“A Sweet but Grave and Sad Melody”: Music and Emotion in Exequies in Post-Tridentine Italy

Abstract

This article investigates the relation between music and emotions at exequies in Italy between ca. 1560 and ca. 1660. Mapping the lexicon used to describe music in funeral books, I highlight the coexistence of two diverging semantic domains, sadness and sweetness. Their juxtaposition corresponds to an aesthetic principle that informed the conceptualization of the entire ritual's artistic setup—as divided between the mournful and the pleasurable. Reading funeral orations, moreover, I show that the ambivalent terms with which the experience of exequial music was verbalized mirrored an ambivalent conception of the liturgy for the dead and, ultimately, of death itself.