Classical Music

Finding the Sublime in the Age of the Algorithm.

Charles Bukowski said “it washes the crap right out of me.”

Classical music does the same for me, too. The great stuff always does. There’s not too much these days that hits like it, I fear it may just get worse. I’m not sure if that’s because of context collapse, because our attention spans are worse, or because I’m just becoming more curmudgeonly in my middle age.

In Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he talks about the loss of aura, how art has been stripped of its time and place. You used to go to a church to see a fresco, or in more modern times, a museum to see the work of a master painter or sculptor. I am simplifying, but the point is, to see or hear a work of art, it took some effort. There was something in the journey that gave it context.

Before the advent of recorded music, you had to either learn to play from sheet music or go to a concert hall. To hear a symphony in all its glory, it took a lot of people coming together. And that thing you heard was ephemeral. It was valuable and I like to think you’d carry it with you, those little bits you could remember. The feeling might stay with you a long time.

I came of age in the file sharing revolution. A lot of music was available for free, but still the access was somewhat difficult. You had to know what you were looking for, it still contained a texture of the hunt. Now, it hunts me. It is served to me, by algorithms and notifications. I’m assaulted by it at every turn. Isn’t it strange? It’s hard to fall in love with something like that. It’s just too… easy. It’s not hard fought, and one click, one swipe, brings up another one that they’re sure I’ll like just as much.

I remember the rush I had the first time I fell in love with a piece of art. It surprised me, took me in, and I was in awe of it. The longer I stared into it, the more it poured into me. I could recreate an inferior version for myself… try and paint it, look it up on my phone, or even print out a picture. But it’s not the same as it was when I stumbled across it for the first time. And when I go back, to the place with the painting, as I try to do whenever I can, it costs me something to get there.

I’ve said it before, but I like that sense of place. I go back to the same painting, but it’s different, because I’m different. I know different things and forgot others - but the space itself anchors me.

Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is touching a similar vein. It extols the virtue of natural beauty. It’s trying to draw a line between the majesty of a mountain, or the complexity of a tree, and how it’s not really knowable. You can stare at the Grand Tetons all you like. You can study the geology, the theories, get a sense of its timeline, climb up into them and walk along the lakes that have formed in the foothills. You could spend your whole life just sitting there, but you’d still know very little. The sheer power of it all snaps you into a larger perspective. Literally, it takes you out of your body and sets you down beside yourself. It is sublime.

The sublime, as I understand it, is the quality of greatness beyond measure. It’s a feeling of being overwhelmed by something that exceeds your ability to fully grasp it. The sublime can terrify, inflict pain even. In the age of the selfie, of the algorithm, there is very little of that. Nothing dangerous about it. I could scroll all day and be challenged not at all. We know by now that the algorithms are designed explicitly not to. They want to keep us there. We might come across something that we don’t agree with, but a quick trip to the comments will satiate your outrage. It’s all very much the same.

So much of what I see is an effort to conquer. To have the most, to win the game. In Byung-Chul Han’s Saving Beauty, he talks about our shrinking sense of wonder. How the digital world is a world humans have covered over with their own retina, so all that we see is a kind of self-mirror. The more time you spend in it, the more you’re just weaving a net tighter and tighter where you choke the real world out. We’ve cut ourselves off from the other, from the outside.

It’s not lost on me that, despite knowing all of this, I still spend a lot of time online. It can’t all be bad, but it also can’t be all there is.

And so when I listen to classical music… I feel like I’m somewhere else. They are works of art that I can’t fully understand. There are movements that shake me, that are uncomfortable to listen to. They contain elements of the sublime. There are moments in Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet that I find so beautiful that it almost hurts. It frees me from being me. In the same way that I feel when looking up at a mountain, this music places me beside myself.

That’s what great art does for me; it’s why I feel compelled to try and make it. Not to be great, that’s not the point. Rather, the act of doing it is something I know I’ll never fully understand. It’s a mystery I am glad to be a part of, and I try to give myself up to those intangible qualities and understand it’s not about me at all.

In music, in life, in everything - you don’t conquer the mountain. The mountain conquers you.