The present thesis is an investigation into the musical rhetoric of Protestant funeral music in seventeenth-century Germany. The study begins with an exposition on the present state of musicological inquiry into occasional music in the Baroque, focusing primarily on ad hoc funeral music. Because funeral music is not discussed in any of the basic music reference works, a cursory overview of existing critical studies is included. The survey of this literature is followed by a brief discussion of methodological obstacles and procedure with regard to the present study. Chapter Two comprises a general discussion of Protestant funeral liturgy in Baroque Germany. Although numerous examples of the Divine Service in the Lutheran Church have survived the seventeenth century, not a single order of service for the funeral liturgy from the period seems to exist. This chapter provides both the social and extra-liturgical background for the music as well as a plausible Lutheran funerary liturgy based on documents from the period and modern studies. Prosopopoeia, the rhetorical personification of the dead, is the subject of Chapter Three. After examining the theoretical background of this rhetorical device, from Roman Antiquity to the German Baroque, the trope is examined in the context of funerary sermonic oratory. The discussion of oratorical rhetoric is followed by an investigation into the musical application of the concept of prosopopoeia in various styles of funerary composition, from simple cantional-style works to compositions in which the personified deceased assumes certain physical dimensions. Chapter Four includes an examination of various other musical-rhetorical figures effectively employed in funeral music. Also treated in this chapter are musica1-rhetorical aspects of duple and triple metre, where triple metre in particular, depending on the text, can be understood figuratively, metaphorically or as a combination of both. As this chapter makes clear, owing to the perceived antithetical properties of metre and certain figures, musical rhetoric was often used to illustrate the distinction between this world and the next. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate

Music plays an important role in Mexican funeral ceremonies, acting as a vehicle for men to acceptably express emotions of bereavement. As an important symbol of mexicanidad (Mexicanness), mariachi music is often used in traditional Catholic funerals, ritualizing grief equally as a mourning of loss and a celebration of the life of a deceased person. Although a form of popular music, mariachi's secular songs go through a process of sacralization, becoming meaningful sites for experiencing grief. As a musical expression of Mexico's idealized gender norms mariachi opens an aesthetic sphere for masculine grief to be expressed, experienced, and socialized in an acceptable form. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the musical mediation of masculine grief, experienced and ritualized within funeral ceremonies, and observed through an ethnographic study of Mexican immigrant communities.

Although Magdeburg cantor Heinrich Grimm was frequently listed among prominent musical figures of the early seventeenth century such as Heinrich Schütz, Johann Hermann Schein, and Michael Praetorius in music lexica through the nineteenth century, he has almost disappeared from modern scholarship. However, a resurgence in Grimm studies has begun in recent years, especially in the areas of biographical study and compositional output. In this study, I examine the yet unexplored music-analytic perspective by investigating the stylistic characteristics of Grimm's 1631 motet, Unser Leben wehret siebenzig Jahr'. Furthermore, I compare his compositional technique to that of his contemporaries and predecessors with the goal of examining the work from both Renaissance and Baroque perspectives.

This study examines the illustrations that appear at the Office of the Dead in English Books of Hours, and seeks to understand how text and image work together in this thriving culture of commemoration to say something about how the English understood and thought about death in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Office of the Dead would have been one of the most familiar liturgical rituals in the medieval period, and was recited almost without ceasing at family funerals, gild commemorations, yearly minds, and chantry chapel services. The Placebo and Dirige were texts that many people knew through this constant exposure, and would have been more widely known than other 'death' texts such as the Ars Moriendi. The images that are found in these books reflect wider trends in the piety and devotional practice of the time. The first half of the study discusses the images that appear in these horae, and the relationship between the text and image is explored. The funeral or vigil scene, as the most commonly occurring, is discussed with reference to contemporary funeral practices, and ways of reading a Book of Hours. Other iconographic themes that appear in the Office of the Dead, such as the Roman de Renart, the Pety Job, the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, the story of Lazarus, and the life of Job, are also discussed. The second part of the thesis investigates the musical elaborations of the Office of the Dead as found in English prayer books. The Office of the Dead had a close relationship with music, which is demonstrated through an examination of the popularity of musical funerals and obits, as well as in the occurrence of musical notation for the Office in a book often used by the musically illiterate. The development of the Office of the Dead in conjunction with the development of the Books of Hours is also considered, and places the traditions and ideas that were part of the funeral process in medieval England in a larger historical context.