Music has always been associated with emotion, though philosophers, musicians, and biologists dispute the nature of the two’s connection. Music theorists currently suggest the relationship comes from “contour” or “convention,” with contour theory claiming that moving music emulates instinctive and natural sounds. We hear music as sad, it avers, because the contour of its notes follow the aural progressions of sad cries, of weeping, of the voices of the grieving, its tempo mimicking the manner of the despairing, a slow dirge the rhythm of the listless, of the bereaved. Joyous music likewise copies the contours of happy people’s lives, of their voices and shrieks, their laughter, their busy, quick and animated movements.

Convention theory reasons that we learn to feel emotion in music from our social contacts. The technique of using major chords to suggest happiness and minors to induce sadness, while it may have begun as contour, now succeeds because as listeners we’ve been indoctrinated with repeated experience to associate those sounds with particular emotions. Any music lover will recognize at least a limited truth in convention theory, for a listener can come to love, after repeated listenings and with coaching, music that seems wholly alien upon first hearing—jazz lacks appeal to those versed only in country-western while classical and opera seem like noise to the untrained and musically naïve, yet as the unpracticed listener learns from others how to hear the strange music he may begin to hear it as they do and be equally moved. According to the conventionists, there is no voila! moment upon first hearing, no essence of Being to be attributed to a piece, just a Pavlovian conditioned response to a learned stimulus.

Together, the two outlooks convincingly explain the correlation between music and simple emotions, but they do not address the sensation that music sometimes, though rarely, evokes: an ineffable sense of something greater than life that corresponds to no everyday emotional experience.

Schopenhauer, an early nineteenth century philosopher, wrote lengthily on this sort of aesthetic experience in The World as Will and Representation, and called such Siren-like music sublime, a type of beauty elevated over others in that it endangers the perceiver. Sublime pieces carry an element of risk that other works do not—violent thunderstorms, dangerous waterfalls, endless expanses of plains, and, as well, their artistic representations, threaten the perceiver, who, if he keeps anxiety, fear and his will at bay, experiences them more deeply. Beautiful art, on the other hand, threatens no one, though when closely conforming to Platonic Ideas provides a similar if less powerful aesthetic experience for the will-less subject.

Schopenhauer distinguished art forms by their appeal—does an object call to the knowing subject or the willing one? He derisively called the latter type of art “charming,” which we might describe today as “cute”, “pretty” or “entertaining,” while giving the former kind a much higher status with a category of its own. Disinterested will-lessness, to Schopenhauer, was the experience’s crucial aspect, for the willing self stands obstructively between a knowing perceiver and Being. He described will, in part, as a cluster of desires inevitably entailing a two-fold suffering: as a lack, desire creates suffering, and as sated, it induces a lack of desire, a kind of boredom evoking yet another form of suffering. In this entangled oscillation of desire and satiety the willing subject can hardly experience anything but momentary and fleeting entertainment.

Yet, if one experiences the “charming” disinterestedly, removed and “knowing”, can he distill just a bit of Being from it, or is this amused, distant sense I have a sham, an imposition of beauty by my willing self upon the inane? Schopenhauer would say the latter, and I find myself fully agreeing with his view…still, there is something here in the trivial that bears an existential worth.

Like the Buddhism he admired and that had just barely found its way to Europe, Schopenhauer made much of man’s involvement with suffering, of the pitfalls of being enthralled with “the charming”—one aspect of the Buddhist samsara—rather than the beautiful. But he did not write of the converse dangers of aesthetic obsession, of the sailors captured by the Sirens’ songs, of the risk of staying on the island of the sublime, of the outcome of the high-wire act of constant will-lessness in regard to music or any other aspect of Being. Instead, he addressed the ascetic’s denial of his will, lauding the welcoming of suffering and the quelling of desire as the highest form of human existence.

Grief, as suffering, bears a close relationship to desire, in one of its aspects is desire—as the wish for the departed to return. Experienced as such, it resides in the domain of the willing self, in samsara. Yet, as Schopenhauer distinctly noted, if the subject experiences grief not as individualized but as grief-in-itself, as everyone’s grief, he does so will-lessly and so experiences a sort of joy-grief, a perception of Being that does not match the contours of everyday, worldly emotions. Grief of this sort qualifies as sublime, the perceived death that presents danger to the individual will being ignored and experienced by a knowing, will-less subject. It is here, in the movement from the grief of desire to the grief of the universal, between the willing subject and the knowing one, between “charming” grief and sublime grief, where On the Beach slipped into my consciousness.