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1. Chant and requiem (1200s–1900)

The template is liturgical. The Dies irae ("day of wrath"), a 13th-century chant from the Mass for the dead, gave Western music its motto of doom. The Church took it out of the liturgy after 1969, but by then composers had long since made it their own.

Ockeghem, Requiem (c. 1460s). The oldest polyphonic requiem to survive. Grief here is calm, interwoven counterpoint.Purcell, Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary (1695). Muffled drums and slide trumpets. Wendy Carlos later turned it into the synthesiser opening of A Clockwork Orange.Mozart, Requiem (1791). Left unfinished at his death, which did wonders for its legend.Verdi, Messa da Requiem (1874). The Dies irae turned into operatic thunder.Fauré, Requiem (1888). Leaves out almost all of the Dies irae. Fauré called death "a happy deliverance".

2. Death dances (1817–1909)

The Romantics brought death out of church and gave it a part to play: seducer, fiddler, guest at the party. Halloween's concert repertoire comes from here.

Schubert, Der Tod und das Mädchen (1817; quartet 1824). Death answers the frightened girl as a friend, not a threat.Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique (1830). The Dies irae mocked at a witches' sabbath, with funeral bells and a shrieking clarinet.Liszt, Totentanz (1849). Fierce piano variations on the Dies irae.Mussorgsky, Night on Bald Mountain (1867). A witches' night on a mountain; Disney later made it the climax of Fantasia.Saint-Saëns, Danse macabre (1874). Death's fiddle is tuned to the tritone, the "devil's interval", and a xylophone rattles out the skeletons' bones.Rachmaninoff, Isle of the Dead (1909). Based on Böcklin's painting, with a boat rowing to the island in an uneasy 5/8.

3. Lament from below

Alongside the concert hall runs older death music, made by mourners rather than composers, and as ritual rather than art. In Morte e pianto rituale (1958) the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino studied the women who lamented the dead in southern Italy. He argued that structured weeping lets a community come through a death without being swallowed by it.

Irish keening (caoineadh) and the Sardinian attitu. Improvised laments sung by women, now heard mostly in field recordings.Sicilian funeral bands and the Trapani Misteri. Slow marches that people sway to as they walk.The New Orleans jazz funeral. "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" on the way to the cemetery, swing on the way back."La Llorona". The Mexican lament of Día de Muertos, sung at the graveside.

4. Monsters go pop (1956–1983)

Rock'n'roll turned the dead into entertainers, and Halloween music as we know it was born. The skeleton stopped being a warning and became a costume.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put a Spell on You" (1956). He later made his stage entrance rising out of a coffin.Bobby "Boris" Pickett, "Monster Mash" (1962). Still the season's anthem.Black Sabbath, "Black Sabbath" (1970). The tritone again, now the founding riff of heavy metal.The Cramps (late 1970s). Rockabilly crossed with B-movie horror, the start of psychobilly.Bauhaus, "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (1979). Nine minutes that launched goth.Michael Jackson, "Thriller" (1982). Vincent Price's spoken verse and the zombie dance.

5. Cinema learns to scare (1960–1980)

Film scores settled what fear sounds like, often by borrowing from the avant-garde, which carried experimental music to a mass audience.

Bernard Herrmann, Psycho (1960). Strings alone, stabbing.Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells (1973). A harmless prog album that The Exorcist made sinister.Goblin, Suspiria (1977). Prog rock, whispers and a bouzouki.John Carpenter, Halloween (1978). A piano figure in 5/4, written in a few days.Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, The Shining (1980). The Dies irae once more, this time on synthesiser. Kubrick filled the rest of the soundtrack with Penderecki and Ligeti.

6. The experimental side (1960–2002)

After 1960 composers stopped depicting death and began asking listeners to live inside it, through dissonance, endurance, decay and near-silence.

Penderecki, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). Fifty-two strings in clusters and screeches.Ligeti, Requiem (1965) and Lux aeterna (1966). Dense, shimmering clouds of voices, both later used in Kubrick's 2001.George Crumb, Black Angels (1970). An amplified string quartet written in response to the Vietnam war, quoting both the Dies irae and Schubert's Death and the Maiden.Diamanda Galás, The Masque of the Red Death (1986–88) and Plague Mass (1990). Requiems for the AIDS dead: screamed, whispered and furious.William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops (2002). Old tape loops crumbling as they played, finished in the shadow of 11 September.

Éliane Radigue, Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) is where the line ends, and the best place to finish listening. It is three hour-long drones made on a single ARP 2500 synthesiser and shaped by Tibetan Buddhism.

Kyema (1988). Six sections follow the six bardos, the intermediate states of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.Kailasha (1991). An imagined pilgrimage around Mount Kailash, begun soon after her son Yves was killed in a car crash.Koumé (1993). Shaped by the cremation of her Tibetan teacher in Nepal, it hears death as part of an endless becoming.

Almost nothing happens and everything changes: tones beat against each other, swell and fade over many minutes. Radigue leaves the Dies irae's threat, the danse macabre's mockery and Halloween's fright far behind. Death becomes a passage you listen your way through.