Sound, Music, Death

This seminar is an exploration of the roles of sound and music play in people’s attempts to grapple with death and its many auras. We will read literature from ethnomusicology, anthropology, and sound studies, and listen to musics from many parts of the world, so as to investigate how 1) the processes of aging, decay, and mourning; 2) metaphorical deaths including war and exile; and 3) imaginations of afterlives resound among the living.