Violinist and musicologist Mieko Kanno, Professor of Artistic Research in Music Performance at the Sibelius Academy, delivers this Gresham College lecture on how classical music culture keeps the dead present. She opens with funeral music across cultures, noting how some traditions mourn while others celebrate, then turns to the requiem as a genre flexible enough to hold both moods. The core argument concerns how performers and audiences live with dead composers, treating the musical score as a bridge that lets a creator's intentions reach forward across time, distinct from the spatial sharing of live performance. A substantial case study follows John Cage's Eight Whiskus, which Kanno demonstrates live on violin, using its deliberately impractical notation to show how a composer's death can open rather than close interpretive freedom for performers. She closes by asking whether any of this points toward a universal relationship between music and mortality. The talk runs about forty minutes and includes a recorded Q&A session.