Expressing Grief Through Music

As we get older, more of our friends and family pass away. Some die from old age, but too many die young, we think, before their time, from accidents, cancer, and other causes. Realizing how fragile life is, and how quickly death can come to the unsuspecting and unprepared, can unnerve us so much that we wake every morning fearing that someone else has died overnight. Every strange ache, cough, and tick of our body can make us think that something is seriously wrong and we’re next.

When someone dear to us dies, we try to find meaning in it, and we search for evidence to affirm that life is basically good, and that there is still enough beauty and joy and love left to make it worth the heartaches. Some of us will work through our grief by creating something out of death’s raw materials, and explore its terrain by painting, writing, weaving, dancing, or playing music.

Franz Liszt, as well as probably every other composer, created music to deal with the tragedies in their lives. Liszt’s grief for the deaths of his father and his son served as inspiration for a number of his compositions. 

Liszt wrote, “I carry a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound.” Each death challenged him to go beyond the boundaries of the musical forms he was taught in order to express the depths of his emotions and the dislocations of grief. While his music grew darker, it also became freer. What he created would pave the way for the generation of composers that came after him. 

Kevin LaVine, of the Library of Congress, wrote: “In Liszt's later years, as he began to suffer from bouts of depression and deteriorating physical health, his music grew … in its use of non-traditional harmony (akin to that of Beethoven in his own later years). His use of chromatically dissonant textures established a precedent that would inspire later composers, such as Wagner, Schoenberg, Berg; his use of harmonies based on whole tone and other non-traditional scales, as well as bitonality, anticipated the musical impressionism of composers such as Debussy and Ravel.”

Once we accept that someone we love has died, and that death is a natural part of life, then we don’t have to fight the philosophical “why” when good, talented, and compassionate people die. We can focus our energy on dealing with our feelings of loss. If we have never lost anyone before, we will be pushed beyond the language we know to find words that are capable of expressing our raw emotions. We will find ourselves drawn to darker images and discordant music in minor keys.

When someone dies as they are coming into prominence in their chosen profession after long years of study and work, a layer of bitterness is mixed into our grief because we’re aware of everything they were about to accomplish with their insights and skills. Paul Kalanithi and his memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, comes to mind here. He spent years preparing to be a skilled doctor, and was on the cusp of using his skills to save others, when he unexpectedly died.

Every death is a tragedy for those who knew and loved that person. Living a long life is not a guarantee, although we stubbornly cling to this notion. Every day our focus should be on doing what is the most important, and caring for others as best we can, because tomorrow one of us may not be here.

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I am grateful to Prof. Ed Rath for inviting me to think about this. He used my words in his column honoring colleagues in the American Liszt Society who recently died.