Appreciation for Classical Music 🎻
Classical music expresses things in a subtle manner. It doesn’t try to fix grief or talk pain away. It just sits with them, and somehow, in its company, they become easier to carry. It has never made the heaviness disappear. What it does is quieter than that: it makes the heaviness feel less lonely.
And it asks for nothing, except that you listen to it. No argument, no answer expected. A few minutes of attention, and in return it hands back a feeling that you hadn’t found the words for yet.
There are two composers I personally like very much. They sound nothing alike, but both of them find their way to the same place in me.
Ludovico Einaudi: Experience
This piece by Einaudi begins the way a memory does: quietly, as if you are slowly starting to remember some horrible or painful incident from the past. You might have grown out of it, but the grief those incidents left behind in you is still there, and those soft, quiet opening notes awaken it. After a few notes, once the pitch of the music starts rising, you feel as if you are there, observing all those incidents as they happened, and all the grief inside you keeps showing up in the form of those memories.
Lastly, when the pitch of the music starts getting lower, that’s when you return to your original plane and sit very comfortably with all the grief that’s stored inside you.
Max Richter: On the Nature of Daylight
This piece feels like it started long before you pressed play. Slow strings rise and fall, each line taking its time, nothing rushed. Richter wrote it for The Blue Notebooks (2004), and it sounds less like one person’s sorrow than many people’s at once, which may be why it keeps finding its way into films about loss, like Arrival and Hamnet.
When you listen to this piece of art, you will realise that it’s genuinely sad, but… I don’t personally think Richter made it only to make us feel sad, but to make us feel alive at the same time. By that I mean: to be able to feel the sadness, the grief (if you have any, and everyone does!), the pain, and then to make peace with it, is a sign of someone who knows how to live and actually be alive. It is not something every human being can do; many avoid feeling grief, numb it, and make their lives somewhat lifeless.
To some, this music might sound depressing, but it actually isn’t, once you understand what it’s trying to say. It’s just asking you to sit there, listen and observe yourself: the easiest way to feel alive after a prolonged period of suffering.
Furthermore, the title stays with me. Daylight is the most ordinary thing there is, and this music suggests that even it holds grief: we love the light most when we know it is ending. It doesn’t resolve the pain. It shows it to you clearly, and somehow that is enough to let you breathe again.
Where they meet
Einaudi and Richter could hardly be more different. One builds from a quiet piano into a swell of strings; the other moves with a slow tide of strings. One feels intimate, like a diary; the other vast, like a sky.
But both understand something I am still learning: grief is not the opposite of beauty. It is often where beauty comes from. Somewhere in each of us lies a loss we have never fully spoken aloud, and this music does not ask us to explain it. It recognises it, and quietly keeps us company.
Perhaps that is the real gift of classical music. It does not tell us how to feel; it reminds us that we already do.