Put into a frame of stanzas, surrounded with understood formulas and familiar images, the inexpressable finds voices. The texts (many of them ORAL, only collected and written down in the 19th and 20th centuries) are Stories, and their performance/presentation is often LAPIDARY: words and phrasing just so, and meant to be listened to. The words alone demand one level of understanding, and how they are TOLD or CONVEYED is potentially another level of complexity.
Music is deeply linked to the culture in which it's meaningful. The music we'll examine tonight is all aimed at AUDIENCES, and sometimes there's a challenge for us in understanding those audiences, and grasping the POWER of a particular metaphor or turn of phrase or formula.
When I first began to go through my collections to find the essential examples I found more than a hundred that just HAD to be included, to explore important facets of "music of D & D", and two years ago I ruthlessly reduced that to 20-odd, and 70-some minutes of music. This year I've trimmed still further, leaving out a few that it was very painful to discard --and ignoring a whole host of genres that I regret: most of the murder ballads are gone (despite their vital importance as admonitions to the insufficiently wary: if your name is Polly or Omie, don't get up behind your lover on his horse...), there are no Corridos to represent the celebration of the lives and deaths of bad men or tragic circumstances, there are none of the Rock'n'Roll and Pop death anthems (Leader of the Pack, Teen Angel...), disease songs (Greek TB, AIDS, VD [Streets of Laredo], plague), or New Orleans funeral music, to say nothing of the "classical" approaches.
What I'll try to do is let the music speak --provide bits of context and explanation where necessary, but I can only hint at the dimensions of the endless and bottomless possibilities of musics of death and dying.