SAD MUSIC MONTH - Part 1:
- WillturnerBass Producer
- Feb 20, 2021
- 3 min read
What is Sad Music?
Saturday 20/02/21
Welcome to Sad Music Month! It’s no secret that most of us as music consumers love belting out our favourite sad songs when we’re feeling down. This short series of blogs will explore the reasons why we love to slap on a classic heartbreak song, hug a pillow and have a good cry.
Before we get to the really interesting stuff, there is a very important question we have to answer: what exactly is sad music? You’d think it’s an easy question to answer right? Well, it turns out that, just like every other debatable topic, there are many contradicting opinions so get your science and psychology caps on because I’ve taken the liberty of doing some research. A 2013 study in Japan broke down emotional reactions to music into 'perceived' and 'felt' emotions. Music in a minor key was played to participants with the hypothesis being that they would perceive the sadness commonly associated with minor-key music but the emotions exhibited may not reflect it.
Overall the researchers were proven right, as the participants did indeed comprehend the sadness of the music, however, their emotions after listening were either ambivalent or romantic. It is likely that the individual experiences of participants (or lack thereof) resulted in them being unable to relate to the portrayed sadness and thus only exhibited positive or neutral emotions (Kawakimi et al, 2013).
That’s fairly simple, right? Well, this is where things get interesting. In his autobiography, 20th-century Russian composer Igor Stravinsky argued that the sole purpose of music is to “establish an order in things” and is therefore incapable of expression. If you thought that was blunt, wait until you hear this. He explained that emotions, which appear to have been expressed in music, are not real and are merely illusions (Stravinsky, 1936). Now, before you disregard Stravinsky for stealing the significance from your last tearful listen to Someone You Loved by Lewis Capaldi, the evolution of music theory may back him up. The conventions of modern music theory began developing thousands of years ago and they allow musicians to create music with no emotion attached by simply following its rules. Some great examples of this are time signatures and the modern musical scale system, also known as solfege (Do, Re, Mi etc...) invented by Guido D'Arezzo. (Hollis, 2017).
So what is sad music? From this point on, using the sources above, we will define sad music as any that has been or can be perceived as being sad.
You did it, you made it to the end of week one! Either you’re bored out of your mind and think this is better than having another monotonous walk around the block or you’ve proved yourself to be as nerdy about music as me. Either way, it makes sense for you to check out next weeks blog about why we like sad music.
Thanks for reading, please share this with your friends and comment something interesting you know about sad music!
-Will.
References:
Hollis, B. (2017). History of Music. The Method Behind The Music. Available at: https://method-behind-the- music.com/history/history/ Accessed: 10/02/21.
Kawakimi, A. Furukawa, K. Katahira, K. Oka Noya, K. (2013). 'Sad Music Induces Pleasant Emotion.' Frontiers in PHYCHOLOGY. 4 (311), 1-9.
Stravinsky, I. (1936). An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/igorstravinskyan002221mbp/igorstravinskya n002221mbp_djvu.txt
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