Arvo Pärt, Death, and Affective Practice

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.