Mourning Music - Eventalk with David Pascoe

David Pascoe, Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Utrecht, was the fifth guest of the Eventalks series on the 2nd of September 2015. The initiative was organized by the Organisatie Oudemuziek, in close collaboration with the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University and the Residenties in Utrecht programme. The series of talks took place during the Early Music Festival 2015 at TivoliVredenburg. The Eventalks consisted of a short (15 minute) spoken intervention by a thinker, scholar or teacher, accompanied by music that strives to guide us, ever so gently, towards the coming of the darkness.
"Purcell's 'Funeral Sentences' played a central role in mourning the death of the English monarch, Queen Mary; but what happens when such music is removed from its original context, and framed in garish new forms in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange? Might such inauthentic use cause us to mourn the violent death of early music; or does it, in fact, herald a bright new dawn?"