Melancholia
Why does a minor chord remind us we’re going to die?
Every song is about love. Whether it be about being in love, falling out of love, losing love. Love or lack of love for a country. Every song, at its core, is about love. I was taught this by my 7th grade music teacher, who likewise was the mentor who introduced me to music as not just something I played on my clarinet or heard while my parents were driving me to basketball practice, but as something that I could escape into, that calmed the constant anxieties and angsts and nauseas in my mind.[1] As a 13 year old in 7th grade, and for every one of the dozen years since then, I would say I’ve been plagued by a sort of all encompassing melancholy that at some point seeped into my bones without my knowing and has refused to leave. That may be melodramatic, but I’ve found that life is in general a bit more fun with a healthy dose of melodrama (taken as needed). Music (and art in general, but this is an essay about music so we will stay here for a while) may not dispel the melancholy from my bones, but it does have the soothing property of making it all a bit more bearable. Music for me, as it is for many, manages to put to sound the way I feel in a way often words alone cannot. Camus would say this is a nod to the absurd, as humanity tries to resolve uncertainties in the form of art.[2] And I suppose he’s right, though I find it’s a more positive outcome than he suggests, because why should we not try to explain the world we experience through metaphor and analogy if we cannot describe it otherwise.
It should be noted that there’s a distinct difference between being sad and melancholy. Melancholy implies a pervasiveness that you can sink into. I would consider a true melancholic episode as one that is distinctly not sober; there is a softness to it, where the hard edges of the world are blurred to an almost apathetic awareness of the way things seem to just barely not fit together. In the way the existentialist philosophers of the 30s and 40s described the sudden awareness one gets periodically of our own improbable existence as the uncanny (Heidegger), or angst and anxiety (Kierkegaard), or the more symptomatic nausea (Sartre), I will describe mine as melancholy.[3] If you’ve ever felt perhaps as if your bones don’t necessarily fit very well inside your body, you understand the feeling I am describing. Perhaps you have your own symptoms for when melancholy strikes, because lord knows I have cycled through many. Melancholic awareness, in short, is a stark reminder of not just our existence, but that our existence is finite. We all intellectually know that one day we will die (no one has ever not) but if we were constantly consciously aware of this fact, I believe it would be rather difficult to get through a day of our lives without completely and utterly unravelling. Nevertheless, that universal truth hangs over our heads and every once in a while (or more often for some), it taps us on the shoulder to remind us that things must end at some point. That comfort, that you know where you will end up one way or another, is the blanket of melancholy.
There is also a difference, though less distinct, between melancholy than nostalgia. Both are a type of yearning, though in different directions in time. I bring it up only because some music may evoke feelings of nostalgia in us which may exacerbate a melancholic state. Nostalgia has us look wistfully back at the past, and mourn that it is over. Melancholy, on the other hand, is a forlornness for beginning, a looking ahead and seeing more that will eventually end. Nostalgia is, I think, the more common feeling among people, as we’ve all had good things come to an end at some point. This experience, however, eventually seeps into our outlooks towards the future. Nostalgia, it seems, is the food of melancholy. I am reminded of a quote from Damon Albarn about Blur’s 2023 album The Ballad of Darren, which can only be described as an album for sad 55-year-old men.[4] He said it’s hard to have lived for 55 years and not have lost anything along the way, and if you haven’t, then perhaps you haven’t lived a very fruitful life. It’s not about having a sad outlook, but more a realistic and tempered one, where you have accepted the lot life gives you and then choose to mold that to what you truly want out if it.
But as with most things I bother myself with, this essay is about music. Not only that, but I’ve decided to begin it with a quote about love, which seems counterintuitive to the general vibe of melancholy. Consider, then, a moment in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, where the protagonist Antoine Roquentin is consumed by his anxieties but regularly finds peace when listening to the song “Some of These Days” as performed by Sophie Tucker.[5] Music, as I have said, calms that feeling of dread that permeates through our psyche and out into the far reaches of our bodies. To quote myself, “not to be stupid and cringe but sometimes it does feel like my headphones are the only thing that keeps my head from cracking into a million pieces.”[6]
But aside from words, what may make a song sad? The phenomenologists would say that because we describe a minor chord as melancholy it in fact is melancholy. The feeling it evokes in us becomes what it is, as without us it is simply a compression of the air around us. I would suggest that some of the sadness comes from the dissonance of chords, which reflect back at us the dissonance of our own mind with the world around us. We are subconsciously reminded of our fragile state in a world that is not made for us and which we are sometimes not made to be within. We may rephrase the proverbial question as if a tree falls in the forest, is the sound it makes one which reminds us of our own imminent mortality?
I find it fascinating that we intentionally seek out sad music when we’re sad. I think there’s a certain aspect of the human experience that requires us to wallow a little bit. Perhaps it’s so that we can better appreciate when things are good. Or perhaps it is just so we have a gentle but constant reminder of our own eventual deaths, as I’ve suggested. I am not a philosopher, so I’m not here to theorize on why it might be that we need to have this reminder. I’m only here to mention that we’ve managed to pack this feeling into music to share it with each other. Perhaps (and I’ll give you a spoiler: this is what I do believe), we write sad songs and listen to sad songs to make the inevitable melancholy of human existence more bearable by sharing the burden between us all. At the end of the day, the most important human endeavor is not technological or intellectual or whatever else we may describe human achievement as, but connection. Music allows us to connect with one another in a sort of code, where we may play some chord or note and we instantly know and relate to the way someone feels. When we connect with something, artistic or otherwise, we say it “strikes a chord” with us. The fundamental and implicit story-telling ability of music is innate within us both as creators and consumers of it. Music, above all else, connects us to each other in ways prose never could. We can see the spectrum of the human life play out in the 45 minutes of Dark Side of the Moon, or feel the longing and yearning of heartbreak in Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” We haven’t lived the exact experience that inspired these works, those are deeply personal experience to the musicians, yet we manage to connect to them and adapt them to our own experience, therefore bridging the gap between musician and listener.
I remember learning for the first time what le petite mort meant in French. As a kid you laugh. Maybe even after you’ve lost your virginity you laugh at it. What a funny phrase to associate with what is (in theory at least) a life-bringing activity. But, if I may, allow me to recontextualize it in terms of connection. A truly intimate connection with someone, in the same way we may connect with music and see the soul of someone bared for us to witness, does remind us of our own mortality. And that above all else, what we have is that connection between one another, to the end.[7] Perhaps each time we connect in such a way we do die a little, in the same way when we listen to a lyric which changes us it gives us a preview of the end as well. Can you remember, for instance, the first time you listened to “Stairway to Heaven?” Can you hear the building of the song in your head, the swelling towards crescendo through tempo and sound? Then you will likely believe me when I say that Jimmy Page has described the climax[8] of the song as orgasmic. And perhaps not all examples are so blatant, but there is a sad sweetness to many melancholy songs that evokes a memory of someone, whether you have lost them or not, who your life is intimately attached to. In our constant quest to be remembered once we’re gone, we forge connections in order to quiet the voice which reminds us of the end. And with music, we can share not just the memory of us but the way we have made each other feel by simply existing.
Maybe I am straying too far from the point. Sad music reminds us that we’re going to die, and we are okay with this because by sharing the sad music with one another we can be remembered after it all, which in a way is preserving the essence of our souls. The comfort we find with other people who can sympathize with the condition of our minds, and share in the agonies and ecstasies of life with us are what give us the drive to forge ahead with living, despite the depressing but necessary reminder of our mortality. We can be moved to passion without even needing words to communicate, making music the universal language across the entire human race, giving us a potential to connect with each and every other human being on the planet. And because, ultimately, life is about the connections we make with one another, it becomes obvious why every song is, in one way or another, about love.
[1] This will not be a philosophy paper, but I am going to talk heavily about it. You have Heidegger and Sartre and Camus to thank for that.
[2] Camus, Albert: The Myth of Sisyphus
[3] Melancholy will serve me in this essay, but I am partial mostly to Camus’ Absurd.
[4] And, frankly, it is one of their best works.
[5] Sartre, Jean-Paul: Nausea
[6] You can ask Mikayla I did at some point say this.
[7] Please tell me you guys got that one.
[8] Pun intended.