How can music be sad?

Blues.

Minor Keys

Klesmer.

Only if it talks about mama, trucks, trains, prison, rain or getting drunk...

fertguy, David Allen Coe at his best.

sfar,
A profound question! Many composers and great musicians did NOT think music expresses emotion at all. Toscanini, asked by a journalist if he found the first movement of Beethoven's "Eroicia" symphony "heroic," replied testily: "Heroic my ass! It's allegro non troppo!" And yet, funeral music would be inappropriate at a wedding (one hopes), and dance music is inappropriate at a funeral. Part of the reason is just tempo, obviously, but only part.

I'm a philosopher, and have taught classes about this. If you're curious, the philosopher Schopenhauer has the most famous, and best thought-out theory of exactly how and why music can move us, and what it means that it does. But that theory depends on buying into his elaborate metaphysics of the will.

I was in NYC during the 9/11 disaster, when the Berlin Philharmonic was scheduled to perform. They rarely travel, and have visited NY only a few times in a century. They'd planned a challenging program of mostly contemporary compositions. When the Twin Towers came down, they changed the program: to Beethoven's Ninth. "Alle Menschen werden Brüder...." It brought everyone in the audience to tears. (There are at least two books about the political use of Beethoven's Ninth, by the way.)

Perhaps the larger question raised here is what "emotions" are, what they signify. To deny that music can be expressive is a little like denying that feelings or meaning are real. Which is not an impossible position. In R. Crumb's great Zap Comix, Flaky Foont frequently asks Mr. Natural "What's it all mean?" Mr. Natural always answers in the same way: "It don't mean shee-it!" 

Great question. Taking a different approach from Schopenhauer, the older idea of the music of the spheres is suggestive, especially when brought into the conversation that some musicologists are having about universal music. Does our music, and even the musical sounds animals make (whale song, for instance), echo something else, something that transcends the physical world? Do our notes and expressions serve as a kind of call-and-response to something? This gets into metaphysical concerns, but it does lead to considerations of why human cultures have so many different forms of music that yet have so many commonalities.

How about happy-sad music? That's how one student once described the clarinet in the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concert. "Autumnal" etc., but with an underlying joyfulness. That's weird, and beautiful.