Joy in music

[Richard Tarleton]

George Bernard Shaw said: 'Such a wonder, and treasure of everything lovely and happy in music'. The work? Wagner's Die Meistersinger, and that's the most joyful piece I know.

Spot on, Pet - nothing to add to that.

[edashtav]

Cheers, S_A, your answer is helpful and informative. I hear in thr finle of Bartok's Second Piano Concerto manic energy from a composer on a high and you provide a possible cause or reason. Mania, for me is clinical, joy is an emotion: euphoric happiness.

[Maclintick]

Cheers, S_A, your answer is helpful and informative. I hear in thr finle of Bartok's Second Piano Concerto manic energy from a composer on a high and you provide a possible cause or reason.

I'd second that -- & add that his B minor violin concerto of 1938 produces the same joyful emotion in this listener -- endlessly inventive & perhaps the ultimate in folk-inspired variation form. Had the privilege in 2018 of standing in the room in which BB composed this, and other works in the 30s until exile in the US.
Finale of Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta equally joyous..
In strictly un-chronological order, GM 3, LVB 6, practically the entire output of Joe Haydn....Schubert 5, of course, Meistersinger, Marriage of Figaro, Tippett 2 & MM, Heavy Weather (& Black Market), Elgar "In The South", JSB Christmas Oratorio & Magnificat, B minor Mass (& much else, it goes without saying). Lots of RVW & Ravel..."Petrushka", lots of Borodin, Abbey Road, Pet Sounds, Songs in The Key of Life -- too much joyousness to enumerate...

[ardcarp]

JSB Christmas Oratorio

Opening and first chorus is the most life-affirming piece I can think of.

[Serial_Apologist]

Bella's distinction in the OP between the "joyous" and the "jolly" struck me this morning when I noticed a CD of Strauss family Polkas. The idea of over an hour of nothing but polkas (even by such masters as these) struck me as purgatorial. Jollity makes its mark quickly, and as quickly pales - Joy is a touch of the infinite: taking an instant, but lasting beyond even the memory of the moment.

You've prompted me to think up a new word to describe your feelings about this, ferney - "polkatorial"!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

You've prompted me to think up a new word to describe your feelings about this, ferney - "polkatorial"!

Isn't that just another name for a private dance lesson?

[jayne lee wilson]

Cheers, S_A, your answer is helpful and informative. I hear in thr finle of Bartok's Second Piano Concerto manic energy from a composer on a high and you provide a possible cause or reason. Mania, for me is clinical, joy is an emotion: euphoric happiness.

How does musical mania compare with or relate to clinical mania?
Are either less involuntary than "joy"?
Is the experience of maniacal joy all that far from "euphoric happiness"?

"Boredom is not far from ecstasy: it is ecstasy seen from the shores of pleasure.”

― Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte,

[edashtav]

There's an edginess and explosive energy to Bartok's music at the end of the 2nd Piano Concerto, Jayne, that betokens something beyond and in excess of joy. If S_A is correct that BB had a bipolar nature, I feel that may have been a cause. His joy is extreme but unstable, threatened all the time by the possibility of a crash. Compare that with Messaien's visions of Eternal Joy which are stable and not supercharged with entropic energy.

[Quarky]

Against my better judgement, I have to make a comment. I don't go out consciously looking for Joy, but am "Joyous" when it happens.

Joy is a prime mover in Mozart's music, imv. His arias for Soprano demonstrate this. When I first started listening to classical music, I was transfixed by his most perfect opera Cosi fan Tutte.

Soave sia il Vento is my nomination. Various versions on YouTube. Glyndebourne production very good. Renee Fleming a little too loud.

[rauschwerk]

Joy is surely more intensely experienced when it is unlooked for. A couple of weeks ago, driving to my Pilates class (an easy run up the A14 when few trucks were about) I unexepectedly heard Haydn's Te Deum in C on R3. I love this piece anyway, but I found myself riveted by this hearing - moving to the music and loudly singing all I could remember from a student performance more than 50 years ago. It remained in my head for the rest of the day.

[Mal]

Salieri (yes him again! Boo!) once accused Haydn of 'gross sins against the church style', that is, too much joy and not enough making you feel like a miserable sinner. I consciously look for joy by consciously seeking out Haydn, and, very often, find joy there. If you don't consciously seek out joy what do you consciously seek out? Not a veiled criticism, I can see that looking for, say, manic excitement would be entirely valid, and joy nice if it came along with the excitement.

[vinteuil]

Joy is surely more intensely experienced when it is unlooked for. .

... I agree - joy (along with happiness, pleasure &c) is an epiphenomenon - a by-product that 'happens' while you are otherwise engaged : you achieve it by doing something else rather than actively seeking it for itself. But listening to music can be a good route. 'Joy' itself is a fairly baggy term - encompassing the lighter end - hilarity, exuberance, as well as a deeper - plenitude, fulfilment. I get it in Scarlatti (listening, but still more in playing : there is a physical delight in the fingers when you get it right... ), Vivaldi, Haydn, and supremely (predictably) in Bach.


.

[jayne lee wilson]

"Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder."

anon, New Orleans Daily Crescent newspaper, 1848 (?)...

[Mal]

Nicholas Kenyon, in “Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart,” writes, “Other great composers have expressed the extremes of life: affirmation, despair, sensual pleasure, bleak emptiness, but only in Mozart can all these emotions co-exist in the space of a short phrase.”

Cairns observes in “Mozart and His Operas,” “Idomeneo” touches on “love, joy, physical and spiritual contentment, stoicism, heroic resolution; the ecstasy of self-sacrifice, the horrors of dementia, the agonizing dilemma of a ruler trapped in the consequences of his actions; mass hysteria, panic in the face of an unknown scourge, turning to awe before the yet more terrible fact; the strange peace that can follow intense grief; the infinite tenderness of a father’s last farewell to his son.”

"In “The Don Giovanni Moment,” Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht write that the ending imagines “life without awe,” a truly human existence beginning on the other side of tragedy. The world may be a duller place without the Don and his occult nemesis, but it is still suffused with Mozartean pleasure. We can live without extremists, however much they may stimulate our faculties of lust and rage." - Alex Ross

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/24/the-storm-of-style

[Serial_Apologist]

... I agree - joy (along with happiness, pleasure &c) is an epiphenomenon - a by-product that 'happens' while you are otherwise engaged : you achieve it by doing something else rather than actively seeking it for itself. But listening to music can be a good route. 'Joy' itself is a fairly baggy term - encompassing the lighter end - hilarity, exuberance, as well as a deeper - plenitude, fulfilment. I get it in Scarlatti (listening, but still more in playing : there is a physical delight in the fingers when you get it right... ), Vivaldi, Haydn, and supremely (predictably) in Bach.


.

Indeed - there's a saying in Zen that the best experiences seem to happen all of themselves, and are unable to be summoned at will. But please don't ask me the source!

(Ah! - I now see that jayne has found an excellent source!)