Music Against Death: Languages of Loss, Mourning, and Memory in British Composers’ Musical Responses to the First World War, 1915-1921

Abstract

In 1930, Harvey Grace crystallised a myth that British composers remained silent in response to the First World War. Scholars of history and literature have since generated revisionist narratives of British war music; however, these reappraisals often fixate upon its socio-political, morale-boosting, and commemorative functions, overlooking compositions which confront the affective and existential dimensions of loss and mourning. Moreover, they privilege the extramusical and mimetic representations of warfare whilst eschewing detailed close readings of composers’ musical responses to the conflict.

Taking a reflexive approach to musical analysis grounded in the histories of war, death, trauma, and memory, this thesis surveys British composers’ responses to the First World War between 1915 and 1921. It explores their use of traditional languages of loss and mourning to mediate bereavement and demonstrates the ways in which composers ‘looked back’ to tradition in the face of symbolic collapse, thus locating music alongside poetry, literature, and visual art.

In addition, this thesis adopts the interdisciplinary frame of Douglas Davies’s ‘words against death’ phenomenon. Viewing musical language and rhetoric through a thanatological lens enhances our understanding of music as an innate and complex human response to mortality, and so this thesis invites the consideration of a ‘music against death’ phenomenon. Here, music functions not merely as consolation but as a symbolic and affective strategy for withstanding existential rupture. Within the historical context of the First World War and the fragile and contingent nature of modern subjecthood, the thesis positions music as a ritualised and aesthetic means of reconstructing identity and meaning in the aftermath of trauma.

Integrating musicology, thanatology, cultural history, and sociology, alongside the interdisciplinary realms of death, trauma, and memory studies, this research elucidates composers’ musical responses to loss and mourning in the First World War. It demonstrates their engagement with war death, illuminates new musical sites of mourning, and underscores the use of artistic languages of mourning in the process of bereavement. Drawing upon knowledge inherited from other disciplines, it encourages new methodological approaches to artistic cultures and humankind’s creative engagement with its own mortality.