On Music as a Source of Comfort
January 25, 2026
Another American citizen has been murdered at the hands of ICE agents in Minneapolis. Alex Pretti was murdered on January 24th on Nicollet Avenue, next to the bubble tea shop that I would always visit during trips to the Twin Cities in college. I found out early in the morning while on the MRT in Taipei. When I opened my Instagram feed, I was met with outraged posts and video footage and photos of his murder from several angles. I chose not to watch the videos.
I don’t feel the need to reiterate my outrage at length, but I felt a stronger sense of sadness and despair over the current situation. For me, this reaches further than partisan politics, but tears at the entire paradigm and vision of America that I have believed in for so long: that the rule of law and justice will prevail. The violence and information overload on social media is a lot, and I’m trying to think about how to responsibly manage my social media consumption while also remaining informed.
I again feel a strong sense of isolation in Taipei; Taiwanese people and my non-American friends just don’t really get it. They’ll hear me out and care for me, but there’s something missing. I don’t hold this against them or expect them to know the ins and outs of the situation or deeply care about an issue in a country that isn’t their own, but this leaves me lacking a sense of camaraderie around this issue that I would likely be experiencing differently if I was in the US right now.
When I’m sad, I turn to music. Especially today, I’ve found that composers best encapsulate feelings of sadness, despair, grief, desperation, and longing in ways that most resonate with me. I’ll share some pieces that have been resonating today, along with my playlist.
Symphony No. 5 in D Minor Op. 47 III. Largo by Dimitri Shostakovich
This movement of Shostakovich’s 5th symphony is one of the saddest movements of music I have ever performed. Pay attention to the oboe, clarinet, and flute solos, woven in with very intense string-heavy passages. To me, the solos sound like tears being cried in a quiet, dark forest in the middle of a snowy winter, while the string passages sound like a collective outpouring of intense sadness and despair. Two side notes on this movement: one, I think there are a couple of moments in the beginning that sound similar to a few chords in the soundtrack of Interstellar, and two, I performed this full symphony with the St. Olaf Orchestra on our fall tour in 2023, and it was very powerful.
Per Wikipedia, which sums it up pretty well, “This movement is a culmination of resignation, mourning and lamentation, which in the center of the movement increases to a passionate accusation with clarinet, xylophone and piano. Otherwise the movement is more chamber music-like and carried by the string orchestra. The tonality is floating and often not definable, free-floating and independent linearity of the individual voices prevails.”
Symphony N. 6 in B Minor Op. 74 “Pathitique” IV. Adagio Lamentoso by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
The fourth movement of Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony is a famously tragic ending to a grand and dramatic symphony. The movement opens with a very dramatic and tragic motif. In the first theme, I like to listen for the bassoon solo working its way down the scale; it feels like climbing down into a pit. The movement takes a slightly lighter turn in the second theme before returning to the first theme, before rising again to a dramatic peak, before slowly coming back down, which sounds, to me, like someone trying to take their last steps. The movement ends quietly and tragically, with a steady rhythm in the lower voices that sounds like a slowly fading heartbeat. It’s a sad and potent ending to a glorious symphony.
My side-note: I performed the full symphony last December in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in a very powerful and emotionally meaningful concert. When we would rehearse the end of this movement, our conductor would always ask the bass section to play it again because it sounded “too alive” which I always found to be an accurate description of what they were missing.
