Sad Music & Sorrowful Songs- Why Do We Listen?
Do Listeners Truly Feel Heartbroken at Sorrowful Music?
Aug 27, 2009
Music is one the few truly cross-cultural sources of pleasure. Its power seems to surpass generations, ages and cultures.
Evidence has been found for the practice of music in ancient civilizations, simple bone structures comparable to a modern day flute have been found in the fossilized remains of Paleolithic human life (Miller, Wood, Balansky, Mercader & Panger 2006).
Music has stirred great artists and writers to speak vividly of its impact. Oscar Wilde described music as “the art which is most nigh to tears” (Wilde, 1891 cited by Keyes, 1999).
So why is it that people listen to ‘sad music’, which in essence creates such negative and harrowing emotion?
Why is it that Chopin’s Tristesse Etude (literary translating to ‘Sorrowful Study’) holds such a place in so many people’s heart?
Why is it that Leonard Cohen keeps creating albums of tearful mourning?
Why is it that The Smith’s sold millions singing about a car accident?
Emotional Recognition: Does sad music actually create sad emotion in the listener?
It seems that many people who genuinely enjoy listening to sad music do not feel the emotion of sadness as they are listening.
Rather than being buried inside the melancholy, many listeners claim to find the beauty inside the music, the tenderness and sparkle within the disclosure of emotion (Manuel, 2005). Many claim that listening creates a sense of awe towards the feeling, rather than the actual sensation.
In a short poetic sense, most people do not seem to listen to sad music to be tearful and miserable; they listen to it to be able to catch the gleaming rainbows inside the composer’s weeping eyes.
True sadness, which would render one approaching depression, could create a feeling of emotional flatness or bluntness towards art such as music. Symptoms of demotivated depression (Charlton, in press) suggest that a sufferer simply does not feel any strong emotion towards any kind of stimulus. Rather than the depression actually stirring a constant sense of sadness, it simply removes any of the feelings created by living.
Therefore perhaps it is not ‘true’ sadness or depression that creates the emotions experienced during listening to music. Perhaps it is something different, something more?
Self Reference Inside Sad Music
Like any other form of art, if the listener can relate to a piece of music through their own experience it could stir up echoes of sorrowful emotions.
For example the horridly beautiful song ‘The Bed’ from Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’, describes the suicide of a young mother and wife.
A listener who may have experienced such an event in his or her own lifetime would likely be shocked and deeply distraught with anguish and memories at hearing the song.
However a listener who has not experienced such a horrific event seems to bask in an almost dark, gothic glow of self-imposed ‘despair’. This emotion created by the song feels almost ‘acted’ and can be dismissed with ease.
So is it that listeners love tragedy?
Is it in the same vein as Romeo & Juliet tearing audiences to achingly exquisite tears?
It seems music lends one fleetingly the emotions to which it describes.
Like a child playing at burning his fingertips in the fire, fascination can be found in touching the sorest regions of our hearts.
Self-Relating In Sad Music
However this could perhaps work in an opposite sense.
Perhaps a listener of heart wrenching music, which shivers with young dejection, finds some sort of reassurance in the knowledge that they are not alone in the shade of their misery.
Perhaps sad music quells the distraught emotions of being left lonesome. Upon hearing that great artists have suffered in a similar sense, perhaps there is some conciliation in the company the emotion has introduced.
Love in Music
It is rare to find music that is not based around the ever-hanging human emotion of ‘love’. Even purely instrumental music, even music based upon differing scales than the Western Standard, will very commonly contain heartfelt titles or movements designed to toy with the heartstrings.
Perhaps a listener going through a difficult and sad period of their lives will not want to listen to songs describing the pleasures of love.
In fact it is a near certainty that someone who has just watched their love of a dozen years walk away in the muscled grasp of a millionaire will not want to listen to songs such as ‘I Got You (Babe)’ or ‘Wonderful Tonight’.
This surely suggests that people do not listen to music in order to feel pure sadness and regret. Surely if one wanted to create the honest emotions of heartache one would listen to such ‘happy songs’ in order to cruelly mock themselves into sadness.
Therefore it is must be concluded that people do not seem to listen to sad songs in order to raise the true and aching emotion of sadness. It seems sad songs follow similar lines to the great tragic stories in that they offer up a confined teasing of the sentiment.
Just as the sight of a previously terrifying fear may fascinate a person when it is securely trapped behind glass, music allows us to objectively gaze at sadness, knowing all the time that we can easily be rid of it at the lift of the needle.
Sources:
Charlton, B. (in press). The four sub-types of depression. http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/subtypes-depression.pdf
Keyes, R. (1999). The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde. Gramercy. 18.
Manuel, P. (2005). Does Sad Music Make One Sad? An Ethnographic Perspective. http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=286
Miller, B., Wood, B., Balansky, A., Mercader, J., Panger, M. (2006). Anthropology. Boston Massachusetts. Allyn and Bacon, 768.
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