Guest Speaker
Associate Professor of Music,
Case Western Reserve University
Case Western Reserve University
Location: Humanities 2441
Late medieval devotional culture displays a preoccupation with two contrasting fates that might await one after death: God might absolve one’s sins, granting eternal, peaceful rest, or He might punish those same sins with vengeful judgment. What God’s wrath might look like was given increasingly prominent and graphic form in the late Middle Ages by, among others, Dante and visual artists whose depictions of putrefaction, damnation, and eternal torment were truly terrifying. And yet late medieval liturgy and music for the dead did not, for the most part, invoke fear and dread but rather emphasized absolution and peace, using serene texts and sounds that resonated with the spare, penitential liturgy of the Septuagesima-Lent season that preceded Easter. This season, with its distinctive liturgical forms, was characterized by expressions of sorrow, contrition, and, yes, fear of divine retribution, but also by a collective mourning of Christ’s Passion that resonated profoundly with the mourning of individual souls in the liturgy of the dead. The musical and devotional resonance between mourning and penitence helps to explain an explosion of mournful and penitential music in the late fifteenth century that included the first Requiems, the first polyphonic settings of the Lamentations, and numerous prominent laments. Using a surprisingly uniform musical language, all of these compositions sought, in varying ways, to tip the scales of divine judgment in favor absolution rather than damnation.
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