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Thomas J. D. Neal, Music and death before 1650, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 2, May 2012, Page 349, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas065
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Now in its 124th year, the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society goes from strength to strength. At the society’s recent AGM it was reported that membership is back in triple figures; over half of the new members joining in the last 18 months are students. On 10 March 2012 the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Music played host to the PMMS’s annual conference, this year themed on ‘Music and Death before 1650’.
The conference opened with a session on Offices for the Dead in two chant traditions. Alexander Lingas (City University, London) spoke on the commemoration of the dead in medieval Byzantine chant, and treated the audience to a number of sung illustrations. Having outlined the contextual origins of the Office of the Dead in early medieval England, Matthew Cheung-Salisbury (Worcester College, Oxford) explored variant readings in a range of chant sources from the period.
The second session turned the focus to laments, elegies and ‘death songs’. In a paper titled ‘The Tombeau before the Tombeau’, Leofranc Holford-Strevens (Oxford) offered a thought-provoking survey of déplorations on the deaths of musicians. In addition to the well-known tombeaux for Josquin, he discussed Guillaume Crétin and Jean Molinet’s laments on the death of Ockeghem, and two ballades commemorating the death of Guillaume de Machaut found in the Chantilly Codex. Katherine Butler (St John’s College, Oxford) then examined types of secular ‘death songs’ at the Elizabethan court—funeral anthems, elegies, laments and staged death pageants. In particular, she explored the connection between the belief in heavenly harmony (musica speculative) and the association of singing with death, citing works by composers such as William Byrd, Richard Farrant and Francis Pilkington.
