A Gradual Farewell with music: Exploring the role of music in bereaved people’s everyday lives in facing the death and dying of a loved one.

Abstract

Bereavement is a universal human experience, yet the ways people live with loss are profoundly shaped by everyday practices, relationships, and their cultural environments. This thesis explores the entwinement of music, sound, and musicking in experiences of bereavement, focusing on musical practices, memories, listening, and most importantly how everyday engagement with music enables people to live alongside loss. It centres the debates around musicking as a nuanced and relational ‘doing’ of music that not only involves performance or listening, but also encompasses the social, emotional and material relations that define one’s identity across their life
course. By examining how individuals incorporate music into their everyday lives following bereavement, this thesis seeks to illuminate the ways in which sound mediates connections between the living and the dead, presence and absence, continuity and change. Drawing on twenty-five qualitative narrative interviews with bereaved individuals across the United Kingdom, this study situates music within the ordinary settings of daily life such as homes, churches, kitchens, and community spaces, where the sounds of the past and present meet. Adopting an interpretivist, constructionist framework, the study employs biographical narrative interviewing and
reflexive thematic analysis to examine how participants make sense of loss through everyday musical practices. Using a sociological approach, the research demonstrates that music enables biographical reconstruction, embodied re-attunement, and relational care after loss. Participants’ narratives reveal that through listening, playing, and participating, the bereaved re-story disrupted identities and relationships, shifting grief from rupture to continuity. The thesis advances a
sociological understanding of bereavement as a gradual and participatory process rather than a finite stage or clinical condition. It develops the concept of musicking to explore how individuals renegotiate their social worlds, rediscovering connection and belonging. Ultimately, A Gradual Farewell with Music, shows that a farewell is not an ending but an ongoing act of integration. Through music, the bereaved weave the presence of the absent into daily life, transforming silence into participation and absence into resonance, living with and through loss in the ordinary rhythms of the everyday.

Date of Award	20 May 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Sponsors	Economic and Social Research Council
Supervisor	John Troyer (Supervisor) & Megan Robb (Supervisor)