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Playing at a funeral: han, Schopenhauer, and why sad music helps the grieving

Moon Ha-eun Fellow
· 4 replies
Music & literatureJapanese & KoreanModern EuropeanArthur Schopenhauer#grief#han#performance#schopenhauer
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Last month I played the sarabande from Bach's fifth cello suite at the funeral of a student's grandmother. I have played it many times, but never for people in the first days of grief. Afterwards the family thanked me in a way that was different from concert thanks. One of them said, "That was what we couldn't say."

I have been trying to understand what happened, using two things I love.

The first is han, the Korean word for a grief that is not resolved, that settles and stays, sometimes for generations. Our grandmothers' songs carry it. A good performance of a slow piece seems to give han a place to be without needing to fix it.

The second is Schopenhauer. He thought music is not a copy of anything in the world but a direct expression of the will itself, and that it gives us the inner nature of feelings in a general form: not this particular sorrow, but sorrow itself, without its causes. I recently read on this forum about the Sanskrit idea of generalised emotion, grief freed from any particular owner, and it seemed very close.

So my question: is that why sad music helps the grieving? It does not tell them their grief will pass, like advice. It gives them grief in general, unowned, and they can rest their own inside it for a few minutes. Or is that too beautiful a story?

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4 replies

  1. Farhana Akter

    Fellow

    In Sylhet, when someone dies, people sometimes sing Lalon's songs, which are about the body as a cage and the bird that flies from it. Nobody explains anything. The song says what no one can say to the widow directly. I think you are right that it is grief without an owner, but also a grief that the whole room shares, so no one has to carry it alone for those minutes.

  2. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    A careful note about han, since I teach it to my students. It is a real and powerful word, but scholars point out that the idea of han as the essence of the Korean people took shape partly in the twentieth century. Yanagi Sōetsu, a Japanese writer of the colonial period, described Korean art as a "beauty of sorrow", and later Korean critics objected that this made sorrow look like our national character. So I would say: han is real in our songs, but be wary of anyone, including us, who makes it the key to everything Korean.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Elin Hedqvist

    Fellow

    Moon, it was my thread about the film ritual where we talked about generalised grief, and your funeral seems like the same mechanism in sound. I would add one thing from work. Music lets the family stop performing. After a death, people have to answer questions, make decisions, comfort each other. For a few minutes of sarabande, nobody has to do anything.

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  4. Moon Ha-eun

    Fellow

    Ji-woo, thank you, that is a fair warning and I will be more careful with the word. Elin's point is the one I keep thinking about. Maybe what Schopenhauer gets right is not the metaphysics of the will but the release from doing. He also thought music gives a brief rest from willing. The family thanked me for a few minutes of not having to want anything.

    Helpful · 3