“August, 1942. Leningrad, besieged and filled with starving inhabitants, barely holds out against the force of the Nazi invasion. People are queuing up for soup made of boots and book bindings. Hitler has chosen the 9th of the month to celebrate the fall of the city, and a ball has been planned in advance.

But in a symbolic act of defiance, the Russians decide to hold an orchestral concert. To do so, they have to fly in extra musicians, because only 15 members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra have survived the war. The piece of music they choose for the finale is Dimitri Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.

At the Cheltenham Music Festival’s The Sound of Melancholia last week, classical music composer Stephen Johnson repeated this story, describing Shostakovich’s compositions as “some of the bleakest, darkest, saddest, most vile and sardonic music” he had ever heard

He went on to recount the story of Viktor Kuslov, who had played in the 1942 performance, who was moved to tears by the recollection of the music’s powerful effect on that night. Indeed, the final page of the ink-written score that was used at the world premiere is smudged and run with the tears of Yevgeny Mravinsky, the conductor.

It’s counterintuitive, but Johnson’s story suggests that the desolation in Schostakovich’s music, resonating with the desolation in their hearts, served to bolster the spirits of the Russian populace at the time. The premise postulated by Johnson and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, who co-hosted the event, is the oft-repeated idea that music, by conferring a narrative structure to emotion, brings emotion closer to thought. “There is something about seeing your own mood reflected that allows you to let go of that feeling,” says Johnson.

But it is not so simple. As Tallis, who was standing in for an absent Robert Winston, pointed out at the start of the evening’s conversation, there is a complex interplay between the emotion the composer attempts to write into the music, that conveyed by the music, the listener’s interpretation, and the listener’s mood. This was resoundingly reflected in the results of an experiment carried out on the evening’s audience.” via @openculture