Why on earth do we listen to sad music?
The answer is life-changing, and little-understood.
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Taylor Swift. Nina Simone. Leonard Cohen.
Why exactly do we listen to sad music?
It doesn’t make sense, does it?
No one - I mean no one - wants to feel sad.
But the answer to this question is one of the most life-changing, and least understood, phenomena that I’ve ever come across.
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One of my favorite YouTube videos shows a two-year old boy, with round cheeks and blond hair so fine you can see the pink of his scalp, hearing Moonlight Sonata for the first time. He’s attending a piano recital, and the young player offscreen is making a hash of the Beethoven. You can tell that the 2-year old knows this is a solemn occasion and he’s supposed to be quiet. But he’s so moved by the haunting melody that his whole face strains with the doomed effort not to cry. He lets loose a whimper, and then the tears stream silently down his cheeks. There’s something profound, almost sacred, in his reaction to the music.
The video went viral, with the many commenters trying to figure out the meaning of the boy’s tears. The occasional snarky comment aside (“I’d cry too listening to all those wrong notes”), most people seemed to sense that the best of humanity, and its deepest questions, lay written like a secret code in the boy’s sorrow.
Was sorrow even the right word? Some commenters spoke of the boy’s sensitivity, some of his empathy; others spoke of rapture. One marveled at his reaction to “the paradoxical and mysterious mix of intense joy and sadness” in the music: “Such things have made the lives of generations of people worthwhile.”
This idea seems, to me, closest to the mark: but what is it, exactly, that makes bittersweet music like Moonlight Sonata so exalting? How can the same stimulus speak simultaneously of joy and sorrow, love and loss – and why are we so keen to listen?