Lament: a ritual of letting go (part 2)
The bird of grief
This is the second in a little series of essays documenting the development of my project ‘Lament: a ritual of letting go’.
The bird of grief
A lament is grief expressed through song. It is an intentional and articulate gesture of connection — of the singer to the one that has died, of the singer to their own grief, of the singer to and within the community that shares in this grief and in this act of memorialisation. Beyond rural pockets and the dwindling memories of old women, we have largely lost the art of the lament within Western culture. Here in England, we do not sing anymore and we have pushed death out of our homes. What little ritual remains is most likely bound up in a condolence book or an Order of Service. We grieve behind closed doors, perplexed and isolated by the unfamiliar emotions.
The ancient Greeks would have been appalled. In her book Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature, Gail Horst-Warhaft describes the liminal aspect of lament, opening up or smoothing the boundary between the living and the dead:
From Homeric times, [the lament] was linked with burial as a necessary part of the geras thanontōn, the privileges of the dead. To leave someone aklauton athapton (unwept and unburied), as Elpenor reminded Odysseus on his visit to the underworld, was not only to deprive the dead person of his rights as a human being, but to offend the gods and thereby to turn the dead into a threat to the living.[1]
In the Iliad, with death upon every other page, we witness the possibilities of a full and loving expression of grief, according to the conventions of class and gender. Patrocles, for example, is lamented by Briseis, the slave girl; by Achilles, his lover, who is covered by ‘the black cloud of sorrow’; and, in turn, by Thetis, Achilles’s Nereid mother. At Patrocles’s funeral ceremony, Achilles leads the mourners in their lamenting and then brings it to a close, saying, ‘Even in lament, there can be enough’. We learn here of the lament’s therapeutic capacity — if given proper time and space — to restore us to our upright and articulate selves:
After Achilles had taken full satisfaction in lament
and the passion for it had left his heart and limbs, then
he rose from his chair and, taking his hand, pulled the old man [Priam]
to his feet, pitying the grey head, the grey beard,
and spoke, addressing him in winged words...[2]
But these are men for whom action comes easily and agency is assured. Elektra, by contrast, is locked in a state of furious grief, unable to avenge her father’s murder, and the lament becomes her weapon. In the preface to her translation of Sophokles, Anne Carson writes, ‘There is only one thing she can do. Make noise. So Elektra talks, wails, argues, denounces, sings, chants and screams from one end of the play to the other.’
ELEKTRA:
Never will I leave off lamenting, never. No.
As long as the stars sweep through heaven.
As long as I look on this daylight.
No.
[...]
Lament is a pattern cut and fitted around my mind—like the bird who calls Itys! Itys! endlessly, bird of grief, angel of Zeus.
O heartdragging Niobe, I count you a god:
buried in rock yet always you weep.[3]
* * * * *
Laments abound in the classical music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods: Dido’s Lament; Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa; Dowland’s catalogue of sad songs; the many settings of Jeremiah’s lamentations, from Gesualdo to Couperin... These laments are formally strict, utilising descending melodic gestures that mimic the downward fall of a sigh and which are held in careful tension against the other lines (by the ascending struggling against the descending, dissonant suspensions, or the vortex of a slow-looped sob) to convey the pain of grief and the impossibility of easy resolution. The aspects of breath and improvisation are key — this is music that is still spontaneous and febrile. But as the Enlightenment sensibilities of reason and individualism take hold, song in general becomes sublime, wrenched away from the blood and guts of life and death. We see the gap widen between notated and oral traditions, between the professional and the amateur singer, and between the formal and the communal spaces in which we sing. Later, the secular march of modernity deals another blow to the lament: ritual is left to the church, and tradition is left cowering in strange corners.
Perhaps at some level we knew that we were losing something valuable for, as the lament disappeared from our own rituals, a growing body of scholarship on and documentation of the lament tradition within other cultures emerged. From the moirológhia of contemporary Greece to the songs of the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, the lamentation genre is understood to include ritual wailing, sung-texted-weeping, keening, mourning songs, dirges, eulogies and elegies. As Steven Feld and Aaron A. Fox put it, whatever the tradition, these ‘Performed acts of remembering oppose the imagined horror of forgetting’[4].
The modern Greek word for lament, moirolói, is composed of two ancient words: μοῖρα + λέγω, or moira (meaning portion and destiny; Moirai are the Fates) and logos (speech or word). Singer Sophie Fetokaki explains: ‘to perform a moirolói is to tell one’s fate, or the fate of another. And in the telling, to grieve.’[5] A lament, she says, is:
a technology of affect transformation. It takes feelings of grief, melancholy, loss, and metabolises them into burdens we can bear. It does this by making our burdens shared, by setting them within a collective context in which we are all moving towards the same horizon.[6]
Just as the Fates spin the threads of human destiny, so the moirologhístres use their voices to spin the thread of a single life into the broader oral history of a community. The moirológhia of Mani are resolutely place-bound, using detailed topographical imagery of this village, this tree, this road, to situate the individuals (just as much the singer as the sung-for) in their land. The vocal phrases are long, tensile carriers of a carefully crafted text; the modal pathways elaborated with extraordinary filigree.
The songs of the Kaluli people of Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, reflect the topography of the rainforest. According to Steven Feld, who studied and recorded the music of the Kaluli from the mid-1970s for several decades, ‘Kaluli people think of themselves as “voices in the forest.” They sing with birds, insects, water. And when Kaluli sing with them, they sing like them. Nature is music to Kaluli ears. And Kaluli music is naturally part of the surrounding soundscape.’[7] Not only do they sing like birds, but at their death they take bird form, as is illustrated by the myth of ‘the boy who became a muni bird’. The plaintive, descending cry of the muni bird (Ptilinopus pulchellus) provides melodic inspiration for several types of Kaluli song that express loss or abandonment or separation. In Feld’s description of sa-yalab, we find the universal hallmarks of a lament:
The process of performing sa-yalab wailing as dulugu ganalan [‘lift-up-over sounding’] involves two or more women simultaneously voicing personal memories, thereby situating their immediate emotions, their relationships to each other, the deceased, and those listening, and their social biographies in a layered collaborative text-voicing.[8]
To reference these cultural practices so remote from our own is to tug at the threads of commonality, no matter how flimsy, and to invite a reimagining of how, through song, the grieving may anchor themselves in a community and a landscape that is rich with memories.
Death is ever-present and yet increasingly held at arm’s length: pandemic policy insisted that we keep our distance from the expiring and Assisted Dying attempts to tidy death away in a clinic. As we reckon with the aftermath and implications of all this, how can we refresh our intimacy with the fundamental human destiny? How, as the old rituals lose their grip, can we find ways in which to mourn together? The lament offers us one way to afford the dead their privileges and to give wing to ‘the bird of grief’. Whatever the song, whether bound to a tradition or unfurling in a strange new form of ritual, now is perhaps an opportune moment to unleash the power of lamentation.
‘Lament: a ritual of letting go’ will first be performed at the Aldeburgh Festival on 21 June 2025 (a late-night show on the longest day of the year) and at Klangspuren Festival in Schwaz, Austria, on 13 September 2025.
[1] Gail Horst-Warhaft Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (Routledge, 1995), 103.
[2] Homer Iliad XXIV, 513-24.
[3] Sophokles Elektra, translated by Anne Carson in An Oresteia (Faber & Faber, 2009), 50-51.
[4] Steven Feld & Aaron A. Fox ‘Music and Language’ in Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 23. (1994), 40.
[5] Sophie Fetokaki ‘Thoughts for Lucy: a foreword to ‘Lament in Three Parts’, 2020, https://lucyrailton.com/Lament-In-Three-Parts. Accessed 22 April 2025.
[6] Sophie Fetokaki, email message to author, 21 April 2025.
[7] Liner notes to the CD ‘Voices of the Rainforest’, released by Rykodisc in 1991, https://folkways-media.si.edu/docs/folkways/artwork/HRT15009.pdf. Accessed 22 April 2025.
[8] Steven Feld ‘Wept Thoughts: The Voicing of Kaluli Memories’, Oral Tradition, 5/2-3 (1990), 249.