most morbid, depressing piece of music?

[Ten thumbs]

I can assure you that if you are truly down, there is nothing more depressing than a happy song.

[max]

I can assure you that if you are truly down, there is nothing more depressing than a happy song.

I've noticed that too! There's nothing more perverse than human psychology which would account why I like to listen to deep, searching and  existential kind of music when I'm least miserable.

[btpaul674]

Simply put, listening to sad music is sort of a survival tool. Surviving is good, and our bodies reward us for it.

http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11071/courses/abnormal/What%20good%20is%20feeling%20bad%20f03.pdf

Randolph Neese's article.

[greg]

Simply put, listening to sad music is sort of a survival tool. Surviving is good, and our bodies reward us for it.

http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11071/courses/abnormal/What%20good%20is%20feeling%20bad%20f03.pdf

Randolph Neese's article.

ooooohh just read the first page, very interesting, especially for me, personally
i'll comment on this later, i just don't have time at the moment

[MDL]

i didn't care for the imagery, either, but if you want to hear a better version, Penderecki's own conducting of the Threnody is better in my opinion
(though that version, too, isn't so bad either)


oh yeah, now that's the stuff.
maybe the Threnody is the most morbid and Pettersson is the most depressing?...

Yes, Penderecki's EMI account of the Threnody is peerless. The problem with the Threnody is that Penderecki wrote it as a technical exercise. I think his original title was something like 8'30", ie, the duration of the work. It was only after hearing a run-through that the composer, or his agent, decided that a more dramatic, "sexier" title would make Penderecki's extremes more acceptable to an audience. Hence a Stockhausen/Xenakis-style exercise in sound was reborn as a fake cry of humanist protest. Having hit the headlines with the Threnody, Penderecki has spent the rest of his career attaching any heavy-duty atrocity to his output (various takes on the fate of Jesus, the Holocaust, the possession at Loudun, the assault on Solidarity, etc, etc). The result is Penderecki's output is morbid, exciting, but shallow. I really enjoy Penderecki's music for its superficial, immediately exciting thrills, but Schoenberg managed more genuine intensity and feeling in eight minutes of A Survivor from Warsaw than Penderecki has managed in his copious, unstoppable career. Penderecki is fun!

[vandermolen]

Allan Pettersson's Symphony No.7 is a right downer. I love it, but I have to be in the right frame of mind to listen to it. Penderecki's Dies Irae, dedicated to the victims of Auschwitz, isn't a barrel of laughs either. They're both morbid pieces, but I don't find them actually depressing. If I want to be depressed, I just have to listen to anything by Haydn, who bores me to tears.

Pettersson's "The Dead in the Market Place" would get my vote.

[Grazioso]

Allan Pettersson's Symphony No.7 is a right downer. I love it, but I have to be in the right frame of mind to listen to it. Penderecki's Dies

Much of it is extremely bleak, to be sure, but I hear it as uplifting, too, with its long struggle from darkness to light, ending in a sort of quiet contemplation or resignation after the outright heartache that has gone before.

[MDL]

Much of it is extremely bleak, to be sure, but I hear it as uplifting, too, with its long struggle from darkness to light, ending in a sort of quiet contemplation or resignation after the outright heartache that has gone before.

You're right about it ending in "quiet contemplation or resignation", but for me, doesn't have feeling of acceptance or the glimmer of hope that makes Mahler's Das Lied so moving. It's more like Shostakovich at his bleakest. Even though it's very beautiful, it's an ending that speaks of exhaustion and defeat.

[vandermolen]

Much of it is extremely bleak, to be sure, but I hear it as uplifting, too, with its long struggle from darkness to light, ending in a sort of quiet contemplation or resignation after the outright heartache that has gone before.

Much the same could be said, I think, of Pettersson's 8th Symphony (there was a good old CBS LP with Kamu conducting).

[max]

most morbid, depressing piece of music?

...the ones which are the worst performed. The kind that could even make Papageno cry.

[Grazioso]

Much the same could be said, I think, of Pettersson's 8th Symphony (there was a good old CBS LP with Kamu conducting).

There are at least two in-print CD recordings of the 8th, on BIS and CPO (the latter also as part of a complete set).

[snyprrr]

I used to be very susseptible(sic) to Phil Collins when I was pining. It seemed, not only was he singing about the same relationship all the time, I was convinced every some was about the same incident!!!

The John Zorn SQs are the most morbid music I can think of right now. Even without the s/m-anal sex cover art to get you going, the sounds of the piece "memento mori" have that queasy feeling of when you're lying in bed and the hangover comes on BEFORE you get to sleep. anyone been there? I wouldn't want to be on a "bad trip" and listening to this.

Florent Schmitt's Piano Quintet?
I never found Berg's Op.3 morbid ENOUGH. And Pettersson?...pleeeze...mother's milk...

honestly, I used to looove the metal music, but I still haven't found much classical to compete. I thought I was going to find it in Berlin 20s-30s, but the closest I've gotten is Franz Schmidt's SQ No.2, and that's not even close to where I want to go.

I'll admit I haven't heard a lot of Hartmann. Maybe he fits the bill?

I've been looking for what I call the "edgar allan poe" sound-remember that EMI disc with Debussy and Caplet?

I think morbid music needs a harpsicord, too, just for good measure.

[DavidRoss]

Wagner's Ring

[Superhorn]

  For me, the finale of the Mahler 6th is not depressing, but cathartic.
  I feel purged after it. It actually makes be feel better.

[ChamberNut]

Wagner's Ring

Hmpf. 

[springrite]

Much of it is extremely bleak, to be sure, but I hear it as uplifting, too, with its long struggle from darkness to light, ending in a sort of quiet contemplation or resignation after the outright heartache that has gone before.

For me, much of the work (before the "of quiet contemplation or resignation") is pain rather than depression. Pain in and of itself is not depressing to listen to at all, and not even necessarily sad. I have no problem listening to it at any time. Interestingly enough, I feel uplifted before the music does. 

[Josquin des Prez]

but Schoenberg managed more genuine intensity and feeling

I was following your argument until you got here. That said, Penderecki has matured a lot through out the years and some of his later pieces are genuine masterworks, like the wind sextet for instance. I'm always suspicious of composers who think they can express the suffering of others. Art is about individualities, anything else is invariably superficial and shallow in my view.

[vandermolen]

I'd agree with Val that Kindertotenlieder should be high on anyones list. However I think most symphonies by Allan Pettersson would fit here.

Especially Pettersson's 'The Dead in the Market Place'. Miaskovsky's 'Silence' (After Poe) is not a bundle of laughs either.

[Guido]

Ives's "Like a Sick Eagle" is a candidate as it languishes in descending quarter tones

"The spirit is too weak
mortality weighs
heavily on me like unwilling sleep
and each imagined pinnacle and steep
of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle
looking toward the sky"

(or thereabouts)'

Yes this (especially in the Jan DeGaetani/Gilbert Kalish recording) is heart rendingly, crushingly tragic - Swafford notes that there are very few instances of tragic music in Ives' oeuvre, but that this is one of them, and he wonders whether this was Ives' reaction to Harmony's miscarriage and subsequent hysterectomy.

[Diletante]

Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony's Finale.

The contrast between the triumphant ending of the third movement and the heart-ripping beginning of the finale is overwhelming. I always imagine someone in their happiest years receiving the news that a dear person has passed away. The world suddenly becomes gloomy...