Why does some music make us cry? It’s all in the details
What is it about some songs that bring us to tears?
Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author and journalist, made his name by asking and answering questions like that.
His latest project is a series of fascinating podcasts called “Revisionist History,” which you will enjoy exploring atwww.revisionisthistory.com. The most recent episode, which is about music and emotion in America, is called “The King of Tears.” The idea for it was born at Kitchener Public Library.
Gladwell is based in New York City now, but he grew up in Waterloo Region and has family living locally. He was interested when his sister-in-law, Bev Suderman Gladwell of Waterloo, told him about an afternoon of music here that had many people weeping.
It was a free performance on a Sunday afternoon. About 120 people sat in the library’s main reading room. The Grand Philharmonic Chamber Singers (of which I am a member) was performing excerpts of “Annelies,” a musical work by James Whitbourn.
It’s based on the diary of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who lived in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and whose diary has connected millions to the grim history of the Holocaust.
Suderman-Gladwell saw that some performers in the choir weren’t singing, and wondered why. Then “I realized they were crying, and they couldn’t sing,” she said.
Gladwell interviewed conductor Mark Vuorinen, who spoke of a brief moment in the work when Anne describes scrubbing herself in the bathtub. The music is reminiscent of a cheerful military march, something she might have heard on the radio and hummed to give herself courage.
“Anne Frank in the bathtub, to the tune of a Sousa march, with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door,” Gladwell says. It’s a combination of details so sharp that it becomes “merciless” for the listeners. They think of their own families, of the children they love, and they break down.
“The thing that pushes us over the top into tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides with specificity.”
Gladwell goes on to describe country music as having some of those same specific images: for example, a song about a marriage breakup that traces the discarded wedding rings from one pawnshop to the next.
We don’t cry over rock music nearly as much. In part, he argues, that’s because country music is almost exclusively music of white Protestants from the South. Rock music, by contrast, is created and performed by a rainbow coalition of almost all backgrounds from all over the world.
Diversity is wonderful, but you also pay a price for it, he argues. Concrete images aren’t effective in a loose coalition, because “if you go deeper or try to get more specific, you start to lose people.”
So we have two solitudes: an emotional divide, as formidably broken apart as the current ideological gulf between Republicans and Democrats. Maybe more so.
Gladwell’s theory of tears makes perfect sense to me. In a long reporting career, I’ve cried only once while writing a story. I was in New York City in September 2001, after thousands of people were killed in the attack on the World Trade Center.
Among the chaotic crowds, I interviewed one person: a mother who had watched helplessly on television, in her trailer home in Florida, as the plane flew into the same building from which her daughter was trying to escape. The mother was on her way to the smoking rubble to call her daughter’s name, in hopes of reviving her somehow. So many years later, my eyes still well up when I think of her.