Emotions and music

A few weeks back, I posted about how listening to music that makes you happy might have beneficial cardiovascular effects. As I wrote the post, I happened to be listening to something by Brahms that made me feel joyful, and one of the comments mentioned another joyful Brahms piece. It got me started thinking about not only what music makes me feel particularly joyful, but why, and about the possibility of a mismatch between the emotion that music is expressing and the emotion that you feel when you listen to it.

For example, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is famously “about” joy; the last movement contains a choral setting of part of Schiller’s Ode to Joy. But if I were looking for music to make me feel joyful, it’s not necessarily the first piece I’d pick. For one thing, it’s been a part of my life for a long time, and so it’s layered over with many associations, including memories of my mother, who loved the piece and who I miss. Aside from these complexities, though, is the fact that the music evokes not just the feelings of joy it describes, but a certain wistfulness. The chorus sings of all men being brothers, and the news is full of stories about what divides us. If I were picking a Beethoven symphony to make me feel happy, I’d probably pick something lighter and less freighted with complex meanings, like the Eighth or Seventh.

Sometimes music that is comforting picks up associations of the bad times when you’ve leaned on it. I heard the REM song “Everybody Hurts” on the radio today, and much as I love it, I felt vaguely uneasy to hear it. I’ve hung onto those words through too many losses for it not to evoke the pain of loss to some degree. My favorite band, far and away, is the Moody Blues, and I’ve noticed that at some point as I slide into a depression, I stop listening to their music. At first I wondered why this should be; much of their work really resonates for me, and, unusually, I will sometimes find new meanings in one of their songs that I’ve heard hundreds of times before. You’d think I would need their music more, not less, as depression looms.

But after awhile I realized that there were two pretty good reasons for not listening to their music once I was seriously down (although perhaps earlier in the process it might keep me from getting that far down in the first place). First, I didn’t want it to get tainted by association (although that’s far less likely for music that I listen to as frequently, under as many different circumstances, as I do theirs). More important, when I’m really down, I don’t respond to the music, and that’s almost sadder than being depressed in the first place—to reach out to a familiar joy and find only emptiness. (Or maybe that’s the essence of being depressed. The clinical word anhedonia doesn’t sound anywhere near chilling enough to describe that experience, if you ask me.)

Conversely, sometimes music about bad times can be powerfully uplifting, maybe because it’s cathartic to get it all out and to realize you’re not alone and people do survive being unhappy (is this why listening to the blues makes people feel better?). Sometimes—this may be rare—an unhappy song can help you put things in perspective and maybe even take life less seriously. There’s a song by the Smiths called “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”; years ago one of my brothers put it on a mix tape for me that he labeled “Good music to be depressed to.” I don’t know how other people take that song, but it always makes me laugh because it’s so over-the-top and self-pitying in its description of the singer’s misery. I have to laugh at myself.

Sometimes the emotional meaning of a piece of music is something of a mystery. I first heard Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which originated as a movement in a string quartet, when it was used in the Vietnam War movie Platoon, which I’m sure flavored my initial impressions of it. But I might have found it sad anyway; it’s a notoriously gloomy piece, played at mournful occasions and making the short list for the saddest classical piece ever, according to those who listen to BBC’s “Today” program. For years I could hardly bear to listen to it; to me, it evoked a sunless, airless desolation.

But one Thanksgiving about ten years ago, I saw a friend listening to a recording of the Adagio, I think by the Kronos Quartet. She loved the Adagio and played it several times; she appeared exalted by it. She lifted her face and leaned into the music—she looked like someone facing into a strong wind, braced and exhilarated by it. Her reaction astonished me at the time. I’ve since seen my own reaction change; I don’t find it exhilarating, but the last time I heard it live, it seemed to evoke something of the beauty of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” that Wordsworth said was the origin of poetry. It was like sitting inside, warm and dry, watching a storm that you’ve recently been out in. I wonder what further emotional complexities might emerge from this piece with future hearings.

OK, one last story about sadness and music and I’ll stop. While I was very slowly emerging from a long blue winter (I still felt firmly embedded in it, but in fact was only several weeks away from the breaking of the emotional ice and the arrival of spring), I heard an excellent performance of Beethoven’s string quartet no. 15. Beethoven labeled the third movement of this quartet “Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity by a Convalescent”; he was writing it after an illness that he had thought might be fatal. The Orion Quartet performed the piece here at IU, and they did a superb job, especially with this slow movement; I wept quietly (I hope) through the whole thing. The emotion Beethoven was expressing was gratitude, but what I was feeling was a powerful longing. I didn’t analyze it in so many words until much later, but what I was feeling was something like, “When am I going to get to the other side of this and be a thankful convalescent?” I’m very curious, and a little worried, about what the piece will sound like to me on second hearing, in much less emotionally wrung-out circumstances. But the mismatch between the expressed and evoked emotions stuck with me.

Thinking about joy and music seems to have led me down some rather dark paths. Someday I’ll say more about happiness and music—for example, about the many varieties of happiness, from the solemn joy of Beethoven’s Ninth to…oh, the heady exuberance of some of Handel’s Water Music, maybe, or the effervescence of a Rossini overture. Meanwhile, if you have any thoughts about the meaning of music, or the difference between what the words or music are saying and how they make you feel, please let me know.