Why beautiful sadness — in music, in art — evokes a special pleasure

Why beautiful sadness — in music, in art — evokes a special pleasure Enlarge this image toggle caption De Agostini via Getty Images De Agostini via Getty Images Composer Cliff Masterson knows how to make sorrow sublime. Take his regal, mournful adagio Beautiful Sadness, for example: Beautiful Sadness 0:12 "When I wrote it, the feeling of the music was sad, but yet there was this beautiful melody that sat on top," Masterson says. "There's a lot of sad songs out there, very sad music," Masterson says. "Pleasurable sadness is what we call it," says Matt Sachs, an associate research scientist at Columbia University who has studied the phenomenon. "Even though music doesn't always have a strong narrative or a strong character," Sachs says, "this category of empathy tends to be very strongly correlated with the enjoying of sad music."