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