Music gives specific meanings to our lives, but also to how we experience death; it forms a central part of death rituals, consoles survivors, and celebrates the deceased.

Introduction
Wolfgang Marx
Part I. Facets of Ritual: Requiems and Other Funeral Music
1 Construction and Instruction: Medieval and Early Modern Masses for the Dead
Miriam Wendling
2 Commemorating the Elite Body in the Fifteenth Century
Alexandra Buckle
3 Types of Mercy and Non-liturgical Dramaturgy: The Musical Requiem as a Concert Piece
Wolfgang Marx
Part II. Negotiating Memory and Loss
4 'Aber auf einmal...': Death, Distance, and Intimacy in Song
Matt BaileyShea
5 Manifestations of Death in the Music of Johannes Brahms
Nicole Grimes
6 Through the Tears of Others: Staging Grief and French Identity in Interwar Musical Theatre
Jillian C. Rogers
7 Leaving the Table: Intimations of Mortality in Leonard Cohen's Late and Posthumous Work
Richard Elliott
Part III. Reflecting Death to Re-Evaluate Life
8 Death in Music and Music in Death: Reflections on Mortality and Listening in the Performances of Marino Formenti
Peter Edwards and Uta Sailer
9 The Day the Music Died: Searching for New Practices of Sharing in the Aftermath of the Death of a Composer in Western Art Music
Mieko Kanno
10 Imagining an Undead Carnival: Psychobilly Fantasies of an Idealistic Afterlife
Kimberly Kattari
11 The B-52s, Loss, and Defiance
Fred E. Maus
Bibliography
Index