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Helena Merriman asks why people listen to sad music. A recent study has shown that sad music has become increasingly popular, but why do people choose to listen to it, and what goes on in the brain and the body when they do so? Helena speaks to Japanese pianist and music researcher Dr Ai Kawakami who has some surprising answers about some of the positive feelings people experience when they listen to sad music. American writer Amanda Stern tells Helena why she regularly listens (and cries) to sad music and British composer Debbie Wiseman, known for her moving TV and film scores, explains what makes a piece of music sound sad. You’ll also hear pieces of sad music suggested by BBC listeners from all over the world.

It was supposed to be a celebratory occasion, a high-profile performance of a piece given life by the orchestra that commissioned it — a young composer's music played by other young musicians. Instead, the performance scheduled for Sunday of Jonas Tarm's music at Carnegie Hall by the highly regarded New York Youth Symphony (NYYS) has been canceled after it came to the attention of the ensemble's administration that the piece contains a quotation from the Nazi "Horst Wessel Lied." Born in Estonia, Tarm is a 21-year-old composer studying at the New England Conservatory in Boston. In 2014, he won the "First Music" prize from the NYYS, which resulted in the commission of a piece to be played by the orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Within the 9-minute piece called, in Ukrainian, Marsh u Nebuttya (March to Oblivion), Tarm says he used two musical quotes, each about 45 seconds long. The first is the anthem of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the second is the Nazi anthem, the "Horst Wessel" song. Tarm maintains that a piece of music should not necessitate further verbal explication. As such, he did not volunteer to tell the NYYS he was making those musical quotations within his piece, nor did he provide any background or context about his artistic intentions to the orchestra.

“Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion?,” Frere-Jones asked. “No movie review begins, ‘Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in The Iron Lady.’” So the question remains: Why do music fans obsess about authenticity? What’s at stake when a fan argues, with emotions riding high, that Taylor Swift is too pop to be country, or that Green Day isn’t authentic punk rock? As a sociologist who studies music, I’ve spent the last five years trying to understand these authenticity debates—which, incidentally, span just about every style of 20th- and 21st-century music, from electronic dance to South Texas polka. And what I’ve learned is that, if you want to understand why authenticity disputes occur, it’s best to look first at when they do.

Many concert-goers are often frustrated by the sound of people coughing during classical music performances. These coughers have now become the subject of an academic paper concerning "the economics of concert etiquette", which analyses a stark fact: people appear to cough more in concerts than in they do in normal life. The German economist Andreas Wagener told the Today programme: "The statistics indicate people cough during concerts twice as much as they do in normal life." Concert pianist Susan Tomes said: "I certainly do notice it, but I think it has something to do with the fact that people have gotten so used to hearing music amplified. "Many types of music are so loud, but classical music is not, and when you go to a classical concert, you forget how quiet acoustic instruments are." First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme on Monday 28 January 2012.

If there is such a thing as real expertise in identifying the properties of a wine, then it must be possible to get it wrong.  If tastes, in general, were entirely subjective there would be no right answer to the question of whether, for instance, chocolate ice cream tastes of chocolate.  No one really thinks that. The fact that expert wine tasters get it wrong so often is evidence that wine tasting is harder than identifying the presence of chocolate in ice cream—not that it is utterly capricious. So tastes are not so entirely subjective that our experiences of them have no relationship to an object.

Furthermore, tasters can strive to eliminate environmental factors that have been shown to influence judgments about wine such as conversations, the style of music being played, and changes in the weather, etc. These are all factors that wine tasters can control by adjusting the environment in which they taste. Wine tasters, if they are to maintain credibility, must taste under the appropriate conditions. But that is no different from any other normative judgment we make. Our ability to make ethical judgments, for instance, is similarly influenced by environmental factors. We know (or should know) better than to make ethical judgments when we are excessively angry, fearful, under the influence of powerful desires, etc. Yet, it does not follow from the fact that ethical judgments can be influenced by irrelevant factors that all ethical judgments are subjective.

So the taste of wine (or anything else) is partly dependent on objective features of the world and partly dependent on how our view of those features has been shaped by past experience. The crucial question then is how much of a distorting lens is that past experience.

As far as I could tell, there were no protesters in the vicinity of Lincoln Center on Nov. 15 before a Saturday matinee, the final performance of “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the Metropolitan Opera. This was a big change from the opening night of the Met’s season in September and the premiere of the “Klinghoffer” production last month, when hundreds of angry demonstrators gathered to denounce this opera by the composer John Adams and the librettist Alice Goodman as an anti-Semitic work that dared to humanize terrorists. Of course, Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath. But the only sign I saw being held outside the Met at the sold-out matinee said, “I need a ticket!” in big red letters.This was also to have been the day of a live HD simulcast of “Klinghoffer.” But Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, canceled the broadcast, bowing to pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, whose leaders were concerned about the work’s gaining international exposure at a time of a rise in anti-Semitic actions.

In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. Many readers felt that he had shown how the brain creates the soul. Others thought that he’d missed the point entirely. To them, the book was like a treatise on music that focussed exclusively on the physics of musical instruments. It left untouched the question of how a three-pound lump of neurons could come to possess a point of view, interiority, selfhood, consciousness—qualities that the rest of the material world lacks. These skeptics derided the book as “Consciousness Explained Away.”

Q-W-E-R-T-Y. Six letters that define so much of our waking lives.

Contemplating such works, we can think in two modes at once, the aesthetic and the historical-political—generally a wise way to navigate the labyrinth of art. To debate whether politics is always present or always absent is to play a parlor game irrelevant to the complex, ever-shifting reality in which both artists and their audiences reside.

There is much in Wagner that has nothing to do with Hitler; there is much in Wagner that contradicts Hitler. That said, I would never dream of suggesting that Wagner’s operas should be detached absolutely and utterly from politics. It cannot be done; it can never be done.

For anyone who has endured clichéd, condescending, uncomprehending, or otherwise aggravating depictions of classical music in American TV ads—the snobs at the symphony, the sopranos screaming under Valkyrie helmets, the badly edited bowdlerizations of the “Ode to Joy”—a new ad for the Apple iPad featuring the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen may come as a pleasant shock. It is, first of all, a cool, elegant piece of work—not surprising, given Apple’s distinguished history of television propaganda. Salonen is shown receiving inspiration for a passage in his Violin Concerto and trying it out in his iPad; then, after a montage of scenes in London and Finland, we see the violinist Leila Josefowicz and the Philharmonia Orchestra, of London, digging in to the score. More notably, it is musical: the concerto dictates the rhythm of the editing, and the correlation between notation and sound is made excitingly clear.