Event: At the Threshold: Sound and Music in Sickness, Death, and Commemoration in Early Modern Europe

In early modern Europe, the experience of illness and death was profoundly mediated by sound. Music and other sonic practices accompanied the rites surrounding the sickbed, structured burial ceremonies, and shaped acts of commemoration for the deceased. Musicologists have long made art music for the liturgy for the dead a topic of research, but by focusing on major settings by prominent composers – particularly of the Requiem Mass – they have often overlooked this broader range of practices.

This conference seeks to remedy this lacuna by exploring the human experience at the passage between life and death as a process, rather than focusing on a given musical genre alone. It aims to map a wide range of sonic and musical practices and to investigate their functions and meanings. Attention is given to both institutional and private perspectives, considering settings such as confraternities and hospital chapels, as well as more intimate or domestic experiences of illness, dying, and mourning. In doing so, the conference seeks to highlight how ritualised sound and music operated not only as an ornament of liturgical practice, but also as a social, emotional, and even therapeutic force at the threshold between life and death.

Thanks to the collaboration with the Tage Alter Musik Regensburg, on May 15 participants will have the opportunity to hear the ensemble Cappella Mariana, directed by Vojtěch Semerád, perform early modern music for the dead from the chapel of Santo Spirito in Sassia, a Roman confraternity hospital whose choirbooks are now preserved at the Bischöfliche Zentralbibliothek Regensburg. A highlight will be the performance of Jean Richafort’s six-voice Missa pro defunctis.

The conference is organized within the framework of troja: Kolloquium und Jahrbuch für Renaissancemusik (troja-online.eu (external link, opens in a new window)), in collaboration with the Tage Alter Musik Regensburg and the research project Funeral soundscapes: Hearing Death Rituals in the Age of Confessionalization (c. 1550–c. 1650) (KU Leuven / Alamire Foundation, funded by FWO).