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Book Series
Speculum musicae, vol. 63
The Theatre of Death
Noble Funerals with Music in Early Modern Europe
Grégoire Bauguil, Galliano Ciliberti, Jorge Morales (eds)
- Pages: approx. 400 p.
- Size:210 x 270 mm
- Illustrations:49 b/w, 10 musical examples
- Language(s):English, Italian, French
- Publication Year:2026
- € 145,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-62726-7
- Hardback
- Forthcoming (Dec/26)
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This volume analyses the development and reception of funerary practices designed to assert and perpetuate power.
Subject(s)
BIO
Grégoire Bauguil holds a PhD in musicology from the Universities of Poitiers and Pavia (Cremona). His thesis focuses on musical modes in France and Italy between the Renaissance and the Baroque periods. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin (Paris-Saclay) and is working on patronage in music in France through the study of dedications in printed works (1550-1650).
Galliano Ciliberti is a Professor of History of Music at the ‘Nino Rota’ Conservatory of Monopoli. He obtained a Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of Liège and a Post-Doctoral degree at the EPHE in Paris. He has received several contracts as research director funded by the National Research Council, he was a research fellow at the University of Pavia, and has obtained several teaching contracts at the University of Perugia, Paris and Bari.
Jorge Morales holds a PhD in Musicology from Sorbonne University and La Sapienza University of Rome. He currently holds the chair of junior professor at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin (Paris-Saclay). He has published Sigismondo D'India et ses mondes, un compositeur italien d'avant-garde (Brepols, 2019), co-edited the volume Il Cardinale. Maurizio di Savoia, mecenate, diplomatico e politico (1593-1657) (Carocci, 2023) and edited the collective volume Les cardinaux et l’innovation musicale à l’époque moderne (Classiques Garnier, 2024).
Summary
The public nature of funerals for the noble elite was a new phenomenon in early modern Europe. During this period, sophisticated, solemn rituals and theatrical ceremonies were deployed, in which music played an important role in the political, ideological and memorial instrumentalisation of death, in terms of its liturgical, acoustic, conceptual and performative aspects. Combining social history, cultural art history, urban musicology and historical anthropology, this volume studies the production and reception of these funerary practices designed to assert and perpetuate power. Taking music and sound as its starting point and spanning a long period of time (from the 16th to the 19th century), this work explores the meaning, perception and transformation of these funeral events, which lie at the origin of the ritualisation of urban space — a place where the collective imagination is forged and where the various strata of society at the time intersected.
