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Music, Mortality, and Ritual: A Death Studies Symposium (15th May 2021): Call for Papers

1 March 2021
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Professor Douglas Davies FBA, Director of The Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University, invites your interest in this one-day exploratory symposium on the relationship between Music, Mortality, and Ritual with its prime focus on Music.

The Centre for Death and Life Studies, Durham University

Music, Mortality, and Ritual: A Death Studies Symposium

15th May 2021

Call for Papers

Deadline: 4th April 2021

For many cultures, music aligns with grief and funerary rites, helps with bereavement, forges connections between life and death, pervades fond personal memories, and assists cultural expressions of society in the presence of death. Amidst and in the aftermath of tragedy and conflict, the ritual-symbolism of music not only helps express collective grief but can be a means of opposing the cause of death, whether through accident, disease or political agency. And what of death and its influence upon musical creativity? How does music help embody individual and collective experiences of death, mark loss, foster mutual bonds, help frame emotions of loss, memory, and potential renewal of life, life values, and hope? What kind of ritual language does music speak to the human heart?

Here at our Centre, we invite you to join us to explore these and other issues in an open forum of scholars and practitioners. Through a wide range of contexts, cases, methods, and approaches, we aimed to foster a mutual flourishing of experience and understanding. Music, Mortality, and Ritual are, then, open for presentations that may have specific research findings, or work in progress to share or, indeed, life experiences that illuminate our human complexity and diversity as people who live with death.

Conference Format

This one-day symposium will be conducted online due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Individual presentations of 20 minutes with a following 10 minutes discussion are invited from academic and service-practitioners at any career stage. If, perhaps, you would simply like a 10-minute statement of work in progress, or to pinpoint a single idea or experience, we might also be able to take that on board.

Proposals

Please submit your abstract (from, say, 100 to 250 words) to:

Proposals should be submitted no later than 4th April 2021 and the Centre Symposium committee will notify their decision by mid-April. The Programme will be published on the Centre for Death and Life Studies website on 18th April 2021.

There will be no fee.

For all enquiries, or to make suggestions and provide feedback, please contact the organizing committee who are assisting the Centre Director in this event.

Organising Committee