Music played an essential role in medieval and early modern death rituals. From the agony to the last rites over the grave, chants and polyphony were woven together in deeply symbolical ways. Bastarda’s Ars Moriendi is a transfiguration of this ancient musical ritual: Paweł Szamburski, Tomasz Pokrzywiński, and Michał Górczyński reinterpreted centuries-old music for the dead, fragmenting the chants and disrupting the counterpoint of early polyphony. What is left, is a modern meditation on death and its paradoxes.
Bastarda’s Ars moriendi does not teach. It is a journey through the emotions of the human being, suspended between desperation and hope.
After the rite, those who are left ask themselves ‘Who will give our eyes a fountain of tears?’ (Quis dabit oculis nostris fontem lacrimarum), remembering what is lost. Mourning marks the end, but Bastarda’s interpretation points also at a new beginning of peace and, finally, silence.
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