Funeral Music

Associating various kinds of performing arts to the most important events occurring in people's lives is a common feature of human culture. Prayer staging, singing, and dancing are commonly met at solemn occasions such as births, initiation rites, marriages, and funerals, as well as more specific rites of passage as, for example, ordination in some churches. But perhaps the association of these rites and music is nowhere as frequently met as with funeral practices, except in those religious contexts where music as a whole is forbidden, such as in the most radical tendencies within Islam. Singing and instrument playing are universally conspicuous. In Western culture, funeral music has given way to a special musical genre that is commonly called the requiem, from the Latin form of prayers dedicated to the deceased in the Catholic Church.

Specialists in the field of rituals as applied to funeral procedures generally distinguish between three types of rituals: (a) rituals of separation: the deceased is said good-bye to by the community as he or she leaves the realm of the living through the words of an officiant (e.g., a priest or a prayer leader of some sort); (b) rituals of translation, from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead; (c) rituals of welcome, at the threshold of the realm of the dead, once again an officiant or a group of welcomers. Music, accompanied or not by songs, can be heard at every stage of the whole set of rituals. In the Catholic Church, the rituals of separation are perhaps the most important since the contemporary funeral corteges have relinquished the pageantry of ancient times and that the burial itself, being held in open air, is rarely an occasion for much singing and music playing. Moreover, except for prominent people, the funeral ceremonies of today are often reduced to some perfunctory praying and speaking. In most cremation ceremonies, however, records are played, which are chosen in accordance with the deceased's tastes. This now occurs also in some religious funerals.

Requiems, from Dufay to Britten

At the beginning and at the end of the sung Mass of the Dead, the officiant begins his last oration by the words “Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine” (Give him/her, Lord, eternal rest). The word requiem applies to a special kind of mass, to which many illustrious composers have given their names. Mozart is the best known of them. But others such [Page 483]as Verdi, Berlioz, and Fauré are also celebrated. During the early stages of Christianity, at funeral services, music for the dead was performed in plainsong. The first original Mass of Requiem, of which the score is now lost, is said to have been composed by Guillaume Dufay (1400–1474), a musician from northern France, for his own funeral service. But there are more ancient melodies associated to these Latin texts, such as Gregorian ones, dating back to the 7th century. Traditional liturgical music was often used for scoring the Requiem text. As a rule, the lyrics of the Mass for the Dead differ from those of the ordinary Mass. They begin with the word Requiem and replace the Gloria by a “sequential” beginning with the famous Dies irae (Day of Wrath), and the Credo by an Offertium. In the Agnus Dei section, the first line “ora pro nobis” is replaced by “dona eis pacem,” and the second one,“dona nobis pacem” by“dona eis requiem sempiternam.” A last section, “Lux aeterna luceat eis” (Let everlasting light shine on them) concludes the Mass.

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