Answering the Question: How Can Music (and Some of the Arts) Be Sad?

This paper seeks to explain how music can be sad and how music is different from poetry and from painting in terms of one’s experience of sadness in an artwork. Expression theorists like John Dewey believe that music is expressive of emotions because it stems from the spontaneous overflow of the artist’s inner turmoil. That is, music, per se, has the power to make the listener, say, sad. On the other hand, projection theorists like Stephen Davies maintain that the listener experiences a piece of music as sad because s/he projects his/her sadness onto it or recognises the property of sadness in it. Although nowadays widely considered more valid than the expression theory, the projection theory has been refined by several critics. Jerrod Levinson, for instance, maintains that, in order to recognise or experience the emotions in music, the listener needs to be “appropriately backgrounded” and to listen to music in its (socio-historical and/or intellectual) context. Convincing as it seems, Levinson’s notion of an “appropriately backgrounded” audience, I shall argue, applies to poetry better than to music in general, in that poetry, owing to being verbally mediated, must greatly involve the reader’s cognitive mediation for him/her to infer the emotions in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]