Photo by Amanda Hatfield via Creative Commons
In yesterday’s interview with music therapist Crystal Weaver, I guessed she wouldn’t want to play the blues for somebody who’s grieving or depressed.
So wrong.
Sad music can be cathartic, she reminded me. It can help somebody find a match outside themselves for the desolate feeling within. “We all want to be heard, understood, validated,” Weaver pointed out. “Sad music tells us there’s someone else out there who understands this experience.”
Music therapists even guide clients through therapeutic songwriting—something romantic teenagers stumble on all by themselves—and lyric analysis, selecting certain lyrics they connect with.
Granted, sad music can just be an excuse for a good wallow and cry. But in a study published in Psychology of Music, U.K. researchers found that if you listen to really good music for its aesthetic beauty, that beauty can help you transcend your sadness.
“The more beautiful music is, the easier it is for the listener to concentrate on the music,” they note.
At Ohio State University, David Huron researches music cognition, and his oft-published theory is that sad music triggers the release of the peptide hormone prolactin. It’s associated with lactation but found in both men and women, and it has psychological effects, producing “feelings of tranquility, calmness, well-being, or consolation.”
Researchers at the Free University of Berlin recently surveyed 772 people around the world, and they found that sad music evoked a complex mix of emotions—often nostalgia, but mixed with wonder, transcendence, peacefulness, or tenderness. People with unstable moods used music to help regulate those moods. And the sheer imaginative creativity of music reminded listeners that it was possible to transform their own emotional experience into art.
The researchers went back to Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, explaining that sad music can give listeners a sense of control and mastery when the piece resolves itself with a joyful ending. If listeners identify with the music, it gives them a sense of powerfully expressing their own emotions. And if they feel the music’s sadness—apart from their own woes—they have the sense of emotional communion and empathy that takes them away from their private pain.
The music cited most often for its sad beauty?
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata
Ah Bing’s “Moon Reflected in the Second Spring”
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
