How can music be sad?

sfar,
A profound question! Many composers and great musicians did NOT think music expresses emotion at all. Toscanini, asked by a journalist if he found the first movement of Beethoven's "Eroicia" symphony "heroic," replied testily: "Heroic my ass! It's allegro non troppo!" And yet, funeral music would be inappropriate at a wedding (one hopes), and dance music is inappropriate at a funeral. Part of the reason is just tempo, obviously, but only part.

I'm a philosopher, and have taught classes about this. If you're curious, the philosopher Schopenhauer has the most famous, and best thought-out theory of exactly how and why music can move us, and what it means that it does. But that theory depends on buying into his elaborate metaphysics of the will.

I was in NYC during the 9/11 disaster, when the Berlin Philharmonic was scheduled to perform. They rarely travel, and have visited NY only a few times in a century. They'd planned a challenging program of mostly contemporary compositions. When the Twin Towers came down, they changed the program: to Beethoven's Ninth. "Alle Menschen werden Brüder...." It brought everyone in the audience to tears. (There are at least two books about the political use of Beethoven's Ninth, by the way.)

Perhaps the larger question raised here is what "emotions" are, what they signify. To deny that music can be expressive is a little like denying that feelings or meaning are real. Which is not an impossible position. In R. Crumb's great Zap Comix, Flaky Foont frequently asks Mr. Natural "What's it all mean?" Mr. Natural always answers in the same way: "It don't mean shee-it!" 

The "music of the spheres" was probably meant as a mathematical idea, having to do with the ratios of planetary orbits. Plato thought that such massive objects moving rapidly through space must make a sound--but that sound would have been determined by "rational" intervals best (or most abstractly) described by mathematical relations. Even before Plato, Pythagoras noticed the mathematical relationships between octaves, etc. Much of our musical terminology (e.g., harmonic mean; chord progression; time signatures expressed in fractions; even pitch, measured in cycles per second) derive from the language of mathematics. In this context, Leibniz remarked that music was "an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not realize it is counting."

But one must be careful in supposing musical aesthetics to be "universal." Japanese music, Indonesian gamelan music--and, for that matter, ancient Greek music, so far as we've been able to reconstruct it--don't rely on the key relationships we take for granted in western music. The perception of "beauty" in music, and also mood, is a highly culturally specific thing, and depends on musical conventions that are not universal.

Anton99,

Interesting point(s). I don't want to suggest that there aren't "universal" dimensions to music--or, for that matter, to sound more generally (thus, to include other animals, and perhaps also plants, as responsive to some of the same auditory stimuli we respond to). Moreover, I'm no Japan scholar. So take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.

From what I've read, Japanese culture marked a radical transition after WWII and the atomic bombings. Prior to that, Japan was culturally isolationist. After that, Japan, especially the young, passionately embraced the western cultures that had defeated them in the war, especially America. Hence, the obvious and genuine interest in western music among late 20th century Japanese. Some of the greatest "western" musicians of that recent period were Japanese; the Suzuki Method of music pedagogy was developed there; Japanese students are way over-represented in good music academies; etc. etc.

Which is to say that the (recent) Japanese love affair with western music is not necessarily indicative of the "universality of musical aesthetics." Rather, it's historically determined--and historically limited.

To return to the question of this thread, then: if music can be widely perceived as sounding "sad" or "happy" or "profound," then one supposes there must be some objective feature to account for such agreement. I'd argue, however, that such features must be recognized to be culturally specific--that, without "training the ear" (and by that I DO NOT mean going to music school, but rather, just living in an environment permeated by music, and unconsciously, or at least not deliberately, assimilating certain patterns and relationships between tones), the perception of musical "meaning" (sad, happy, whatever) isn't possible. The hypothetical human being "raised by wolves" will not perceive music in the same way you or I do.

And so, if it's true that "music soothes the savage beast," it's not because that beast perceives it as "soothing," but for some other reason (like the "soothing" sound of a gentle rain, or whatever). 

Just some random thoughts. 

sfar,

Regarding tone of voice--are you really sure you can read tone of voice accurately? Probably you can with people you know well, even on the phone. But with people you don't know, or especially with people whose native language is different from yours, I suspect things are quite otherwise.

I'll give you a few examples to explain what I mean. The first time I heard my own voice on a recording, I was shocked. It did NOT sound at all like it sounds to me, and therefore, it did (does!) not express the emotion I mean it to express when I speak. I've tried to learn to do this more effectively--I suppose actors must be good at it, but I'm a professor and need to communicate effectively every day, so I should be, too. Still, it's very disconcerting to hear my voice as I suppose others must hear it. As several philosophers have pointed out, we get our "selves" from others.

Here's another example. My wife is from Croatia, and we've spent a lot of time there. To my ear, Croatians always sound angry--and this carries over to a native Croatian speaker who speaks in a different language. I met my wife at a language school in Germany; even Germans, who speak a notoriously commanding language, tended to recoil from her when she was trying to sound friendly.

Conversely, I've spent time in Italy, although I don't speak Italian. Listening to Italians argue sounds to me like they're flirting--just as Croatians flirting sound to me like they're arguing.

Cultural conditioning again. There just aren't many "natural" cognitive judgments in anything, in my opinion--not in aesthetics, or politics, or even ethics (despite what we'd like to believe). What we see, hear and think is filtered through a complex system of neurons that are patterned in part by environments. What seems "natural" to us is highly structured, conditioned, mediated.

Anton99,

I'm not sure I understand all you've written here. Perhaps we might continue this discussion privately.

But I will say this: I'm not trying to "relativize" anything, unless by "relativize" you mean only that experience is relative to the experiencer. That's certainly the case; how could it be otherwise? We're all human, so we can suppose that there are various things we have in common; this is what makes communication possible.

Yes, "subjectivity and objectivity are not opposed, but complementary"; I completely agree. But that's because what's "objective" is really just universally subjective. That is, what we take to be "objective" is really only what any subjective perceiver will similarly experience. Space and time are "objective" in that sense; they are universal features of any human experience. Of course, experience is itself necessarily "subjective"; it happens within a consciousness, not out there in the world. So even mathematics is "true" to the extent that it describes experience in ways that are constant across different consciousnesses. That doesn't make it "nonsense"!

But hey--this has long since turned into a philosophical discussion, and I don't think any of our fellow Audiogoners want to follow such a thread too far. Again, I'm open to continuing privately.

Thanks for the conversation.