So please help me welcome Professor Connell.

Music and death are present in every single society. Their universality is unquestioned. Yet the ways in which people respond to music and death differ widely across cultures. These variations not only tell how humans grapple with death, but also reveal how imaginative and resourceful we are in making sense of ourselves and the world through music. Today I will focus on three interconnected themes. First, how music functions within cultural practices surrounding death. Second, how Western classical music embraces dead composers. And third, how we share music on spatial and temporal dimensions for the afterlife of music. And I offer a case study on the last theme. The most familiar point of contact between music and death is the funeral, those moments when the dead are mourned, honored, and remembered. Across cultures, human death is almost always accompanied by ritual, and music frequently plays a central role. But funeral music itself varies dramatically from one culture to another. The observed musical differences are in atmosphere, tempo, volume, phrase shape, and emotional character. Even within the genre of funeral music as such, the range and diversity in these parameters are striking enough that it prompted ethnomusicologist Philip Tagg to question the notion of music as a universal language. In Western classical music, there are established conventions for how particular emotions are conveyed, an idea explored in fields such as music semiotics, topic theory, and musical rhetoric. These theories describe how specific musical characteristics become associated with emotions such as anger, joy, or anxiety that listeners within a shared cultural context can readily recognize. This is true in funeral music too, and particularly so. Some of the most, well, some of the most established expressive conventions of Western funeral music are set in a minor key, low and subdued dynamic level, slow tempo. The pitch range is typically confined to a narrow ambitus, often no more than the interval of a third, and lastly, it favors descending melodic motion. But not all the funeral music around the world shows these characteristics. For example, Taoist funeral rituals often involve very loud music. Musical lament from Central Africa can encompass a wide pitch range evoking vitality. One of the most often observed causes for difference originates from the cultural conventions surrounding the funeral as an event. Two issues are particularly relevant. The first concerns the emotions that are ritualized during the event. Funeral music is not solely about mourning the dead, it celebrates the life of the person. Every funeral negotiates both impulses, producing its own unique emotional mixture. In many Western contexts, people often plan aspects of their own funeral in advance to avoid the heavy solemnity that can otherwise dominate such ceremonies. The second cultural issue relates to the question of whose relationship to the deceased is being ritualized. This is closely tied to the question of who is responsible for organizing the funeral, since that role typically determines which relationships are foregrounded, often members of the close family. At the same time, funerals can also be public occasions that bring together a wide range of attendees, each with different connections to the deceased. This is one of the reasons why Requiem, the most prominent death-related genre in Western classical music, is such a versatile medium. It encompasses a broad spectrum of emotions and relational perspectives surrounding death. Tag, whom I mentioned earlier regarding the whole the wide range of funeral music, concludes emphatically that, quote, death is anything but universal when considered as a cultural phenomenon. We have seen not only how behavior and attitude towards death vary radically from one society to another, but also how such attitudes vary inside our own cultural sphere. For these very reasons, we have also been able to offer evidence suggesting that there is little or no structural correspondence between music associated with death in one culture and that of another. Studying funeral music offers a small window into the cultural specificity of what is often assumed to be a universal truth, meaning mortality. In reality, death is anything but universal in its meaning and expression, both culturally and individually, and the music surrounding it reflects this diversity. But what is even more striking, in my opinion, is the extraordinary imagination and ingenuity with which humans navigate the ongoing presence of death in life. With this in mind, I move on to my second theme: how Western classical music shapes the ways we live with its dead composers as a cultural practice. Classical music places exceptional value on the legacies of its departed creative figures, especially composers. It is unimaginable without them. Their creativity permeates the repertoire. Whether we encounter the music on the radio, in a podcast, or in a live performance, the living and the dead are seamlessly intertwined. In classical music, we coexist with past generations, bridging temporal distances through sound. Moreover, long-standing cultural tropes, whether in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, blur the boundaries between creator and creation, and between mortality and immortality. We live through these works just as they continue to live through us. To understand how this situation has emerged, I'd like to consider the education environment in which Western classical music has been passed down through generations. Classical music education places exceptional emphasis on communication through the notated score. Composing is routinely described as writing music, and the score itself is expected to be largely self-sufficient. For aspiring performers, crafting an appropriate interpretation of that score is regarded as paramount because the score is still widely understood to embody the essence of the work. Given the school's capacity to function as a communication medium, the composer's personal status, whether alive or long deceased, tends to matter very little. As I have argued elsewhere, classical music pedagogy promotes an attitude that notation serves as the primary conduit of information. Communication is imagined as tripartite. The school occupies the center, flanked by composer and performer, each attempting to communicate through notation. Classical musicians' training equips them with skills to master their instrument, read notation fluently, identify relevant stylistic conventions, and determine how best to combine material and style in a convincing performance. Conservatoire training has long been devoted to cultivating and refining these skills in every student. Yet, anyone who has learned to play an instrument knows that studying classical music is, for the most part, a solitary endeavor. Aside from the time spent rehearsing with others, the bulk of the work unfolds within a small triangle formed by the performer, instrument, and score. This process leaves very little room for the participation of anyone else, perhaps with the exception of a teacher, and certainly not for the composer. Paradoxically, this hermetic learning process also fosters remarkable creativity. The score opens an expansive space in which the performer can contemplate and shape their own voice by immersing themselves in the lines and dots on the page. In doing so, they learn to inhabit the space left by the composer, a space in which the composer becomes vividly present, sometimes more present than anyone physically nearby. The composer's mortality is not a limitation. It becomes an invitation to explore a realm of imagination that extends beyond the living, much in the way in which literary theory considers the death of the author coinciding with the birth of the reader. This may sound as though musicians function like shamans, bringing the dead back into the world. That's not quite the case, but it does point to one of the ways in which classical music cultivates an afterlife for its composers. I said that the small triangle of performer, instrument, and score promotes an attitude that the performer approaches the matter of creation on their own without anyone else involved, because the triangle lies at the heart of their personal creativity. Now, the same can be said of audience who can have their own niche of isolated creativity. We have observed some popularity surges after the death of iconic composers at the beginning of the 21st century, including Yannis Senakis, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, and Luciano Berrier, who have become somewhat more accessible since their death by acquiring a kind of commodity status whereby we relate to their music in our own ways rather than being informed how we should approach their music. What these examples show is that the death of a composer prompts a new cultural dialogue with the composer's work. There is a particular kind of creativity that becomes available with their death. That is distinct from other kinds of creativity found in the composer-performer or composer audience communication. Next, I shall explain these phenomena from a theoretical point of view using two types of sharing practice, one on the spatial dimension and the other over the temporal or diachronic dimension. I use the concept of sharing to explore how Western classical music cultivates an afterlife for dead composers. The funeral music practices discussed earlier exemplify spatial sharing in the sense that the exchange occurs among the people who are alive and attending the event at the same time. They may be geographically distant, yet they share the here and now of the unfolding event. Such environment is often collaborative and generative and provides fertile ground for what is often described as distributed creativity or for the creation of performance as event. Songwriting, jamming, and improvisation all emerge from this kind of shared co-present creativity. This collaborative mode also holds significant importance in contemporary classical music today. We experience all kinds of music through the modes of spatial sharing, even when listening to a recording, because we participate in the unfolding present of the performance. Yet, in classical music, creativity is typically seen to involve a much smaller degree of spatial sharing. I have already noted the solitary nature of a performer's practice, but this pales in comparison to the profound solitude in which most classical music composers write music. The division of labor between composer and performer, however, sets the stage for a different type of sharing once the composer dies. Sharing in the temporal domain or diachronic sharing is a more challenging idea to grasp. The living and the dead cannot share a physical space for communication. Yet, in Western classical music, such sharing becomes possible because practices of sharing through notation allow exchange between the individuals separated by historical time. In this sense, the creative mind of a deceased composer can remain active and perceptible. Next, I explore how a composer's death can trigger a shift from spatial sharing to diachronic sharing and how these different forms of sharing shape the long-term cultural life of classical music. To illustrate this, I examined a case of 20th-century American composer John Cage, comparing musical practices before and after his death. Throughout his long career, John Cage cultivated a distinctive public personality and helped shape a myth around his creative practice. At the heart of the myth was his pursuit of relinquishing ego and authorial control by using concepts such as indeterminacy and chance in his composition. This narrative has played a central role in sustaining his popularity and expanding his appeal across diverse artistic communities and audiences. It is well known that Cage was an avid collaborator, working closely with musicians, dancers, and visual artists. He was a pioneer in exploring forms of distributed creativity. Yet, for all his reputation for embracing values such as collaboration and indeterminacy, he retained the whole mark of the traditional Western art music composer. Even while remaining open and collaborative, he held firm and highly articulated aesthetic principles, compositional values, and working methods. In sharp contrast to the apparent surrender of control implied by his use of chance and indeterminacy, Cage maintained a strong sense of intention and authorship. He frequently complained that his music was misinterpreted and reacted strongly to claims that it was characterized by non-intention. More than 30 years after his death in 1992, a very different set of practices loosely connected to Cage's work has flourished alongside rigorous scholarship on his own creative output. These represent two distinct approaches, one involving posthumous reinterpretations of Cage's work outside of his original context, and the other featuring historical appraisal of what Cage himself shared with his contemporaries during his lifetime. My hypothesis is that a particular compositional tension in Cage's work has actively fostered diachronic collaborative emergence since his death. The tension within Cage's practice is unmistakable. On the one hand, his music expresses a desire to relinquish ego. On the other, despite this attempted self-abnegation, he consistently articulated strong views about what his music should achieve. Magnus Anderson uses the term med. Metacomposition to describe the underlying structuring practice in Cage's work that generates oscillations between intention and non-intention. According to Anderson, the three most significant features of Cage's metacomposition are one, Cage composes an overarching structure. Two, Cage subjects structural decisions to chance. And three, Cage intentionally strives to write non-intentional music. Recognizing metacomposition as a practice distinct from conventional music composition is illuminating because it opens up a new possibility within diachronically distributed creativity, meaning that metacomposition can function as a tool for composing performances. Practically speaking, the concept of metacomposition creates opportunities for musicians to develop a performance independently of the score or the documented collaborative practices associated with Cage himself. To illustrate how such diachronically distributed creativity can unfold, let us consider an example from Eight Whispus, a solo violin work by Cage. The work, this work, was first produced in 1985 as a series of eight short songs in style of Japanese haiku, and violinist Malcolm Goldstein asked Cage to produce a violin version of it. In the version for violin, the songs are subjected to layers of chance operations affecting bowing positions, bowing pressure, and some right and left hand techniques. And the song itself phases away into distance. Now I'm going to play the first song, starting from the original song melody, then adding one layer of chance operation at a time and repeating the process four times until the violin version is complete. In this way, you can experience Cage's intentional method for non-intentional results stage by stage. What you see here is the complete first song with all the arrows and little numbers are the chance operation additions, and you'll hear four versions of it. I would like to draw your attention to the striking rigidity and procedural procedural precision involved in achieving these sounds. Understanding them as options rather than instructions gives the performer not only discretion, but also a productive kind of uncertainty. Cage offers endless alternatives. The peace may be realized in multiple forms, each with a different quantity, quality, and character. This offer of freedom shifts the performer's attention somewhat away from the printed score as a fixed record of chance operations and towards the generative principles that produced it. Some impractical instructions lead to concrete instances where the generational procedures and the resulting notation do not align as process and outcome, and it brings many fault lines in performance. By prioritizing the generational principles, the performer may subsequently revise the score, at times to the point where the performed result no longer resembles the notation. Yet, this does not lead towards non-intentional music. Rather, intentionality is transferred to the performer who effectively assumes the role of meta composer. It is here that collaborative emergence occurs. Cage's meta composition acquires an independent life force in performance while the written composition remains fixed. I'm going to play some more repeats of the same song, starting with the last repeat I played, and a few more repeats following meta-composing principles. I think this process brings back some intention to the music within the bounds of non-intentional results. While Cage was alive, there was no meaningful separation between his composition and his metacomposition. The two operated as a single integrated practice. Only with the passage of time since his death has this distinction become visible, allowing each element and its creative potential to be considered independently. A defining feature of metacomposition is its capacity to renew a musical work through performance, and the process revitalizes the music. Once composition and metacomposition separate out, the latter acquires its own generative force in the present moment of performance. It becomes a structuring engine, structuring its own practice as Pierre Bourdieu would have said. Furthermore, Cage's pursuit of non-intentionality also causes productive disruptions in this structuring process. I see that the tension between intention and non-intention accelerates renewal. The score is the crucial artifact that enables the process of metacomposition. And it needs to be said that this kind of metacomposition exists in the work of many other classical music composers too, precisely because notation demands sustained engagement from its users. Through notation, musicians collaborate with past composers by engaging in acts of metacomposition. This is, in effect, how the long afterlife of a composer begins within the Western classical music tradition. New modes of sharing creativity with deceased composers have always emerged across the temporal domain. Historically informed performance practice is one prominent example of this phenomenon. But the shift in collaborative creativity is perhaps most perceptible at the moment of a composer's death. This threshold transforms collaboration from a synchronic exchange into a diachronic one. Diachronically distributed collaboration is, in fact, the dominant mode within Western classical music. From this perspective, classical music offers considerable space for creative engagement, and this may ultimately be one of the most plausible explanations for this culture's remarkable longevity. Of course, the dead do not speak or interact with us directly. So the notion of collaboration, which is usually understood as something synchronous, can only operate on a metaphysical level. But in this context, metaphysics is hardly abstract because memory enables diachronic exchange with the past. We often say that we remember music, but in a sense, music also remembers us. Jeremy Eichler describes it, quote, music's ability to trigger flights of memory is a phenomenon many people still experience. Yet it is not just we who remember music. Music also remembers us. Music reflects the individuals and the societies that create it, capturing something essential about the era of its birth. When a composer in 1823 consciously or unconsciously distills worlds of thought, fantasy, and emotion into a series of notes on the page, and then we hear those same notes realized in the performance more than a century later, we are hearing the past literally speaking in the present. In this sense, music can fleetingly reorder the past, bring closer that which is distant, and confound the one-way linearity of time. In these very ways, music shares a profound affinity with memory itself. For memory, by definition, also challenges the pastness of the past and the objective distance of history. To conclude, let us come back to the starting point of this lecture. Funeral music weaves memory into the moment, and each participant in their own way meta-composes the music they hear. There may be no universal music, but I would suggest that there is something universal in the act of shaping musical experience at a moment of loss. It says something about the power of music and why we have music across the world. Thank you.