ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which haunting appears in song and music from the haunting of Theodor Adorno by the ghost of Schoenberg to the role of the ghost in the border ballads. It reviews the question of 'nightvisiting' in song – folklore songs which express the return of the dead to us at night and the ways in which song expresses certain kinds of English landscape. The social realities of rural industry, agricultural decline and capitalisation were subsumed into the musical traditions of northern landscapes. The chapter considers some of the great English composers of the twentieth century, such as Britten, who were themselves haunted by ghostly motifs which appear time and time again in their music. It explores the way in which Britten performed and recomposed the ghost stories of Henry James. The new ghost traverses the meadows of locust and its nakedness is reflected in the nakedness of the trees and the birds.
