Composing Illness, Death, and Dying: Establishing Music as Narrative Medicine

Abstract: Acts and events constituting music vary widely in form and function, but music itself is a nearly universal human behavior and experience. Music communicates and translates elements of human experience that defy linguistic description and is therefore uniquely poised to deepen the experience of absorbing, interpreting, and being moved by stories of illness, death, and dying by providing access to narrative elements beyond the reach of verbal text. And yet, despite a broad expansion of scholarship within the arts and humanities over the last 25 years, music remains an underexplored discipline with respect to narrative medicine—until now. This paper presentation will address this gap by presenting a novel method for translating the fundamental skills of narrative analysis to a musical medium, offering a detailed framework for engaging with music as narrative medicine under the guidance of an instructor with expertise in both music and medicine, illustrating the remarkable potential of music as an artistic medium for more deeply exploring stories of illness, death, and dying using excerpts from Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder [Songs on the Death of Children], and demonstrating the implementation of a medical humanities seminar curriculum exploring music as narrative medicine with medical students. Music as narrative medicine is a powerful exercise in exploring and developing what Matthew Ratcliffe and Isabel Wilkerson have called radical empathy—an opportunity to explore another’s lived experience of illness, death, and dying from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. We need only listen to that which already surrounds us.

Keywords: Medical Humanities, Narrative Medicine, Music and Performing Arts