A listener’s guide to Music in Medieval Rituals for the End of Life [playlist]
The music has been hidden—unseen and unheard—for centuries. Listen to the playlist and hear a historic soundscape unfold—songs of compassion and hope, created to accompany the final breaths of life.
Music in Medieval Rituals for the End of Life took seven years—searching through medieval manuscripts, transcribing their music notation, and writing the book. As a musician who has attended to loved ones during their final breaths of life, I was determined to recover the historic music created for those awful and awe-filled moments.
But even as I researched and wrote, I knew that the book was only the beginning. The music was never meant to be confined to the written page.
Singers from the University of Notre Dame now offer the first recordings, completed in the campus’s historic Log Chapel. A soundscape from a distant time unfolds while listening to these chants. Transcribed from manuscripts dating from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the chants acknowledge the suffering and pain that accompany death. But they also sing of a soul in motion—a soul journeying towards a loving creator and a place of hope and welcome. The following playlist highlights a selection of these chants, intended to accompany the final minutes of life, the last breath, and the time immediately following death:
The final minutes of life provided the time to tell the story of the Exodus—the Hebrew Bible narrative relating the Israelites’ escape from slavery. The experience of the Hebrew people was understood to parallel the experience of death. Just as the community of Israel escaped from captivity, so the soul escaped from the hard constraints of earthly life into heavenly freedom.
In the chant, the story of the Hebrew people (Psalm 113) is framed with a traditional Christian blessing:
May Christ receive you, who created you, and to the bosom of Abraham may angels lead you.
The Christian blessing and the Jewish narrative together form a single expression of reassurance and hope.
This chant brings the dying person into the center of the Christian story. The last words Jesus spoke (following the gospel of Luke) were sung on the dying person’s behalf:
Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit
The chant mimics the movement depicted in the text. With the words “into your hands” (in manus tuas), the melody leaps up, musically echoing the spirit’s leap—from the human body to divine hands.
The women of Aldgate formed a close community, and when one of their sisters was dying, they surrounded her with song. This chant was sung during the final breath of life. As it unfolded, it gently moved the sisters through the loss.
The chant begins by calling for help from angels and saints:
Come now and take this soul. Bring it to the Most High One.
It continues by offering a final blessing to the departing loved one:
May Christ receive you; may angels lead you.
It concludes with a final prayer, asking for peace:
Give them eternal rest, Lord.
When the final breath of their sister had passed, the women of Aldgate stood surrounding her. In a time of quiet prayer, before her body was cleansed and dressed for burial, they sang this chant:
Lord, have mercy
Christ, have mercy
Lord, have mercy
The simple words were familiar from their religious services; the graceful melody followed familiar patterns of breathing. Listen to the first words. The music gently rises and falls as the singers pass the melody back and forth. The final lines expand. As the opening melody mimics a gentle breathing pattern, the melody with the final words breathes more deeply.
The sister’s breath had stopped, but the community’s song continued, making their breath audible as sound.
The singing continued as the body was moved.
The elite, educated practitioners of Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican sang as they carried the body from the place of death to the church:
Direct my ways, Lord, my God
Let me walk in Your sight.
Did they sing in the voice of the one who had just died, whose soul was moving into the afterlife? Or was this a prayer for themselves, the ones who continued to move through the difficulties of earthly existence? Possibly both.
The medieval rituals blur the line between the living and the dead. Each person’s fate was the same; the need for help was the same: only time separated the living and the deceased.
Listen as the chant voices the words in conspectu tuo (“in your sight”). The melody ascends confidently, offering a reassuring musical image—God’s sight is broad and expansive, taking in any path a human might travel.
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I am deeply grateful to the University of Notre Dame for making the entire playlist freely available.
Featured image by Chris Linnett via Unsplash.
