Arvo Pärt, Death, and Affective Practice

Abstract: Recent scholarship suggests that the modern West offers few spiritual resources to prepare people for death. This essay contends that Arvo Pärt's music can act as a contemporary affective practice that consoles listeners facing death and compares this use of music with the medieval spiritual practices associated with ars moriendi . This essay attends to the first-person accounts of hospice patients listening to Pärt's music as a compelling case study of contemporary affective practice and develops a new framework for understanding the affective capacities of music by engaging emerging scholarship on spirituality and affect theory.