglyphics and other artwork document the use of music for the temple, entertainment, the battlefield, and for the tomb. They indicate singing, playing flutes, rattles, drums, harps, flutes, reed instruments, hand clapping, and a variety of percussion instruments. Music was an integral part of religious worship.

1500 BCE. Northeast Ireland. Bronze horns have been found in various sites, with designs and tuning being indicative of their geographical locations.

800-146 BCE. Greek musical culture. Extensive uses of music, singing, instruments, vocal modes, including Pythagorus’ beliefs about music’s powers. Specific to mourning and grief was the elegy, a poem or musical work lamenting the loss of someone. Later vocal examples were composed by Josquin, Beethoven, Schumann, and Mahler; instrumental examples by Fauré, Dussek, Liszt, and Stravinsky. (An “Elegy for Martin Luther King, Jr.,” was written by David Ward-Steinman and performed at a community commemoration just days after King’s death, April 1968.)

800-146 BCE. Greek origin, epicedium or “threnody”: a funeral-like hymn or dirge. Later used in Blow’s “The Queen’s Epicedium,” 1655 (death of Queen Mary II); Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” 1960.

625 BCE.- 476 AD –Ancient Roman empire, classical examples. Nenia (Latin): A funeral dirge in honor of the dead, sung to the accompaniment of flutes, at first by the relatives, in later times by hired mourners. Additionally, funeral processions were elaborate, and led by musicians. Centuries later, Schiller’s “Nänie” poem was set to music by Gotz (1874), Brahms (Opus 82, 1880-1881), and Orff (1956).

Biblical Hebrew music / Early Christian music. Descriptions of early Hebrew music reflect findings of similar geographical areas during those times, i.e. instruments, uses for temple worship, celebration, and mourning. Early Christian music began with Jewish chants, and gradually incorporated Greek and Roman musical and cultural influences.

Through the centuries, folk examples. Lament: Generally, a broad term for a song or instrumental piece of mournful character, including all other forms in this list. More specifically, domestic music of mourning — such as the Irish and Scottish Caoine, Coronach, and Ho-hoane (bagpipe forms, developed from lament melodies). (Bagpipes continue to be a powerful instrument for marking funerals.)

814 A.D. Planctus (Latin), planh (Provencal): A medieval song of mourning, such as “Planctus Karoli,” written shortly after Charlemagne’s death (d. 814). Later medieval plancti were of the three Mary’s at Christ’s tomb.

Dark and Middle Ages. Medieval religious rites. Dirge (Latin): A mournful song, hymn, or musical composition with a slow and repetitive quality, used to (a) accompany or (b) portray burial rites. (a) Antiphons in the Office of the Dead; (b) Vaughn Williams’setting of Whitman’s “Dirge for Two Veterans” in his “Dona Nobis Pacem” (1936).

1000 AD.- Present. Requiem. Meaning “rest eternal,” requiems began in earliest Catholic liturgies for the dead, in plainchant style. The requiem’s performance styles and practices have developed with the times of change, on into 20^th century atonality. Representative composers include Palestrina (1554), Schutz (1636), Mozart (1791), Berlioz (1837), Brahms 1868), Faure (1887), Durufle (1947), Britten (War Requiem, 1962), Stravinsky (1966), and Rutter (1986).

1250 AD. Dies Irae settings. Meaning “Day of Wrath,” and a standard component of the Latin Requiem Mass. Attributed to Thomas of Celano (d. c. 1250), with a distinct melodic pattern. Used as thematic material in various other orchestral or choral works, i.e., Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830), Liszt’s Symphonie zu Dante’s divina Commedia (1867), Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (1936), and Penderecki’s Dies Irae (1967) which commemorates the Holocaust victims. Penderecki’s Dies Irae was first performed at Cracow and Auschwitz, the actual sites of Nazi concentration camps.

1377 Deploration (French). A musical setting of a poem that laments someone’s death. Deschamps’s poem “Armes, Amours” on the death of Machaut (d. 1377), set by F. Andrieu

1525 Dump (England): Lute, keyboard, and viol laments from the sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries. “My Lady Carey’s Dompe” (ca. 1525).

1608 Lamento (Italian): A song of great sadness in Baroque Italian operas and cantatas. Monteverdi’s “Lamento d’Arianna” in L’Arianna, 1608.

17^th-18^th Centuries. Apotheose (French): A work glorifying a deceased composer. Couperin’s “L’Apotheose de Corellie” (1724)

17th-18th Centuries. Plainte (French): Certain seventeenth to eighteenth-century French works which use unusual techniques to portray sadness (e.g. downward glissando on the violin).

1600–Present. Tragic Opera. Opera’s massive combination of vocalists, orchestra, elaborate sets and costumes, staging, and complex plots engage the audience into stories of dramatic proportions. Suicide after the loss of a love is a frequent plot in opera. Class examples of tragic opera include Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), Verdi’s La Traviata (1853), and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865) with its “Motif of Death.”

17-19^th Century African and Caribbean funeral rites: Typically, three days of dancing, singing, and playing instruments helped transition the spirit to its new world. Slavery brought increasingly rigid restrictions. The days were shifted to shorter periods of time, and then to night. Dancing and playing of instruments was banned, in some places, by law. The unaccompanied spiritual grew out of these.

17^th-20^th Centuries. Tombeau (French): Meaning tomb or tombstone, a miniature memorial piece. Gaultier’s “Tombeau des Mademoiselle Gaultier” for lute (1655); Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” for piano (1914-17).

18th-19^th Centuries. Spirituals (African vocal music within Euro-centric, American context): Songs by and for slaves, expressing grief, sorrow, faith, and hope. Enormous impact on American music. “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” “In My Trials, Lord Walk With Me.”

19^th Century- Present. Gospel Songs. (American): Protestant songs of faith. Developed from the sol-feg shaped note tradition, into revival songs, and blended with popular music styles into praise choruses. “It Is Well,” by Horatio Spafford (1874), and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” Thomas Dorsey (1932), “Because He Lives,” William Gaither (1971).

19th-20th centuries. Blues (African-American): Vocal and instrumental music created out of the slave spirituals, less spirituality, more about the hardships of everyday life and love. Regional styles, such as New Orleans, Chicago, Country Blues. Artists include Charley Patterson, Blind Boy Fuller, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Ma Rainey, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, and B.B. King. Basis for many other jazz genres: boogie-woogie, jug band, rhythm and blues, rock, soul, hip-hop, and rap.

Renaissance – Present. Almost any other genre of Western music includes pieces written out of, or expressing some type of grief/loss. They may be instrumental or vocal, choral or symphonic, folk or classical, rap or religious. Countless examples can be found in country ballads, soul, hymns, liturgical forms, gospel, folk music, top-40 music, music theater, cinematic music, patriotic, holiday music, and world music. Such examples may be have written, performed, or experienced within contexts of loss and grief. Examples are given throughout this book, particularly drawing from popular styles that likely will be easily recognized by and accessible to this book’s readers.