J Boyce-Tillman: Music, Death & Dying

The Revd Prof. June Boyce-Tillman MBE: Music, Death & Dying

This paper will look at the range of music associated with death and dying. It will start with an examining of spiritual views of dying and death and how these may generate certain ways of musicking related to research into the process of dying. End of life care planning will be interrogated and examine the development of threshold choirs singing around the beds of the dying as well as the music thanatology harp and voice programmes designed for end of life care. It will look at a case study of a music therapist working with hospice patients. Other areas to be considered will be music in grief and mourning rituals , including keening, as well as a composer working on a piece about his own relationship to death and dying. This will include a short look at the origin of the Requiem Mass and the use recorded Requiems today as a way of handling grief. This contribution will constitute a brief survey of the range of musicking broadly associated with this field. June Boyce-Tillman MBE PhD, MA, LRAM, FRSA FHEA, FISM. Professor Emerita of Applied Music University of Winchester; Extraordinary Professor at North-West University, South Africa; Associate of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts, St Andrews University, Scotland.