Book excerpt: This book engages with the question of how music expresses and responds to the profound existential disturbance that death and loss present to the living. Singing Death ranges across genres from medieval love song to twenty-first-century horror film music. Each chapter offers readers an encounter with music as a distinct way of speaking or responding to human mortality. The chapters cover a wide range of disciplines: musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, history, philosophy, film studies, psychology and psychoanalysis. The collection is accompanied by a website including some of the music associated with each of its chapters.