Funeral Sentences
In my first ‘re-reading’ of Henry Purcell’s Music for the Burial of Queen Mary, I endeavour to bring this music out of its usual context: the occasion of the death of a benefactress of Purcell, the solemnity of a royal burial. In fact, a part of this work was not specifically written for this circumstance, but was composed earlier as incidental music for Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine. While this play was designated as a tragedy by Shadwell, its macabre humour and somewhat ludicrous excesses of horror have led others to qualify it as a black comedy. This same music was employed in an analogous manner by Stanley Kubrick: as the soundtrack for the opening credits of A Clockwork Orange (in an synthesized arrangement by Wendy Carlos).
This ‘re-reading’ integrates the text set by Purcell into the instrumental material through the intervention of the electronics. The original text consists of the Anglican funeral rite, derived from the book of Job, an episode of the Bible of an extreme violence and suffering. The quotation of Job was eliminated from the official liturgy of the English Church in 1965, a sign of our discomfiture in the face of suffering.
Man that is born of a woman
hath but a short time to live,
and is full of misery.
He cometh up, and is cut down,
like a flow'r;
he fleeth as it were a shadow,
and ne'er continueth, in one stay.
