What's good about sad? It's happy for deep people.

I'm doing the Facebook 30 day song challenge (and why not?), but I am finding it really quite hard.  As the saying goes, the more you like music, the more music you like and hopefully this is one of the things that will come out of this blog as it wends its merry way through the byways of culture.  Today though, has been a particularly tricky one.  The subject is 'a song that makes you sad'.

Now, generally speaking, one of the things that I have found as I grow older, is that I have less and less time for things that make you miserable: I now work to the philosophy that you should concentrate on things in life that make you smile, dance or sandwiches, but in the spirit of youthful melancholy I have been making a real effort to find a sad tune.

Unfortunately most of the things that I personally associate with misery have very little that would make anyone else sad - it's the personal connections that I have formed with these songs that cause the sadness, rather than the songs themselves - and so I have been wracking my brains for the really sad stuff, the crack cocaine of misery.

I have pretty much dismissed most pop songs as their sadness tends to be of the superficial, teenage angst style misery, so I have been looking more at classical music.  Again the spectre of definition raises its ugly head - I know classical is a specific style of 'serious' music, but I am using it to mean things played by orchestras etc. rather than just limiting myself to Mozart, early Beethoven and their ilk.  In fact, the real misery in music starts with the romantics and carries on into the twentieth century.

One of the first things that springs to mind is the song 'Somewhere' from West Side Story.  Every since seeing the first performance of the show when I was a teenager this song is guaranteed to bring tears to my eyes - I only have to listen to a few bars of the main tune and I am having to pretend to clean my glasses.  The second piece I considered is a bit of Wagner - the Liebestod from 'Tristan und Isolde' - another classic tear-jerker, which Baz Luhrmann used to such great effect in his film of 'Romeo and Juliet'.  However, after relistening to these I found that they weren't really suitable as they bizarrely have an uplifting spiritual quality behind the sadness, a quality of consolation that helps make them such masterpieces, but makes them not quite right for song challenge criteria.  I also came to the conclusion that the reprise of 'Somewhere' at the end of 'West Side Story' is almost like Bernstein's own Liebestod, which just increased the respect I have for him as a composer.

So, having eliminated both of those pieces I had to make a decision and being someone who is not afraid to go for the obvious (because there is often a good reason for the obvious) I plumped for Barber's 'Adagio for Strings', especially after watching the YouTube video of the performance conducted by Leonard Slatkin at the Royal Albert Hall four days after the September 11th attacks.  It has become in many ways the official mourning music of America, having also been used at Kennedy's funeral (JF, rather than any of the others) and it is just the right piece of music for that stage of mourning.

So there we have it - Barber's 'Adagio for Strings'.  Happy for deep people.