When we get goosebumps at a concert, when our eyes tear up at the words we hear spoken onstage, or when we hold our breaths out of excitement during some other type of performance, what we’re experiencing are one-of-a-kind moments that can’t be reproduced in all their aspects—or, for that matter, repeated in exactly the same way. The following pages invite you to explore how art’s fleeting nature affects us, how human beings repeatedly use the most varied cultural techniques in an attempt to capture the ephemeral, how music and suicidal thoughts relate to each other, and why our awareness of our own finite nature so frequently takes a back seat.
Trauernde Stimmen. Ethnographische Notizen zum musikalischen Umgang mit dem Tod
