- Banning Eyre – “Dancing with Death: The Festive Funerals of Madagascar”
Perhaps it has to do with life on a large, remote island. Malagasy people have long felt an intense connection to the particular spot of land associated with their family, and there is a strong pull to die and be buried there, wherever else one’s life may have taken them. Family tombs are proudly displayed on homesteads, sometimes ornately decorated, often visible to passers by on the roadways. When a family member dies, lengthy rituals ensue, almost always involving music. At funerals in the rugged southwest,
tsapiky bands crank out high-energy electric guitar music literally for days—without stopping. The Antandroy of the far south sing passionate improvised funeral songs, known as
beko—a kind of local blues—to send off the the spirit of the newly deceased. The ubiquitous
marovany zither is used to bring about trance and facilitate communication with dead ancestors. And in the highlands, bones of ancestors must be removed from the tomb every few years to be rewrapped and reinterred—but only after a multi-day ritualized dance with the bones, accompanied by traditional music and the eating of oily rice. Nowhere in the world is music more a more cherished and visceral link between the worlds of the living and the dead. The paradoxical blend of death’s ravishing pain and Malagasy music’s frenetic joyfulness is a human dynamic every bit as surprising and unique as the island’s famed flora and fauna. In this talk, we enter the trance world of Madagascar’s musical culture of death, with particular focus on the logistics and and emotional passage that occurs at a three-day tsapiky funeral.
- Russell Rodriguez – “Funeral Ritual or Just a Mariachi Gig?”
As mariachi music within the United States has expanded throughout, what Américo Paredes referred to as “Greater Mexico,” the commercial value of this music style has increased extensively, and subsequently has been integrated into the cultural fabric of the United States. Mariachi music and musicians have been included in commercials (Jack in the Box Southwest Salad), movies (Jerry Maguire, Glory Road, The Heartbreak Kid), and are integrated into school curricula throughout the Southwest and many Latino populated communities throughout the nation. As a result, the popular imagination around mariachi music has influenced researchers (mostly in Mexico) to refer to the contemporary mariachi as commercial, commodified, or modern, breaking away from traditional aspects that define what mariachi music
was in 19th and 20th Century. This paper is to demonstrate that ceremony and ritual take on a different guise in the sense of presentation, participation and performance, sustaining the mariachi as a vibrant cultural practice. Funerals within the Mexicano, Chicano and Latino communities have afforded a fountain of work to working mariachi musicians, which include providing music for catholic masses, memorial services and music at burial sites. Since the inception of the
Misa Panamericana, mariachi musicians have been playing a version of this liturgical repertoire. A funeral repertoire, however, has not formally been developed, as that of the mass.
What is argued in this presentation is that the repertoire for funeral rites, instead of being a set of traditions constituting a specific ritual routine and repertoire, is rather a dialogic process in which musicians and mourners (family and friends of the deceased) are given the chance to remember and memorialize through popular songs that have specific meaning or a specific connection to the deceased.
- Joseph Schafer – “Ritual Necromancy: Heavy Metal’s Funereal History”
Heavy metal as a genre has a well-deserved reputation for morbidity. Its subgenres include “death metal” and “funeral doom”. Its most prominent bands —Metallica, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne’s solo career — fill stadiums with songs about the horrors of war, the inner psychic state of serial killers, the plight of those crushed by the demands of industry.
These song topics are not purely imaginative exercises, and owing to the genre’s roots in the blues, from which it derives its morbid tradition and diabolical foundation, metal has a confessional tradition — specifically a subsect of songs, spanning its subgenres, which function as funeral rites remembering those in the band.
These are haunted songs, by haunted bands. But they are a self-inflicted haunting. These songs include vocal takes from deceased band members, passages written by dead band members, and the like. We can see them as a kind of necromancy, a voluntary haunting, an invitation from the band to their former members to continue existing in their art and perpetuate both the band and its members living and dead in the memories of listeners. The metal funereal practice frequently brings out the best in its songwriters. It is a stream in the most white-hot and molten core of the culture. It is the heaviest metal.
Some examples:
Metallica used discarded compositions by their deceased first bassist, Cliff Burton, as well as a spoken word section attributable to him, for the song "To Live is to Die", the penultimate instrumental on their classic album 'And Justice For All', which turned 30 this year the band has a complicated relationship with this record, as do fans. Famously its bass is nearly inaudible, a choice which seems to be a sort of mourning for Burton's loss, a creative decision which has informed virtually all commercial metal record production since.
Norway's Mayhem, a problematic band for many reasons, used vocal takes from their deceased original singer, Per 'Dead' Ohlin (the irony was certainly not lost on them) on the song "Funeral Fog", the lead track on their debut album 'De Mysteries Dom Sathanas,' an album which is often cited as the high water mark of the black metal genre in 1994.
Seattle's own Bell Witch used scrapped vocal takes from their deceased drummer, Adrien Guerra, to create their 2016 album 'Mirror Reaper', which made several year-end lists.
- Paul Fess – “Lead Belly in the Archive: ‘Goodnight Irene’ and the Death Drive”
In this presentation I consider Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s haunting waltz “Goodnight Irene” for the ways its entrance into the American music archive was animated by a combination of racial attitudes about folk music and the Freudian death drive. Lyrically “Goodnight Irene” hinges on its juxtaposition of love and death, the singer’s pining laments and his willingness to take his own life. More than this, though, the song’s movement into the canon of American song indicates how impulses to preserve American cultural artifacts often took on the character of circumscribing notions of minority cultures while also giving the illusion of simply safeguarding this material for futurity, enacting what Jacques Derrida has termed the twin archival impulses of commandment and commencement. Within this rubric, “Irene”’s placement in the archive both preserves a piece of black American folk culture while implying definitions for what each of those terms signify. I consider three episodes in the circulation of “Irene”: it’s presence in a 1935
March of Time newsreel that featured Ledbetter, the Weavers’ 1950 hit studio recording, and a recording of one of Ledbetter’s concert performances of the song. The newsreel, which gives us the mythology of Ledbetter’s violent past and his discovery by John Lomax, has Derridean archive fever on full display, depicting the field recording of “Irene” being placed in what Jonathan Stern might call a “resonant tomb” at Library of Congress. Along these lines, the Weavers’ version of the song, recorded the year after Ledbetter passed away, continued its homogenization by limiting the song’s references to death
