Absolute Music Is Not A Luxury

meaning, justice, and music’s role in society.

A few weeks ago a friend confided, over coffee, to a gnawing insecurity about the fact that their music isn’t “about” anything. Where others write explicitly ideological pieces with themes ripped from the headlines, my friend favors abstraction. This, they explained, led them to feel out of step with a zeitgeist that seems—at least in some instances—to value subject matter more than craft. A few days later, an acquaintance messaged me to say that, amidst the many humanitarian crises raging in the world, she felt as if she’d gotten a case of “cochlear Covid,” her ears unable to derive any meaning or feeling from sound. “How does any of what we do in music actually matter right now?” she asked bluntly. 

These exchanges got me thinking more broadly about current attitudes concerning music’s role in society, particularly in the orchestral and university presenter circuits. I want to argue here that we have come to ask both too much and too little of music: too much in the sense that, by fetishizing “issues-based” art, we risk reducing such work to the status of means-to-an-end, while setting it up for failure through unrealistic expectations of what such work can and ought to achieve. And too little in the sense that, consumed by our obsession with explicitly political art, we may overlook, or worse yet, disparage, the extraordinary power that music has when unshackled from the here and now: namely, its ability to transcend language, to transform listeners, to bring people into contact with each other, and with the deepest parts of themselves, which is to say, to touch and commune with the divine.

I associate this register of experience with what is often called absolute music, which, for our purposes, I will define as that whose meaning is concealed or coded. It isn’t that a string quartet doesn’t “mean” anything or isn’t “about” something, but rather that its extramusical meaning or subject matter cannot be (or chooses not to be) expressed as language. When a culture lionizes music with overt sociopolitical content, it ostensibly demotes absolute or abstract music to second-tier status. But this isn’t quite right. It would be more accurate to say that, sensing an urgent need to fight injustice, the culture begins to treat absolute music as a luxury it cannot afford, a sparkling bauble to be enjoyed only by elites who are untouched by (or benefit from) the world’s ills. By this line of thinking, abstract art is the concern of the wealthy, while social art is the concern of “the people.” To subscribe to this binary view of music—that it is either actively working, say, to fight oppression, or that it exists merely as sound in rhythm—is to deprive oneself of the powerful, private, and untranslatable language that is music: that sacred, liminal realm between speech and sound in which we learn otherwise unknowable things about ourselves and each other.  

There is, of course, no such binary: music exists at both ends of the spectrum, and at every node in between. And we need all of it. My goal here is only to sound a note of caution around the fetishization of nakedly ideological art, and more importantly, to offer a meditation on the virtues of music whose intention and/or meaning is ambiguous, concealed, or expressible only as sound.

Glasswork | Josef Albers

I.

In nearly every art form, there is a conversation about negative space. In lyric writing, negative space is the ambiguity, erasure, or subjectivity that allows a listener to make her own meaning. It might be a succession of images without a verb, an ambiguous personal pronoun, or the withholding of an inciting incident, say, the death of a lover that occurs just before a song has begun. At its best, negative space is a kindness, an act of generosity toward a listener which says, “I have left just enough room in this song for it to become yours when you graft your meaning onto mine.” 

The same can be said of absolute music, but to an even greater extent. This is what concerns Theodor Adorno in his essay, “Music, Language, and Composition,” in which he writes:

What music says is a proposition at once distinct and concealed... A dialectic reigns here… Music without signification, the mere phenomenological coherence of the tones, would resemble an acoustical kaleidoscope. As absolute signification, on the other hand, it would cease to be music and pass, falsely, into language.

It is for this reason that when you hear the opening of the Rondo of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in Eb Major, K. 482, you may envision a clown at a child’s birthday party, while I see a tabby cat doing a sexy dance with its forepaws. Or, most crucially, you may have an emotional experience that is beyond description, beyond signification. Indeed, when abstract music is at its most transcendent, there is no language or imagery that can satisfactorily approximate what we have felt. And it is this register of emotional (or spiritual) experience that can be lost when we make too many demands of what music “should do.” Just as negative space in a lyric allows a listener to make meaning, the absence of fixed meaning in a Chopin Nocturne, or a Ligeti Étude, is an invitation to become, through our imagination, a part of the work. And what could be more spiritually rich than a roomful of people, connected in space, connected by sound, and yet each making her own private meaning? 

Now, take the last sentence, and replace the word sound with faith. Here, we can begin to understand why some conceive of music, quite literally, as religion. We cannot adequately express in language what a piece of music does to us, but our bodies betray a psychophysical response. Goosebumps bloom on the back of our necks. We may weep. We may feel ecstasy. Is this any different from the way that a true believer experiences God? 

Even in its most abstract form, music exists in relation to a moral code. I do not say “imbued with,” for this would suggest that morality is superimposed onto or blown into it. But because music exists beyond language, we can’t say precisely what this moral code is, only that, like porn, we know it when we see it. I believe that we have all heard certain pieces of music and felt a quickening of the soul, a lightness of spirit, and at the same time, a sense of being more firmly rooted to the earth. And, I imagine, we have experienced music that has done the opposite, giving us the feeling of physical, aesthetic, or spiritual revulsion. 

We cannot define the moral code because to do so would, following Adorno, reduce music to “absolute signification” and “pass, falsely, into language.” And whether moral or not, the absence of signification doesn’t mean that composers don’t have highly specific ideas to express. The air quotes that my friend used around the word “about” served to temper their self-criticism, because of course, their music is full of meaning, albeit “distinct and concealed.” It’s also ravishingly beautiful. Why should we have to defend this work’s immediacy?

“Cables” | Josef Albers - 1931

II.

At a moment when the internet has brought to our attention almost limitless human suffering—a volume of pain we are simply not built to process—it is unsurprising that some might question the value of art whose meaning exists beyond language. Meanwhile, the same technology that instantly transmits images of war to our devices has recalibrated our sense of urgency as we endeavor to combat such suffering. It’s not only that the images demand a swift response. It’s also that the tempo of our consumption of bad news has pushed our internal metronome to its upper limit. We feel that we must beat back every crisis as swiftly as it has appeared on our screens.

One way we have responded is by attempting to ratchet up the speed with which art can change society. And so artists and institutions have thrown themselves into producing works that deal with topical themes. And, to be clear, this is a good thing! I am among those artists whose work is inextricably linked to matters of current public interest. Indeed, the inquiries I make through my work play a huge role in how I come to understand the world; at the same time, I hope that my curiosity will be taken up by audiences who come into contact with these pieces.

But whenever I embark on one of these projects, there is an inner voice that assaults me with a barrage of questions. What is it I hope this work will achieve? Have I adequately considered who the audiences will be, and whether they are, in their political predilections, the ones who need to hear what I am offering? Does the work ask questions, or is it a polemic dressed up as art, intended to scold audiences? And if the latter, do I believe polemics to be effective? 

The inner voice continues: is this my story to tell? Am I aestheticizing someone else’s pain? Have a made sufficient efforts to involve in the process the community or communities about which I am writing? Is an institution allied with capital/capitalists benefiting through the process of ‘elite capture,’ absolving itself through a minimum of artistic lip service to injustice? And then within the work, how do I navigate the space between moral clarity, on the one hand, and the need for ambiguity or negative space on the other? Does the work transcend its subject matter? Can it outlive the current crisis it’s meant to address? And, in the here and now, what, again, can this work actually achieve? 

There are so many ways to get it wrong: to be ham-fisted, patronizing, condescending, appropriative, too confrontational, not confrontational enough, and so on.

Make no mistake, we need artists and institutions who are willing to wade into this ethical murk. I believe that meaningful work does, and will continue to occur in this difficult aesthetic and political terrain. But, just as we need justice-oriented political coalitions with varied modes of participation, so too should our thinking about music and justice be broad-based. Too often, our digital regime has convinced us that art must do its work quickly, that its relevance is tied up with its topicality. For all the reasons I’ve laid out above: color me skeptical. And to widen the lens beyond music, coalition and consensus are not built in a day. Each depends on slow labor, the patient cultivation of trust and understanding. And it is this slow labor, and its intersection with live performance, to which I want now to turn my attention.

“Factory” | Josef Albers - 1925

III.

Like the public practice of religion, live performance is a social act. Here, my thinking is informed by Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift, whose animating provocation is this: “works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.” 

When Hyde writes of the art object as gift, he means that there is an exchange between maker and recipient, an act of reciprocity in which the audience’s gratitude or even mere presence is the gift given in return for the art object. There is something liberating in this worldview: when we, as artists, come to understand that our spiritual sustenance can be provided by a single listener, reader, or viewer, we can unburden ourselves of the more superficial markers that are often used to measure success. 

Much of Hyde’s book is given to an analysis of societies that practice gift consciousness as an economic model. For our purposes, the relevant insight is this: as a gift circulates through a community, it articulates the community. Thus, when we perform a piece of music, each member of the audience becomes a part of a community, albeit one that may exist only for a few hours. 

Particularly in the aftermath of the most isolated moments of the pandemic, when social gatherings were difficult if not impossible, live performance has taken on a numinous glow. When we assemble, we are mending social bonds that were torn or had grown weak during that period. More than that, the social act of music-making is a counterweight to the paucity of human interaction that has come to define our age of automation.

I increasingly think of myself as a shepherd of communal experience. When I sing and play my songs, a portion of my attention is devoted to making the audience aware of themselves and each other as members of a community (the room) within a community (the city) within a community (the state) within a community (the nation) within a community (the planet). Concert stages are, for the most part, literal pedestals that separate artists from audiences, making them obstacles to this sense of togetherness.¹ Lately, I have designed or improvised moments in my performances intended to remake, or undermine, the hierarchy of the room. We may roll our eyes at the idea of a sing-along, or other modes of audience participation, but we might ask ourselves why it is that we feel the need to look down on these kinds of activities.  

The work we do, the songs we sing, the oratorios and string quartets we compose—all of it is of course important. Its craft is crucial, and so too is its subject matter, whether or not it’s legible to an audience. But equally important is that we create experiences that foster a sense of community. We ought to spend at least as much time thinking about how we can model and cultivate togetherness in the spaces where we perform as we do thinking about the artworks themselves. In a deeply polarized society, to focus our consciousness on the simple fact of being together may be the most radical act available to us.

“Bowers” | Josef Albers - 1929

IV.

Again, we ask too much and too little of music. It cannot stop the bombs falling on Gaza any more than it can bring about universal health care in this country. Nor can it bring an end to U.S. gun violence or famine in Madagascar. On the other hand, when we allow music to do its singular work in the realm beyond language, it can be transformative. We will not easily be able to articulate how and when this work has been done, both because it will not hold still for portraiture, and because it is ongoing. But I have an almost religious faith in the fact that this work is occurring, and that it operates in tandem with the social dimension of music.

Indeed, we should bring humility to our relationship with music, recognizing that, for all of its aesthetic power, it is also a social lubricant. When we gather in a room for a performance, we have the opportunity to animate an environment in which we can better perceive each other’s humanity. This is the slow, incremental, and yet radical work that demands our participation: the recognition of each other, across difference, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. To see each other is to see more of ourselves. And to see more of ourselves—as we often do in our deepest encounters with music—is to see more of each other.

“Untitled” | Josef Albers - 1921

1. Worse yet, in my view, is the tradition of plunging the audience into darkness, while the artist is brightly lit. Almost always, I ask for some amount of house light to remain on the audience, both so that I have the feeling of being in conversation with people I can see, but also so that the audience members can see each other.