Death and dying Music and grief

F rom th e C h a p la in

FINAL PASSAGES

"¥’"T’7r 7rAzt music do you want played t X / and sung at your funerali The V V question startled us at first.

A group of friends were discussing mu­ sic appropriate for particular life occa­ sions: birthdays, anniversaries, achieve­ ments, celebrations of homecoming, retirement. Then came the question about music and the end of life. In one sense, the question is quite familiar to

musicians who are called upon to plan funerals and memorial services. To paraphrase a famous hymn, “What language shall we borrow” to mark the final passage of human life? What shall confer dignity and final meaning that also echoes the faith of a community assembled to give thanks for a life re­ cently completed?

Some in the group thought immedi­ ately of songs of triumph, others of gratitude, others of rest and serenity. One of us desired the final chorale of Bach’s St. John Passion sung by a choir. The hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Ex­ celling” seemed sufficient to another. Still others spoke of using Palestrina’s “Sicut Cervus,” Vaughan Williams’s “O How Amiable,” Howells’s “Hymnus Paradisi,” or Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium.” One of the organists chose Messiaen’s “Celestial Banquet.” Obviously, many diverse convictions, musi­ cal and theological, were at play in our conversation.

If we had not been professional church musicians, the choices might have been very different. There would be the deceased’s favorite hymns. Many of us have played or sung the requested “The Old Rugged Cross” or “I Come to the Garden Alone.” More recently, some have requested popular contemporary praise songs, or secular love songs from certain periods of the person’s life. However wide the range of responses, our question prompts reflection about how and why music is related to grief and joy, gratitude and sorrow on the occasion of saying farewell to life itself. Apart from ritual songs such as the Kol Nidre, or chanted prayers from a Requiem Mass, what hymns, songs, or instrumental music reaches to the emotional depths required by the passage from life to death?

It is common these days to hear people talk about the “sound track” of their lives. For them music serves like a film score, ex­

pressing significant memories while supplying a narrative of what is experienced over time: childhood, family, friendships, loves gained and lost, as well as remembered moods of particular times and places. While nostalgia sometimes rules, my experi­ ence tells me that we need music that expresses emotions that ac­ company life passages through time. “Time like an ever rolling stream, bears all who live away . . . ” sings the familiar hymn.

Discussions of personal choices of music to mark the end of life reveal a set of tensions: between expressing an individual’s life and proclaiming the community’s faith in the face of human mortality. Consider what it means to come to final measures of a great piece of music, choral or instrumental. With the final ca­ dences or closing passage—whether triumphant or contempla­

tive—we begin to grasp the whole of the composition and, indeed, the en­ tire performance. Perhaps we hear again how the piece began and under­ stand it from the standpoint of its completion. Think of how that final chorus (“Worthy Is the Lamb” with concluding “Amen”) gathers up all the themes and the larger narrative of Handel’s Messiah; or of how the “In Paradisum” extends a serene blessing at the end of Faure’s Requiem, or how the joyous “Alleluia” seals all the stan­

zas of “For All the Saints.” Our lives flow and end like a complex piece of music. The joy

and the sadness, the pain and the hope, the suffering and the rest— the very ways in which music itself moves reveal how life itself is experienced. This is why music chosen to sound the final cadence of human existence is so important. What we sing and sound in the face of death and bereavement takes us to the edges of mystery and supreme art of living faithfully. As certain pas­ sages in some music bear the mystery of our existence in time, so each life resembles a symphonic form, whether tragic or glorious.

I love how John Dryden ends “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” in Handel’s cantata:

So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour, The trumpet shall be heard on high, The dead shall live, the living die, And music shall untune the sky.

Don E. Sauers

Discussions o f personal choices

o f music to mark the end o f life

reveal a set o f tensions: between

expressing an individual’s life and

proclaiming the community’s faith

in the face o f human mortality.

12 T h e A m e r ic a n O r g a n is t

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