Death, Music and the Appropriateness of Emotions in Reformation England

In studies of the musical history of the Protestant Reformation, little attention has so far been paid to the theme of death. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that congregational singing as the prayer and spiritual sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving is usually seen as the musical ‘highlight’ of the Reformation. If only occasionally, however, Masses for the Dead and laments over the deceased were written by some major composers in the early modern period, for both public and private purposes. ¹ Of these compositions, a number of pieces of English Church music deserve special attention not only in relation to vernacular funerary rites, but also regarding the expression of mourners’ grief. ² While the Requiem Mass was no longer part of the sacred music repertoire in the terrain of the Protestant Reformation, the English liturgy in the form of the Book of Common Prayer (1549) contains a service for the Burial of the Dead, which was set to music in both monophonic and polyphonic styles. ³ Besides, under the auspices of the Reformation, which advocated the vernacular Bible, English composers wrote music for vernacular biblical texts describing dramatic scenes of dying or mourning. United tightly with languages of the vernacular liturgy and the Bible, these musical compositions express intensely the emotions involved in death. ⁴ Most of all, as we shall see, the technical devices used in these compositions demonstrate clear evidence of the influence of humanist rhetoric upon English church music in terms of the relationship between tones and words, which is ruled principally by the meaning and mood of liturgical texts chanted or sung. ⁵