Angelus News | September 23, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 19

DESIRE LINES
HEATHER KING
Making music to die for
Elaine Stratton Hild. | COURTESY IMAGE
When Elaine Stratton Hild,
Ph.D., was only 18 years old
and a music conservatory
student, she was volunteering at a local
hospital, playing the viola. One day
she was directed to the room of a particular
woman who was very ill. She
started playing “Amazing Grace” and
in the course of the song, the woman
died.
“Did I do something wrong?” she
asked the hospital staff. “No,” she was
told. “You didn’t do anything wrong.
That woman rode your hymn right up
to heaven.”
She went on to earn a bachelor’s
degree in music in viola performance
from the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Then, poised for a career with orchestras
and chamber music ensembles,
she was diagnosed with a rare neurological
condition. Continuing to
play professionally would have meant
possible paralysis in her left hand.
As difficult as it was to change course,
the diagnosis allowed Hild to embark
on a more academic career. She
earned both a master’s degree and a
Ph.D. in musicology from the Univer-
sity of Colorado at Boulder.
And in 2018, she was a Distinguished
Fellow at the University of Notre
Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study, a
semester-long fellowship during which
she conducted full-time research on
a fascinating and specialized area: the
chants sung for the dying during the
Middle Ages.
She currently serves as a musicologist
with Corpus Monodicum, a long-term
research project housed at the Universität
Würzburg (Germany) focused on
historically significant monophonic
church and secular music of the European
Middle Ages.
“There’s an entire repertory of
plainchant that historians haven’t
dealt with: a collection of works that
were meant to be sung, in community,
around the bedside of a person who’s
about to leave this world.”
Studying archival music in Europe allowed
Hild to see the deathbed not so
much as an end but an opening — a
sacred time during which music could
play a beautiful and important part.
A forthcoming book has the working
title “Song At the Moment of Death:
Chants and Medieval Rituals for the
End of Life.” And she runs a small
business, Palliative Music, dedicated
to providing comfort music for people
in the Fort Collins, Colorado, area
experiencing difficult medical circumstances
and end-of-life care.
In her work with the suffering and dying,
Hild plays the viola and the harp.
She also sings. “The more fragile, the
closer to death, the more gentle the
sounds have to be. Sometimes the
human voice is the simplest instrument.
So sometimes that feels most
appropriate.”
Her fervent wish is that we might all
come to play music, chant, or sing
around the bedside of our loved ones
at such moments.
“Interestingly, the historic material
I study was not for professionals. It’s
made very clear that the chant was
for the community. I’m all in favor of
medical resources and experts. But
death is a human experience, not just
a medical experience.”
So maybe one thing these chants are
telling us is that a deathbed is not the
place for the professionals. “Maybe it’s
30 • ANGELUS • September 23, 2022