Healing the mother wound: grief management and metal performance

Shadrack, J. H. (2017) Healing the mother wound: grief management and metal performance. Invited Presentation presented to: Music and...Death, Vienna, Austria, 02-03 December 2017.

The files below are currently restricted to repository staff only.

They may be awaiting processing or under a publisher's embargo.

Items under embargo will be available for download from the date noted.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Invited Presentation)
Abstract:	Metal saved my life. It is not the first time and it probably will not be the last. The murder of my mother when I was twenty-one, meant I was alone and if it had not been for metal, my grieving process may have been the end of my story. The death of course is one thing, but mourning is something that characterises many years after the event. If I had not bought my first guitar the year she died, the last seventeen years of my life would be a very different narrative. I firmly believe that metal and metal performance, prevented my suicide and any plans for revenge. It matched my pain, sonically, texturally, musically and aesthetically. It initiated a cathartic process that I have returned to since, because it offers me emotional and psychological balance that other music forms do not. This may be a purely subjective engagement but that is precisely the point. Remembering this time in my life is not easy, and can often come in hesitations, blanks and painful memories. By using interpretive performance autoethnography, a methodology that Richardson calls CAP or creative analytic practice (2000b, p. 929) means, [it] allows the researcher to take up a person’s life in its immediate particularity and to ground the life in its historical moment. We move back and forth in time, using a version of Sartre’s progressive-regressive method. Interpretation works forward to the conclusion of a set of acts taken up by the subject while working back in time, interrogating the historical, cultural, and biographical conditions that moved the person to experience the events being studied’ (Denzin, 2001 p. 41). Through this methodological application, this paper seeks to analyse how metal and metal performance helped me write my trauma into a performing life that ultimately liberated me from my grief.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Death, grief, performance, mourning, feminism
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > ML Literature on music > ML3800 Philosophical and societal aspects of music > ML3920 Therapeutic use of music
Creators:	Shadrack, Jasmine Hazel
Funders or Sponsors:	The University of Northampton and Progressive Connexions
Faculties, Divisions and Institutes:	Faculties > Faculty of Arts, Science & Technology > Acting & Drama
Date:	2 December 2017
Date Type:	Publication
Page Range:	pp. 1-8
Event Title:	Music and...Death
Event Dates:	02-03 December 2017
Event Location:	Vienna, Austria
Event Type:	Conference
Language:	English
Status:	Published / Disseminated
Refereed:	Yes
Related URLs:	Conference
URI:	http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/id/eprint/10053

Actions (login required)

Edit Item

Altmetric