Every time the Trump administration does something really horrid, I end up crying — which is why I sometimes avoid the current news cycle — and why I also have a list on my smartphone’s notebook app called List Of Times The Trump Administration Has Made Me Cry.

Other times, I feel I have to own it as much as possible and wallow in the times that we are living in, so I created a soundtrack of some depressing pieces of music that match the general atmosphere and climate.

Here are six of them.

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1. John Dowland’s Flow My Tears

John Dowland, a Renaissance composer, wrote a famously depressing song called “Flow, My Tears.”

If you listen to the lyrics, there are beautiful lines like:

Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.

I feel like that’s a metaphor for our times.

This song was part of a weird artistic trend at the time to make stuff melancholy.  It relates back to the Renaissance theory of the four humors or four temperaments (which, in turn, comes from the Greek physician, Galen).

If you were melancholy, it was because you had too much black bile over having too much blood, phlegm, or regular bile, which is what happens when you trust that jerk Galen, who also said stupid stuff like your liver digests your food to turn it into your blood.

Anyway, during the Renaissance, making art melancholy became a fad. Dowland was a part of this trend. His motto was “Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens” or “Always Dowland, Always Mourning.”

2. Aulis Sallinen’s Winter Was Hard 

This piece is by contemporary Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen.

When I listen to it, it makes me think of the bleakness of Siberian winter.

It sounds like a bunch of peasants sitting in a shack around a table without any food. Or like the tundra all covered with snow and the wind blowing over the shack where they are starving.

They are just trying to wait it out till the spring thaw when they will be able to dig for some roots or gnaw some new leaves from trees and shrubs, and they are so not going to make it.

3. Antoine Brumel’s Dies Irae, Dies Illa

The original “Dies Irae” or “Day of Wrath” was a hymn written in the 13th century. It’s basically about the day of judgement where good souls are sent to heaven and the bad souls are sent to hell.

I can almost hear the groaning of bells while mourners in black clothing stand around mass graves while a hundred pock-marked bodies are dumped in during the black death.

This seems prescient for all kinds of reasons.

(2020 NOTE: I was right! We are now in the middle of a pandemic!)

“Dies Irae” eventually became part of the sequence for the Requiem Mass or Funeral Mass of the Catholic Church. The theme from “Dies Irae” has been musically referenced by many composers since the 13th century. (Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is the most famous example.)

Antione Brumel (who composed the above version) was actually the first composer to put “Dies Irae” into a mass. Before that it was only a dumb hymn that everyone cried about because plague death.

4. Mozart’s Requiem

What is not to like about an entire mass about death? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Not in this day and age.

The thing about the Requiem is that Mozart died while working on it (hello Halloween).  Maybe he haunts the unfinished score somewhere, and everyone who studies it feels stared at — but like — musically.

I don’t have anything magic to say about the Requiem, only that I love it. I’ve listened to it so much — and so loudly — that I may have permanently damaged my ears (hello tinnitus).

4. Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima 

This piece is by contemporary Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. I don’t know anything about this piece other than it was written for the victims of Hiroshima, and that it sounds like screaming.

It’s really disturbing in that eternal torment kind of way — in that it depicts the realistic horrors of war.

I feel like if the current administration’s politics keep heading in the same direction regarding international diplomacy, that this could become a reality for us at some point. I can’t even imagine the war crimes that this administration would commit.

5. Henry Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament” from Dido and Aeneas

Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas is based on the story of Queen Dido of Carthage from Virgil’s Aeneid. All you need to know is that Aeneas leaves Dido, and in a fit of grief, Dido throws herself on top of a funeral pyre and stabs herself to death.

The aria “Dido’s Lament” is led in by a particularly morbid recitative:

Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me,
On thy bosom let me rest,
More I would, but Death invades me;
Death is now a welcome guest

I imagine Dido throwing herself on the fire and singing the lyrics.

6. Five Other Pieces

Here are five additional pieces that also erupt with pathos and evoke the current climate.

• Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony (Funeral March)
• Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time
• Shostakovitch’s String Quartets (All of Them)
• Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
• Lera Auerbach’s Dreams and Whispers of Poseidon

Unhappy listening, everyone.