Bill Blank:

>On the way home I was listening to our local NPR and they were playing
>the adagio from Schubert's Quintet in C major. I quickly became tearful
>and then began thinking on the nature of life.  I have only listened to
>this piece a couple of times, so am not sure it qualifies as sad music,
>but certainly fit my mood today.

Oh, does it ever qualify as sad music!  Schubert wrote it late in his
short life, when he knew he was going to die, so the fact of its arousing
your thoughts about the nature of life seem entirely appropriate to me.

I have very little use for the musical/extramusical distinction.  If
only strictly musical elements are proper to appreciation of a piece
of music, you are left with formalism of an extreme sort.  In fact, the
expressive markings--traditionally in Italian--that fill musical scores
and describe--or even "name" the movements of classical works, would
then become meaningless.  That said, I will say that, as far as sad music
(or music expressive of sadness, if you prefer) is concerned, it is not
necessary--or even particularly desirable to feel sad oneself, and not
at all desirable to let the music "make" one sad, but, as I implied in
my previous message, it is impossible to perceive the music as sad unless
one has in fact experienced sadness in life at some point.  The reflective
awareness by the listener of both the sadness of the music and sadness
in life form a kind of counterpoint which can add to the appreciation
of the piece.  Some aestheticians have said that you can pay attention
either to the music or to your own feelings, duck-rabbit fashion, but I
think that is nonsense.  Perceiving the complex elements in music is not
at all like seeing a duck-rabbit. A performing musician in an orchestra
needs to attend simultaneously to the score, to the mechanics of making
the right notes, to the tempo and the expressive commands of the conductor.
If the playing is going to be any good, the player needs to throw him
or herself into playing expressively.  With all that going, with the
mind and fingers racing to do everything right (as a piano teacher once
told me, all music is fast) heightened mental awareness and activity
surely has room for some other mental processes that make emotional
expression possible.  The audience has it easier.  There, you just have
to listen, think about where the music is going and feel the exhileration
even of sad music.

Now, just how sad music is sad is another question altogether, but I will
pass over that this time.

I want to thank Peter Manuel into goading me finally to articulate what
I really think of this most interesting of problems in musical aesthetics,
in words I have never been quite able to say, after decades of thinking
about it.

Jim Tobin