The Saddest Instrument of All Time

so i was listening to one of my favorite pieces of music recently and as it reached its really emotional final pages i thought to myself this is probably the saddest most heartbreaking concerto ever written oh that's so sad so i was originally going to post this all as one long video but i decided instead to split it into a three-part series so today's video is going to be all about sadness in music and we're going to try and figure out what is the saddest instrument in music and what's the best one to use for our sad concerto then in a couple of days time i'll post a video all about concertos and why they're not usually the best place to express sadness and finally in the third video i'll introduce this particular piece to you and give you 10 ways that it flips the rules of concertos on their head and creates a piece that's just filled with melancholy and ends with the most amazing cascade of grief [Applause] keep it in so let's talk about sadness in music and the first thing to say is that what feels sad to me may not feel sad to you like all our reactions to music it's conditioned by our experiences both culturally and personally i still feel sad when i hear a cheesy love ballad from the 80s called move closer because i heard it on the radio as a kid the morning my dog died the music of amy winehouse feels just a little bit more poignant knowing the tragic end to her story [Music] the music of say schindler's list is very sad but it's made so much sadder by our associations with the film and what it represents [Music] it's strange that sad music makes us happy i first noticed this paradox as a teenager listening to the smiths their songs are pretty much all sad their melodies are usually little more than a moan and their songs have titles like heaven knows i'm miserable now i remember thinking why do i enjoy this feeling of wallowing in misery when i listen to them and it turns out sadness has always been a big part of music [Music] this is a song by the renaissance composer john dowland in an arrangement i did for the australian chamber orchestra a few years ago dowling's titles almost sound like smith's songs come heavy sleep in darkness let me dwell and this one flow my tears so wallowing in misery has been an experience we've enjoyed for some time singing in particular has always been one of the most direct ways to the human heart when it comes to sad music whether it's dowland or the songs of the portuguese fardo or the latest song by adele in any of these songs we experience the emotions vicariously through the singer [Music] and our bodies are washed with the same chemicals that they would produce if we were experiencing genuine trauma we get the benefit without having to experience the pain studies have shown music is more effective than anti-anxiety drugs at reducing stress but if we're going to find our sad concerto we need to choose an instrument which instrument do you think would be the saddest of course it'll be totally subjective but give it a thought for a second and put your answer in the comments sad sad sad sad sad sad i asked twitter a few days ago and got a range of responses if you're going to focus on the tone of the instrument well the duck has a haunting sad tone it's a strong contender orchestral winds like the bassoon and the core angle also picked up a few votes i guess for similar reasons [Music] for stringed instruments there's the indian sarangi [Music] or the persian comanche [Applause] or for orchestral instruments actually any of the strings from the violin viola cello and bass can make a pretty convincing sad sound [Music] and i think the reason all these instruments seem sad isn't really that hard to pin down sad music on the whole imitates the sad sounds we make as human beings in some cases it's just the actual tone of the instrument the naduk just sounds inescapably like weeping it has a fragile vulnerable tone which sounds almost like someone's voice cracking with emotion but in other cases it's the way those instruments are played that creates a sound an effect that seems like a sob a sigh a whale a moan or a groan [Music] klezmer music uses little ghost notes called crechts i think that's how you say it which literally means sobs the music is so full of them it feels existentially sad as one tweet put it even when it has a happy phrase it's still sad so what we're saying is that most human sounds made in sadness like a sob or a sigh have a musical contour a shape which translates quite easily onto an instrument [Applause] and this translation works particularly well when that instrument has the ability to play in smooth continuous lines rather than distinct notes something like say a mandolin has frets to map out the individual notes the strings don't bend very much so it's hard to make any of these sounds i didn't get many tweets mentioning the sadness of a fretted instrument isn't that a happy sound but of course instruments like the sarangi and the comanche and of course the violin and the cello have no threats the pitch can move up and down with almost total freedom very much like the human voice [Music] [Applause] so i'm going to say that in a classical music context at least that because of this greater flexibility of pitch and the greater expressive flexibility that gives them the strings just have the edge when it comes to sadness and then you've got the register of the instrument and again it's sounds that feel like the range of a human voice that give us the strongest emotional connection and in the strings the cello has a range that matches the human voice almost exactly at the lower end it reaches down to a low c [Music] which is pretty much exactly the lowest note humans can sing you can hear notes down there sung by russian basso profundos and at the very top of the fingerboard you can reach up to an e or an f again that's right at the top of the human vocal range that f is the famous ridiculously high top note in mozart's queen of the night arya [Music] and secondly there's a property the cello has that i think makes it seem particularly human its size the proportions of the cello are probably the closest to the size of the human body or the torso at least of any instrument so sounds coming from something this size i think just seem more relatably human than other instruments so we found an instrument that seems really well suited to expressing sad sounds it has the physical proportions and the range to match a human singer as well as that flexibility of pitch that allows it to produce expressive moans and cries but i think there's one more feature it has that really seals the deal this is probably the most famous solo piece for the cello it's the prelude from bark's cello suite number one you can hear how there's a combination of warmth and depth in the cello tone so that even if the music is quite light-hearted sometimes there's a sense of reserve or of contemplation listening to a whole cello suite takes on something of a meditative quality but what's that tone got to do with sadness well remember at the start how we talked about experiencing the emotions vicariously in sad music we want our music to relate to the sound of a human cry but we're not looking for the real thing we don't go to concerts just to hear people cry that warm meditative tone the cello has allows us to enjoy the sound of sadness to wallow in it the portuguese have a name for the feeling they call it saudaji a kind of glad to be unhappy sad nostalgic feeling and when it comes to bathing in a warm glow of sadness i think we can all agree amongst the orchestral instruments at least the cello has few rivals [Music] you

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 63,360

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Id: b-uild3eyRY

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021