Music is “a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy, and will drive away the devil himself”, wrote Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621. Yet music is not simply a cure for sadness or grief; it speaks where words run out, it enables those in mourning to commune with the inexpressible, and possesses the unique ability to access and transfigure our feelings of lack and loss. Are we wallowing when we listen to sad songs or are we hearing a deeper truth behind the plain facts of minor chords and chromatic dissonances?
Today, the term “melancholy” has lost its currency in the psychological lexicon. “Depression” has emphatically replaced it as the diagnosis for our culture’s relationship with loss and suffering. Yet if one word best describes the experience of so many in the past few years of pandemic life, it is melancholy – and it is to music that so many were able to turn during those isolated months for solace and contemplation. As Burton wrote four centuries ago, “Sorrow is both mother and daughter of Melancholy, symptom and chief cause; they tread in a ring, Melancholy can only be overcome with Melancholy”.
