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!" 

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.  

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.

All these thoughtful responses have made me think about the question a bit more. Does our emotional reaction to music come from the same place as our reaction to the tone of someone's voice? Even when we can't see someone's face, as when we're talking to them on the phone, we can tell how they're feeling by the sound of their voice, or at least we think we can. 

Whether there's a definitive answer I'm glad the question managed to bring together Tolstoy, Shakespeare, David Allen Coe, Schopenhauer and Black Sabbath.

The GREAT thing about music is it can be a best friend to anyone in any stage of your life.