The Theatre of Death: Noble Funerals with Music in Early Modern Europe

11-13 April 2025, International Virtual Conference
Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini
Conservatorio ‘Nino Rota’, Monopoli
Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin

The Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, the Conservatorio ‘Nino Rota’, Monopoli, and the Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin are pleased to invite submissions of proposals for the symposium «The Theatre of Death: Noble Funerals with Music in Early Modern Europe», to be held from 11 to 13 April 2025.

The public nature of the funerals of noble elites was a new phenomenon in Early Modern Europe: one, indeed, that was both closely linked to the birth and development of public opinion as well as to the transformation in how European urban spaces were used. In effect, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the deployment of sophisticated solemn devices in conjunction with the performance and representation of rituals.

Information about these important events is preserved in a variety of printed and handwritten records, among them chronicles, funeral orations, and gazettes. Moreover, the presence of music is frequently documented within such sources; these provide details about the liturgical, acoustic, conceptual and performative aspects of music, as well as insights into the collective imagination and evolution of mentalities.

This political and memorial instrumentalisation of death is equally underpinned by a conception of ritual, whereby these ceremonies served as a form of theatricalised liturgy that also involved the recipients of the celebrations. The social status of the spectators was thus central to the production and reception of these ritual practices.

By combining a comprehensive methodology with a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach — one that encompasses social history, the cultural history of art, urban musicology, and historical anthropology — the present conference aims to explore the long history of funerary cultural practices designed to assert and perpetuate power.

Taking music and sound as a point of departure, it seeks to examine the meaning, perception, and transformation of these funerary events that were not only at the heart of the ritualisation of the urban space but were also where the different strata of society intersected.

This conference is open to researchers of all backgrounds, whether musicologists and musicians or historians and researchers in other fields including (but not restricted to) cultural anthropology, the figurative arts, literature, and architecture. Paper proposals on any relevant subject are welcomed, including the following:

Music in printed descriptions and handwritten reports concerning the celebration of noble funerals (social typology, political communication, sonic meanings).
The relationship between music and ritual, as well as the apotropaic intentions of funeral ceremonies.
Death as spectacle: for instance, topics focused on mausoleums, catafalques, the rhetoric of funeral symbols as the art of persuasion, and the preservation of memory.
Music and funerary rites (repertoires, performance practices in street processions, in churches or palaces) and their material conception (the forces involved, their composition, their deployment).
Funeral music and urban elites (social and anthropological structures).
Music and funeral rituals for female elites (particularities, differences and/or similarities with the ceremonies offered for their male counterparts).
The involvement of the Catholic Church in the organisation of funeral rituals and the social, political or technical role of the organisers (patrons, princes, ecclesiastics, gentlemen).
Liturgical-musical rites in absentia corporis and in presentia corporis (meanings and elaborations).
The impact of the Wars of Religion on the form of funerals.
Funeral music, rites and public or private urban spaces as theatres of ceremonial, and their staging.

The official languages of the conference are English, French, Italian and Spanish. Papers selected at the conference will be published in a miscellaneous volume.

Papers are limited to twenty minutes in length, allowing time for questions and discussion. Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words and one page of biography.

All proposals should be submitted by email no later than Sunday 16 February 2025 to <conferences@luigiboccherini.org>. With your proposal, please include your name, contact details (postal address, e-mail and telephone number) and (if applicable) your affiliation.

The committee will make its final decision on the abstracts by the beginning of March 2025 and contributors will be informed immediately thereafter. Further information about the program and registration will be announced after that date.

For any additional information, please contact: Dr. Massimiliano Sala

Scholarly Committee: Galliano Ciliberti (Conservatorio ‘Nino Rota’, Monopoli), Roberto Illiano (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini), Pauline Lemaigre-Gaffier (Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin), Fulvia Morabito (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini), Jorg, Morales (Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin), Massimiliano Sala (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini)

Keynote Speakers : Galliano Ciliberti (Conservatorio ‘Nino Rota’, Monopoli)j, Wolfgang Marx (University College Dublin)j, Jorge Morales (Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin)

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Jeudi 26 Septembre, 2024