On 'Sad' Music...

Occasionally an encounter with a member of the musical public leaves me feeling that I'm very out of touch with the way many people perceive music. On one such occasion an elderly gentlemen told me that he has ceased listening to the local classical station because they play nothing but “sad music.” I was a little surprised at this. Mozart, Haydn? Really?  He proceeded to ask me, “Did the great composers have a lot of sadness in their lives?” I hesitated, not sure how to answer such a broad question. Interrupting my hemming and hawing, he continued: “I’ve got enough sadness in my life as it is. I don’t need music adding to it. I listen to the gospel station now.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. It was one of those moments that make me doubt the flowery, idealistic rhetoric I’ve been using about music in recent years—about how it can bring us together, make the world a better place, make us more tolerant, egalitarian, what have you. It also makes me doubt a line that I once used in a bio about myself: “Ethan seeks to write music that will break down barriers between people and have the potential to convey a depth of meaning to anyone who hears it.” Anyone? That’s saying an awful lot; perhaps I’ve given myself too much to live up to. What stings is that, though I can’t prove it, I’m virtually positive that if my music were widely known enough to be played on classical radio, the chap mentioned above would have dismissed it along with all the rest. If Beethoven doesn’t cut the mustard, than I surely don’t.

This all begs the question: Is it really possible to know how other people perceive music? To some extent, yes, based on what they say about it and how they act when they hear it. But we can’t know in any kind of detailed way—not short of actually becoming somebody else. That’s a little sad because, as a composer, I’m dying to know how other people hear my music. Now, we are often told that there is one way to know when music has struck a chord (pardon the metaphor) that resounds on a seemingly universal level—something that does seem to convey meaning to just about everybody. And that’s time. The passage of time—generally a lot of it—is the only way to know which of the vast number of musical darts thrown at the wall resonate with the human psyche well enough to stick. That’s why names like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms remain with us today, while most of their rivals have faded into obscurity.

But here’s the problem: the names that have “stuck” are the composers whose music is being played on classical radio today—and therefore it’s the music that my elderly friend dismisses as “sad” and changes the channel. And we can be sure that he isn’t the only one to search the airwaves for sunnier sounds. How do we account for this?

I don’t think I can answer that, but I would like to offer a bit of speculation. Let me start out with a confession: I very rarely listen to classical radio either. Why not? For starters, I never know what’s going to be playing when I hit the “on” button. The chances that it’s going to be something that fits where I am and what I’m doing at the moment are pretty slim. Is The Rite of Spring something that I really want to hear while careening down I-75 when I’m late to work? It’s like dropping the needle on a record with no label on it. It could be Mozart, it could be Mark O’Connor. And am I really capable of taking in something as complex as, say, Bach’s Mass in B Minor while answering emails? And even if I stop what I’m doing and give it the attention it deserves, do I really want to start it halfway through the ‘Credo’? And what are the odds that a random Tuesday morning at 9:13am will find me mentally prepared for something so rich, so profound as that Mass? When you get transported to heaven in such a fiery chariot as that, it’s very difficult to come back down and go about the day’s mundane tasks when it’s over.

So I can in some ways resonate with the guy who has changed his radio loyalties. But how about this word “sad”? Is all of this music really sad? To go back to the Bach example, I don’t think anyone would argue that the ‘Crucifixus’ is about as sad as it gets. But isn’t it just as likely that our friend would turn his radio on during the explosively jubilant ‘Et resurrexit’—something he would apparently dismiss with all the rest of the “sad” music? Perhaps the problem, then, is one of terms: maybe he uses the blanket term “sad” because he doesn’t understand the music—he’s not given any context, he doesn’t understand the words, where the music came from or where its going, what the music is “about,” and maybe not even who wrote it. It goes by in a blur of profundity, and he intuitively feels that he was supposed to get something out of it, but somehow didn’t. Perhaps that translates as sadness, I don’t know.

The ideal solution, however, is not necessarily to throw up one’s hands and change the channel to a station that’s playing “Happy Rhythm.” The ideal solution, unfortunately, takes a bit of effort, but it’s worth it. You’ve got to know in advance that while Bach’s Goldberg Variations might prove to be nice background music while you’re painting your house, his St. Matthew Passion is probably not. And you’re probably not going to get anything out of the latter if you don’t know the plot it follows and if you don’t put some effort into understanding what Bach was trying to accomplish with the music he clothed it in. It doesn’t necessarily require musical training, just some time and effort.

If we find the motivation to get to know great music, we can be in a position to decide what sort of music our souls need at any given time. So I very rarely turn on the radio, and I very rarely bother with background music. I want to choose what I listen to and really concentrate on it, giving it the attention that I hope people will give to my compositions. (It always burns me up when I’m at a party or something and someone says, “Play us one of your compositions,” and then proceeds to keep chatting with her friends as I comply with her request). We mustn’t let all our encounters with music be happenstantial or we will more than likely have a shallow musical experience.

But suppose for a moment that my elderly friend was accurate in his use of terms; suppose that the station really did play nothing but the most devastatingly tragic music Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff had to offer—or, indeed, nothing but ‘Crucifixuses.’ What then? Would our friend be justified in saying, “I’ve got enough sadness in my life as it is” and “I don’t need music adding to it”? Perhaps so. We need balance; we need music that will lift our spirits. But this makes me wonder: Are we sometimes afraid of music that will awaken the grief inside us? Music or no music, the sadness is there in all of us. Some people have more sadness than others, but we all carry grief—over family members or friends who have died, over betrayal or abuse we’ve experienced, over unrequited love, our own failures, the death of past dreams. It’s impossible to get rid of it all, yet society seems to frown on those who openly express it—especially if those people are men. So we learn to hide it.  We stuff it, we ignore it, we pretend it’s not there.

But we find that it’s very hard to pretend it’s not there when we hear, say, Chopin’s Nocturnes or Tchaikovsky’s Symphonies. They fracture the thin façade that’s holding our inner grief at bay. These are some of the composers who threw darts that stuck; they’ve stood the test of time. Why? They were able to pour into their music a depth of emotion that was, for them, very personal, and yet the passing years have proved it to also be very far reaching: something that gets at the heart of shared human experience. When we listen to the music and let it affect us, we realize that these composers, in giving voice to their own sadness, seemed, miraculously, to be giving voice to ours as well. It’s when we’re willing to open that door, when we stop stuffing it, that healing can begin. I believe very strongly that music can aid that process.

Several years ago a high school choir was slated to sing one of my compositions at an afternoon concert. When I arrived I was told that the concert had been cancelled. One of the students from the high school had died that morning in an accident, and his classmates, shell-shocked, were too upset to sing. I resonated with their grief, but I had to wonder if they had thought through that decision. It seemed to me that they had denied themselves the best coping mechanism I know of: singing. And they weren’t slated to sing a bunch of silly stuff. It was a concert that I believe could have been profoundly healing if they hadn’t been afraid to go ahead with it.

It’s at moments of unexpected tragedy that music has the potential to be most powerful, because it is at these moments that people can no longer pretend that “everything’s fine” like they usually do. At such times, people often say that there are “no words”; indeed, little or nothing can be said that doesn’t seem hollow. But what if the words are given the wings of song? Does “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” seem hollow in the most tragic of times? I think not. A song like that is like a bottomless receptacle for the tears of mankind. We just have to have the courage to sing. We have to have the courage to take music out of its background role and let it help us cope with what life throws at us—let it be a companion on the road to wholeness.