# Can classical make you as melancholic as popular music?



## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Seems like I can have a lot of nice, mournful melancholic feelings with popular music, but not as much with classical, although J.S. Bach can do that for me. I am thinking perhaps because these songs have been with my most of my life, and hence the sense of nostalgia is there? Or, is melancholia something that pop aims at?


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Classical music can make you anything - melancholic, happy, enraged, energized, nostalgic, you name it - and with a much more powerful effect than popular music.


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## Antiquarian (Apr 29, 2014)

SiegendesLicht said:


> Classical music can make you anything - melancholic, happy, enraged, energized, nostalgic, you name it - and with a much more powerful effect than popular music.


Agree. Well said. As for the OP's query as to melancholia: The aim of Pop music is to sell Pop music. If it makes you melancholy, and the purpose of the song was to elicit this emotion, then it's done it's job.


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## Retrograde Inversion (Nov 27, 2016)

If pop makes me "melancholy", it's mostly because of the sheer, soul crushing banality of the inauthentic, commercially driven garbage that passes for popular music these days.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

SiegendesLicht said:


> Classical music can make you anything - melancholic, happy, enraged, energized, nostalgic, you name it - and with a much more powerful effect than popular music.


Agree, almost never sad though.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Pugg said:


> Agree, almost never sad though.


Try Soundgarden, Nirvana. Young people want their own music and they're gonna get it. Should they be listening to Schubert lieder instead?


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## David OByrne (Dec 1, 2016)

regenmusic said:


> Seems like I can have a lot of nice, mournful melancholic feelings with popular music, but not as much with classical, although J.S. Bach can do that for me. I am thinking perhaps because these songs have been with my most of my life, and hence the sense of nostalgia is there? Or, is melancholia something that pop aims at?


Yes it can, and it never wasn't. A year ago, I myself was asking "What's so great about classical music? Is it possible to actually have an emotional response to it?"
I thought classical music sucked, when I had only heard things like Mozart, Verdi and Vivaldi but now I've heard Stravinsky, Brahms, Bach and Varrse, I now have far more hope and interest


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Try Soundgarden, Nirvana. Young people want their own music and they're gonna get it. Should they be listening to Schubert lieder instead?


I did listen to Schubert, grunge never did it to me in my youth .


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Grunge didn't even exist in my youth! But Telstar got my attention.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Grunge didn't even exist in my youth! But Telstar got my attention.


Must be a U.S.A joke, my country has a surf club and a soccer team with that name.


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## Lenny (Jul 19, 2016)

KenOC said:


> Try Soundgarden, Nirvana. Young people want their own music and they're gonna get it. Should they be listening to Schubert lieder instead?


I agree, but also think Soundgarden is for present day young as distant as Schubert


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

KenOC said:


> Try Soundgarden, Nirvana. Young people want their own music and they're gonna get it. Should they be listening to Schubert lieder instead?


And why not? There is plenty of sadness in Winterreise.


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

SiegendesLicht said:


> And why not? There is plenty of sadness in Winterreise.


First sad work I thought of. Gorecki's third symphony was the next. Dialogues des Carmelites was the third (and then a bunch of other operas). Of course all of those have texts - but then so does pop music. It's harder to think of a non-vocal piece that consistently makes me sad (not merely melancholy). Some will on certain listenings - the Brahms Clarinet Quintet comes to mind.

As for simply melancholy - the list is endless.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

For mournful music which also swells up into rage, I recommend the Swedish composer, Allan Pettersson's Seventh Symphony.

You are practically guaranteed to be "melancholic" at the end of this devastating work. 

One of the greatest of 20th century symphonies.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

SiegendesLicht said:


> Classical music can make you anything - melancholic, happy, enraged, energized, nostalgic, you name it - and with a much more powerful effect than popular music.


A good post. Nice and pithy; to the point.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

SiegendesLicht said:


> And why not? There is plenty of sadness in Winterreise.


I try to avoid reaching for this work to be played at weddings and birthday parties.


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## Gouldanian (Nov 19, 2015)

Classical music can bring out every single possible emotion in you.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Pugg said:


> Agree, almost never sad though.


True. Except Mahler's Kindertotenlieder makes me sad. I heard it once, and that was enough. In fact, I won't listen to it until my grandchildren are grown. Of course, the sadness comes from the words. If the lyrics were changed to something like Frosty the Snowman, I might put on my headphones again.


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

regenmusic said:


> Seems like I can have a lot of nice, mournful melancholic feelings with popular music, but not as much with classical, although J.S. Bach can do that for me. I am thinking perhaps because these songs have been with my most of my life, and hence the sense of nostalgia is there? Or, is melancholia something that pop aims at?


I think that people often feel nostalgic for the music of their childhood/adolescence, regardless of the genre. If you grew up listening to popular music, then perhaps that's why it gives you a stronger sense of nostalgia.

In my case, I actually get that feeling more strongly from classical music. It's probably because I've been listening to (or at least hearing) classical music for my entire life, ever since I was born. (I mean this literally...my mom was listening to Monteverdi's Orfeo while giving birth to me. ) I wish I had been exposed to some popular music when growing up, but in my family it was all classical all the time!


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## bioluminescentsquid (Jul 22, 2016)

Why would you want to be melancholic? Sober and poignant and humbled, yes. But sad?


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

bioluminescentsquid said:


> Why would you want to be melancholic? Sober and poignant and humbled, yes. But sad?


I like that. I never thought of redefining what the pleasant state of melancholia might translate into in other words.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

bioluminescentsquid said:


> Why would you want to be melancholic? Sober and poignant and humbled, yes. But sad?


It might depend on whether one thinks music induced emotions are real, full fledged emotions or aesthetic, "play" emotions.


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## Nate Miller (Oct 24, 2016)

making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.

but remember, Soundgarden and Nirvana were nearly 30 years ago. If a teenager was blasting Soundgarden today, I'd be overjoyed. No, today its just cookie cutter pop singers and the obligatory rap videos. this is the first generation that I've been around for that didn't have its own style of pop music.


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## Isiah Thanu (Nov 1, 2016)

Retrograde Inversion said:


> If pop makes me "melancholy", it's mostly because of the sheer, soul crushing banality of the inauthentic, commercially driven garbage that passes for popular music these days.


Amen to that. As one who liked pop once -Elvis etc, what is now put out is utter rubbish.


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## TwoFlutesOneTrumpet (Aug 31, 2011)

Classical music can make you anything you want to be. For example, it made me gay when I was down (no, not the gay you're thinking of; the other, older gay).


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## jailhouse (Sep 2, 2016)

rofling at even the thought of a notion that modern commercial pop music can elicit more varied emotional states than the vast ocean that is 'classical' music.


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## TwoFlutesOneTrumpet (Aug 31, 2011)

jailhouse said:


> rofling at even the thought of a notion that modern commercial pop music can elicit more varied emotional states than the vast ocean that is 'classical' music.


Well, the feelings felt are completely up to the individual and you can feel only if your brain is prepared to perceive the music. Many brains are not prepared for classical music and thus feelings are not felt.

I know a lot of people of non-classical music feel emotions for completely non-musical reasons, like a pleasant memory when they first heard a song or lyrics that have an emotional content.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

TwoFlutesOneTrumpet said:


> I know a lot of people of non-classical music feel emotions for completely non-musical reasons, like a pleasant memory when they first heard a song or lyrics that have an emotional content.


Or when a song appears as a part of a particularly tear-jerking movie.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

SiegendesLicht said:


> Or when a song appears as a part of a particularly tear-jerking movie.


Yeah. If the movie's sad enough, one doesn't need sad music to drive the point home.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

SiegendesLicht said:


> And why not? There is plenty of sadness in Winterreise.


I never tend to listen to it in that way.


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## Ainsley (Dec 22, 2016)

I think both classical and pop music can make you feel sad/nostalgic as long as both are well written. I do listen to popular music a fair amount with my friends ( I'm 15- all of my friends like pop!) and am generally not impressed with what I hear. However non-classical genres like musical theater, singer-songwriter, and folk tend to have some really good and heart wrenching music.


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## PeterKC (Dec 30, 2016)

Second movement of Finzi's Cello concerto.


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## Petrushcat (Dec 31, 2016)

I think of melancholy as being an emotion rooted in social ostracism, isolation or perhaps guilt, so wouldn't see it as the natural territory of popular musicians, notwithstanding notable exceptions (Nick Drake). To be really melancholic it helps to have your music shunned by the public e.g. Birtwistle [who wrote a piece called Melencholia], Allan Pettersson; or suffer from repressed sexuality / guilt e.g. Britten (again, a quality atypical of popular musicians).


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Petrushcat said:


> I think of melancholy as being an emotion rooted in social ostracism, isolation or perhaps guilt, so wouldn't see it as the natural territory of popular musicians, notwithstanding notable exceptions (Nick Drake). To be really melancholic it helps to have your music shunned by the public e.g. Birtwistle [who wrote a piece called Melencholia], Allan Pettersson; or suffer from repressed sexuality / guilt e.g. Britten (again, a quality atypical of popular musicians).


I think two great melancholic songs are "If You Could Read My Mind" by Gordon Lightfoot, and, "I Used To Be A King," by Graham Nash.

Nothing negative about melancholic music or feelings.


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Melancholia by Durer


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

Fortunately not all non-classical music is "popular music".


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## Petrushcat (Dec 31, 2016)

regenmusic said:


> I think two great melancholic songs are "If You Could Read My Mind" by Gordon Lightfoot, and, "I Used To Be A King," by Graham Nash.
> 
> Nothing negative about melancholic music or feelings.


Liked that first recommendation especially. Folk music certainly hits the spot when it comes to melancholy; I feel like I should explore it further. Here are a couple of classical pieces that strike me as melancholic, although perhaps it's harder to judge a composer's intentions and frame of mind when dealing with an instrumental piece.

1. Britten's Notturno




2. Brian's Symphony 11


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