Technology makes bad music possible. This is not to say all technology-driven music is bad. It's to say that most technology-driven music is bad.

You can blame Philip Glass or Kitaro or Pink Floyd. Or you can go way back. Mark Twain blamed the modern mindset: "You know, Wagner's music is better than it sounds." Or here's Twain on the opera: "I haven't heard anything like that since the orphanage burned down."

Me, I blame Roger Williams.

Not the founder of Rhode Island. The schlock pianist. Roger Williams' artistry back in the 1960s was based less, much less, on virtuosic ability than on the ability of the latest microphones to pick up the echo. He was popular because you could hear the diminish of each key struck.

The notes really did put you in mind of leaves falling. There was an eternity between each note, especially in those pre-ambient days of yore. It was a spooky, sad sound.

Williams was like the Alan Shepard of tech-schlock-music. With him, studio engineers realized that musicianship affected people less than effects created at the console. The last chord of Sergeant Pepper that rolls on and on forever. The endless echo of Enya. Techno Goth rock. Or my favorite sad band, The Eels.

You see, I like sad music. Remember that famous Charles Addams cartoon showing an audience in a moviehouse cowering from disgust at whatever mayhem is transpiring onscreen -- and the Addams Family, in row six, all smiling smiles of beatific comprehension?

I'm like that, only instead of mayhem, I brighten at anything melancholic. When others are unpacking their razors after some ghostly dirge by Leonard Cohen or the Cure, that tune is in my head, and it ain't leaving any time soon.

I had a phone chat the other day with distinguished musicologist Robert Greenberg. I was doing a write-up for him. He was telling me how all kinds of music communicate. It's all the same song, he said, the blues, the raga, the tango, the ballad.

In my excitement, I let down my guard. "Yes, yes!," I said. "And have you noticed how only sad music makes people happy?"

Greenberg ahemmed, since I was dissing everything in the musical canon more upbeat than adagio. Our brief voyage of sharing was shipwrecked on the odd thought I chose to share.

Here's another "Huh?" for you.

Most people think of time as a conveyor belt, or an airport people mover, that is always bringing the future closer to where we are, and putting the past farther behind us.

Time is horizontal. The past is off to the left of the chart. There's the Big Bang and the Cretaceous period on the far left, fading into the Boston Tea Party and the discovery of pencillin.

Me, I see time as vertical. I would turn the chart on its side, so that we are at the top, and gravity is pulling us down, each of us toward our individual future. Time is exactly like gravity -- none of us can resist its pull.

And though we hold ourselves high in our youth, November eventually comes, and plucks us free.

And like gravity, your future ends with a touchdown.

Meantime we are falling, like the autumn leaves in the Roger Williams song. We fixate on the present, and the wonderful choices it presents us with. This way, that way -- which way shall we go?

But the future is foretold -- you are going down. But so beautifully, each leaf as separate as the notes of a sad song.

And isn't that just like November?

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