How can music be sad?

Great question. Taking a different approach from Schopenhauer, the older idea of the music of the spheres is suggestive, especially when brought into the conversation that some musicologists are having about universal music. Does our music, and even the musical sounds animals make (whale song, for instance), echo something else, something that transcends the physical world? Do our notes and expressions serve as a kind of call-and-response to something? This gets into metaphysical concerns, but it does lead to considerations of why human cultures have so many different forms of music that yet have so many commonalities.

How about happy-sad music? That's how one student once described the clarinet in the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concert. "Autumnal" etc., but with an underlying joyfulness. That's weird, and beautiful.  

To snilf:

It's a good question to ponder, the universal nature of music, or its cultural specificity. The Bach phenomena in Japan is interesting in this regard. A 17th-century German Lutheran composer whose very cultural-specific music somehow becomes all the rage among late 20th/early 21st-century Japanese. How is that possible? The perceptions of beauty would seem to differ, yet the popularity of Bach's choral music in contemporary Japan begs some questions. The high suicide rates and despair evident in Japanese society, according to some interpreters, suggests a fertile ground for the sense of hope that animates Bach's music. Not just the lyrics of his orotorios, passions, or cantatas, either, but the music itself. It doesn't seem to matter that Bach's music is rooted in Early Modern western patterns, and that these are foreign to Japanese modes of thought. The response to the efforts of Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan suggests that the bridges assumed by advocates of the music of the spheres are more than imaginary constructs rooted merely in ancient mathematical ideas. 

The conceptual origins of the music of the spheres provide a foundation that developed in different directions, mathematical, metaphysical, and musicological. Some current theories, even if speculative, remind us that the different languages of music transcend the local, and that our emotional response to sound waves requires a whole lot of wonder and curiosity. Count me in. 

snilf—

I think opposing cultural influence and objectivity is unnecessary. My example, and your response, suggests that such an either/or is too simple. I wasn't talking about Japanese composers, musicians, and students as much as listeners. How do we account for so much interest among the laity? Among those not trained in academies or educated in the west? The fact remains that in a society that has experienced high levels of culture-specific despair, something is breaking through from the outside.

I see little reason to relativize this experience. Yes, everything you say about cultural conditioning makes great sense. It's necessary to point this out, but hardly sufficient. Otherwise any real contact with others becomes impossible. Those articulating the constellation of ideas associated with the music of the spheres were cognizant of the local, but they weren't limited by it. It's a modern notion that we have somehow overcome the parochialism of the past, that we recognize for the first time that context is not only important, but the only thing. 

Subjectivity and objectivity are not opposed, but complementary. Again, if this wasn't true, there's no way that any form of communication—musical included—could happen except in the most surface of ways. My Japanese example was meant to illustrate that music reaches through and beyond the limitations of local culture. To me, and to many others, past and present, that suggests that there is something in music that speaks a "universal" language. One we all hear, and filter in different ways. But it's not simply local.

Which means that there can be a sadness etc. that can be heard in music. One we may need to learn to hear, of course. But the fact that we can learn it is important. And just because we learn something doesn't make it relative to environment.

If I stole your record collection and your audio equipment, your immediate response would tell me more about what you believe than any talk about cognitive patterns. Again, you're opposing things that need not be opposed. "That's wrong!", which you would yell as I carried off my haul, is hardly only a culture-specific response. Mediation never implies or demands relativity as you suggest. Otherwise mathematics, not to mention our topic of music, is nonsense.