Yahoo News Why listening to melancholic music can cure the blues
There’s sadness, and there’s depression. And then there’s melancholy, which is something else entirely. Sadness is something to be endured until it passes, depression is a pathological sadness which often cannot be shaken off without medical help. But melancholy is grander, a state of mind which plunges so deep into a mysterious, causeless loss that sufferers don’t want to leave that state, because they find a strange sort of pleasure in its darkness. For those sufferers who are also artistic, melancholia seems to offer an insight into the nature of existence and is actually a spur to creativity.
It is this aspect of melancholy that has inspired theatre director Netia Jones to create a show exploring the strange affliction, which opens at London’s Barbican Centre at the end of this month. Entitled An Anatomy of Melancholy, after the near-eponymous book by the early 17th-century churchman, scholar and polymath Robert Burton, it explores the topic through the medium of song, images and words. “I was interested in the cult of melancholy that existed in England at that time, the idea of it being fashionable,” says Jones. “Melancholy was a state that young men of that time would deliberately espouse because it seemed to bear an intimation of poetic qualities.”
At the heart of the show are the songs of John Dowland, a contemporary of Shakespeare, which will be sung by famed counter-tenor Iestyn Davies. Dowland’s most famous songs, such as In Darkness Let me Dwell, Flow, my Teares, and Come Heavy Sleep, capture the melancholic attitude to perfection.
“When I listen to the songs, they’re so simple and beautiful that they are painful,” says Jones. “Especially when Iestyn sings them; there is a special beauty in his singing, which touches us somewhere deep.”
In the production, Davies will play a character who is unhappy and is exploring his own unhappiness through song and the texts of three authors who have written about melancholy. What insights are we likely to get from the authors? The most venerable of them, the aforementioned Burton, was a man of prodigious learning, although some of his explanations, such as that melancholy is caused by too much hot wine and onions, seem merely quaint.
Others, such as “too little sleep and too much work” seem spot on as an explanation of the malaise that afflicts people today.
The second of Jones’s authors, Sigmund Freud, observed that mourning is very similar to melancholia, in the way the sufferer withdraws from the world and seems incapable of love or action, or indeed anything. The difference is that the melancholic person undergoes “an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale”.
The jilted lover, after a period of mourning for the loss of the loved one, finds a new lover. With the melancholic a nameless feeling of loss turns inward, onto the self. The self becomes the new love object, but Freud speculates that the love can easily flip into hate for this thing – the self – that seems so empty and powerless.
A different sort of insight comes in the third of Jones’s sources, the British psychoanalyst Darian Leader. In his book The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, Leader scorns the present trend for “quick-fix” treatments such as antidepressants. He compares these to a missile strike on a terrorist base; it brings a temporary reprieve but does not change the terrorists’ mind-set.
Towards the end of the book, Leader reminds us that: “Freud names not psychoanalysis but culture as the only possible panacea for the terrible demands that civilised life places on us. In other words, he is saying that it is the arts that can save us.” For Freud, art was valuable because it offers a socially acceptable outlet for repressed desires and fantasies; Leader values it as a way of coming to understand things that in “real life” are mysterious and hidden, above all ourselves.
Does Jones not think there’s a danger in inviting audiences to flirt with the melancholy state of mind? “It’s true that we can almost become addicted to our maladies, especially this one,” she says. “There is something about melancholy which is attractive, no question about it. Burton himself talks about the sweetness of melancholy. There is something deeply pleasurable about the sadness in the songs. But you have to be careful not to be caught up in a vortex.”
One could imagine that Dowland’s songs actually save the sufferer from being sucked into the vortex. By fixing the pain of melancholy in an artistically perfect form, they draw its sting, the way a perfect love song draws the sting of disappointed love.
As Dowland himself said, music is an easily available remedy for anyone who is sorrowful. “It expels cares, alters their grieved minds, and easeth in an instant”, he declared. In the show, it will be interesting to see which of those two possibilities – the musical easing of cares or the vortex of misery – wins out.
'An Anatomy of Melancholy' is at the Barbican Centre, London EC2, from Oct 27 to 30; barbican.org.uk
