When did funeral songs become a thing?
Perhaps ironically, there’s nothing that pulls the importance of music in life into sharper focus than in the face of death. Indeed, the songs you want played as your final farewell to the world can take up a lot of space in your mind, as it’s a meticulous choice.
Some people want a song to suit the sombre and reflective mood – ‘Tears in Heaven’ by Eric Clapton is often a popular track for this reason – while others want to go down the celebratory, if comedic road, through something like ‘Highway to Hell’ by AC/DC. In a lot of ways, the selection of tunes you pick is often what you will come to be remembered by, even once swathes of time have passed, so it shouldn’t be a decision you rush through in one night.
But when the morbid curiosity has got the better of you and you do sit down to consider your sonic options, it might also get you thinking about the history of the whole tradition in the first place. Playing music at funerals has become so second nature in the functioning of our lives – and, of course, deaths – that we don’t really consider why we do it anymore. Who actually decided that playing a song would be a fitting representation of someone’s entire life?
In actual fact, when we say that the idea dates back as long as time itself, that’s not really an exaggeration. Our most ancient ancestors – as in the cavemen – inadvertently spearheaded the notion of funeral music by using their voices to wail and sing to commemorate their fallen friends and family. Obviously, time and evolution have done a lot of heavy lifting since then, but it just proves that the power of music has always been in our souls in some form.
How did funeral songs evolve to what we know now?
The Greeks and the Romans shifted the scene a lot in terms of popularising many of the aspects of life that we would be nothing without now, and not least in terms of music at funerals. Those guys were big believers in the power of music to cleanse your soul of sins, and although that overtly religious component may not be as pressing now, it did a lot in moving the tradition forward into something everlasting.
Hurtling forward in time, one of the most significant advancements came during the renaissance and baroque periods, when music began to be composed for the specific purpose of funerals. That ultimately gave birth to things like requiems and other classical movements – in order words, music designed to mourn the dead – which we still lean on now to a certain extent, albeit with a much broader scope than it used to have.
With our whistlestop historic tour now bringing us straight to the present day, we can see just how much the art of playing songs at funerals has always been an essential component of our lives, despite it taking various different forms over time. Granted, the cavemen could never have imagined that ‘Highway to Hell’ would now be a popular choice, but that also directly shows the power that music commands. It quite literally resonates in every note of our lives, ranging from birth to death.
