Astrid Swan

My latest research article was published this week by The British Journal of Aesthetics. The article is titled Between Noise and Silence: The Grief of the Dying in Musical Compositions. In the article I define my concept of the grief of the dying and trace its appearances in Kaija Saariaho’s final composition HUSH (2023) and in SWAN/KOISTINEN EP (2019).

Here is the abstract for the research article:

As contemporary medicine prolongs lives with chronic and incurable illnesses such as metastatic cancer, grieving one’s own approaching death becomes more common. Yet, multidisciplinary grief research knows little of this grief, which I have named the grief of the dying. Music offers consolation and gives people a means to express and explore grief. This article examines two musical compositions as autobiographical life-writing about the grief of the dying. The compositions are Finnish contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho’s final concerto HUSH (2023) and alternative pop composition SWAN/KOISTINEN EP (2019) by Astrid Swan and Stina Koistinen. Both pieces were made while their composers lived with metastatic cancer. Interpreted as self-life-inscription, music can become an archive and a transmitter of the grief experience. Capable of widening our understanding of the grief of the dying, these compositions use sound, noise, silence, and voice to address the emotional and embodied experiences of cancer and grief.