A tombeau (plural tombeaux) is a musical composition (earlier, in the early 16th century, a poem) commemorating the death of a notable individual.
In France, where this musical genre emerged first, strong influence of literary models, particularly of memorial poems that were popular from the 16th to the end of the 17th centuries, may have been another important factor.
These genres offered many suitable expressive characteristics: the suspirans figure (a three-note upbeat), dotted rhythms, particularly in repeated notes, and slow-moving harmonies in the minor mode whose gravity is heightened by a tendency to settle on pedal points.
"[1] "Developed by Parisian lutenists (Denis Gaultier, Charles Mouton, Jacques Gallot, François Dufault), the genre was soon taken over by clavecinists (Johann Jakob Froberger, Louis Couperin, both on the death of their friend Blancrocher in 1652) and was then spread into Central Europe (Jan Antonín Losy, Sylvius Leopold Weiss).
Surely between the tombeau and the hommage the instrumental Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by Arvo Pärt and for Morton Feldman (1987) by Stephen L. Mosko.