“Human Music”

I don’t love the new Rosalía album. I don’t hate it either. On a basic listening level, I simply find the music annoyingly melodramatic, bombastic, mostly unchallenging, and just not catchy in the way pop music at its best can be. It’s fine, there’s nothing to really hate about it, and that’s part of the problem for me, it feels calculated and lackluster. Embodying the Neo-Classical turn, Lux also seems to equate cloying sentimentality with beauty; representing the antiquarian turn, it seems to abuse history as a means of obscurantism; postulating a fullness of life, we instead get the diva’s melodrama. It doesn’t take much risk, despite the bombast, and in our era it’s often an adventurous risk that makes something beautiful. Musically, it’s harmonically derivative, melodically unclear, rhythmically unmoving, unadventurous in timbre. Despite its drama, it lacks tension. It’s not the classical-pop hybrid that’s the issue either — to say that classical and pop don’t go together would be wrong, popular music and classical have always shared the goal of universal appeal and are fellow travelers. So the hybrid Lux is not necessarily a watershed, there are plenty of precedents for it, pretty much all pop music and classical music worth their names. But the overwrought historical references and Neo-Ludditism imply something new-ish — a need for history for those who feel it slipping away. But is it actually slipping away, or is this just paranoia? And history in what sense of the term? In many ways Rosalía represents a kind of 21st century melancholia — an inability to let go of the past, and so an inability to move forward. My biggest issue with Lux is not that it misrepresents classical music in the name of loyalty to it and so fails to be properly conservative, but rather that it gives up on the new. Perhaps that’s fine, in the end. But that is what its social meaning represents to me — a cultural war over new music and tradition. And like many culture wars, there is a sense that it’s a war that doesn’t need to be fought, that the causes are confused and the conflict is unnecessary. The Bjork/Tumor cameos are like ad placements or book jacket endorsements (neither of them are interesting musically, Bjork used to be), but merely symbolize avant-garde associations superficially. With Caroline Shaw writing credits, their collective inclusion is a coded blessing from the tired streets of a ghetto New Music. Or is it not rather a curse? Listeners now want classical music because New Music has failed them. But the public’s philistinism has also failed New Music. Another Millennial failure. Intentional or not, Lux is a collective attempt to reign it all in, to encapsulate and put a final point on what it was the Millennials were after all these years, and its a medley of ludditism, performativity, and antiquarianism. In order to properly let go, we have to understand history, and to properly understand it we have to critically interpret it’s latent meaning, its telos. Is this possible with Lux? Is it sincere? Or does it rather make an art of monumentalizing history in its most caricatured and reified styles, a smartism hoping to please, a kind of historical bootlicking? Is merely referencing history enough? Perhaps it’s a turning out of history so that we can process it, in other words not resist it? Or perhaps it’s a looking back at the splendors of antiquity with jealousy, fantasizing in vain that we might return, and so having given up on creating something modern that could conceivably be better, a kind of anti-modern cynicism?

Whereas modern artists revisited history as a reflection of possibilities in the present — the Neo-Classicist today adopts history to foreclose such possibilities. Even so, while it’s apparently a historical album, Lux is very much contemporary and so might not be conserving anything at all. Which is fine and actually should be more upfront, instead of hiding behind the projection screen of history. The hybrid classical-pop is basically a similar genre-mixing trend that we see everywhere in the postmodern pastiche industry. The celebration of Rosalía singing in 14 languages exemplifies how this Pomo Babel pastiche is romanticized as intelligent … which it is, in a historically specific, barbaric kind of way. The insecure smartism of the Millennials is almost as a rule paired with unoriginality. Of what use is 14 languages if all they can sing is the same cliche discourse of our time? But this Capitalist ideology does aim to sway the status-quo, so maybe it does need to be sung in 14 languages, just as manuals also come in multiple languages. That alone doesn’t make it bad — Lux is just fine — but it does represent the cultural turn away from the modern tendency towards possibility and into reified historical style — it becomes a symbol of mass resignation that anything new can be aesthetically compelling. It’s analogous to the return of mediocre figurative painting and the trendy and pretentious medieval organ girls squatting in churches. The sanctimonious Millennial girls found their patron saint in Hildegard — as if it were possible, desirable, or necessary to reincarnate some musty old pious monophony in a godless society. More likely such an idealization is overcompensation for their own vulgarity (Catholics are always atoning for something) in a polyphonic world. In their ideological anti-modernism they can’t discern their blatant conservatism. Or perhaps they do? And were classical artists and movements really reified “styles“ to be appropriated, or were they rather living expressions of possibilities in their own present?

Sitting in a room overcrowded with instrumentalists performing mediocre music competing for attention is a good representation of the unique character of the music industry today, and so also likely to trigger a kind of cultural claustrophobia or nausea rather than Rosalía’s intended fullness of life. It’s an ugly scene to me, pathologically desperate to prove something, and so not really taking pleasure in its own autonomous activity. It’s also reminiscent of Nathan Fielder’s realization that having a “pack” of people behind a lone insecure individual can instill a confidence that is otherwise lacking. So, it’s a literal herd psychology, a herd that is hyping up itself ~ or someone ~ to act. But act and prove what? That it’s worthy of the tradition? That it’s “human”? What kind of human needs to prove it’s human? The most cynical reading is that Lux represents a new conservative turn for those who want to appear cultured but who actually lack historical consciousness and will do little to gain it. Also new — it represents the Millennial’s philistine conflation of the performing arts with music. Classical, romantic, and modern music was about form, feeling, and imagination, not performativity. Lux is a symptom of our times. It’s understandable to return to the classics to study form, but is that what’s happening here? It feels more like an insensitive pillaging, a kind of braggart art by and for insecure barbarians showing off the splendors of their looting. No one’s learning anything, and nor is that a requirement to enjoy pop music. If anything, the classical here is a ruse, a kind of projection screen for existential pathos today, and says far more about the calculating Millennial antiquarian who can’t take pleasure even in pop music unless it checks a lot of boxes first. But there’s also something quite dusty and old going on here — for well over a century, the melancholic has fetishized history as the solution to their present problems, and thus senses it might contain some hidden revelation. Those keen to overturn the rock of classical music and uncover some perfect, complete form are more likely to encounter a lot of worms! Is the Millennial historian really ready to see what they uncover? Maybe. Classical music is far from perfect and has lived more of its life in crisis than not. Presenting a host of self-contradictions, it historically transformed into the strange forms this latest Neo-Classical turn (there have been many) is now reacting to, because it was unable to solve its own crises, or its solutions were confounding (e.g. Schoenberg). Classical music answers nothing, but poses deeper problems. The modern might find those problems interesting, a crisis that gives the work meaning, whereas the Neo-Classicist must repress the problems for the sake of projecting an idealized unity that was never present. Yet like Nietzsche said, we’re lucky that Mozart still speaks to us today. The question is, Can we understand what he’s trying to say? Is our interpretive faculty capable of constructively hearing it? Does he only speak to us in terms of reified style? Or does he rather represent the excitement of the new?

Also of our moment, not classical, new — Lux represents a conservative reaction to technology on the grounds that it’s “human”. It’s music for the recent Neo-Luddite culture, a kind of not-so-new 19th century social throwback that the Neo-Classical turn aestheticizes, and so is more likely a distortion of classical music that shares little-to-nothing ideologically with our Capitalist pathos. Despite the “human” pretenses, it’s calculatingly robotic itself, typical of so much academic music today that can’t understand that music is not about technology or anti-technology. Some humans may be disappointed to learn that, apparently, the current ideal of a "human" means being melodramatic, pious, derivative, calculating, insecure, performative, and repressed. An influencer’s video on Rosalía proposes that "being human as an act of resistance" to AI is the next great “evolution” in music, pining over rooms overcrowded with violinists desperately sawing at their "wood" and making the sound of human "imperfections". Sure, it’s “resistant” … in the way someone “resists” a bowel movement. Such sensibilities are hot on the tails of pop music conservative Rick Beato, a tasteless Neo-Luddite who has for years been arguing that the decay of music quality in the 21st century is due to technology and musicians not playing music manually. A video of Beato interviewing a keyboardist for a Michael Jackson song shows him gushing over the fact that the keyboardist played the same repetitive bassline for over three minutes and didn't sequence it with MIDI. As if anyone listening actually noticed or cares? Imagine driving in your car listening to MJ on the radio, grooving and enjoying the song until … wait … you must stop to ask yourself … was this bassline played manually, because if MIDI sequencing was involved, I don't like it anymore. Said no one ever! Are we all to be such repressed listeners? And no, his manual dexterity did not contribute to the greatness of the music, the fact that no one can tell the difference is precisely the point. Listening and playing are two different neurological processes. This attitude is analogous to the museum goer who only reads wall texts by bureaucratic curators and can form no aesthetic judgment of the artwork staring them in the face without being told how to — often based on autobiography and not the artwork — and a “how to” that’s often very absurd. This is the kind of character that Lux appeals to, at its worst. It reveals a regression in listening, an increasing philistinism, and is deeply inhuman and calculating itself. For such demagogues to talk about "human music" or deeper listening is comically ironic. It's not "evolution", it's a conservative reaction to a mere phantasm. It’s no secret that popular music is robotically formulaic — which does not prevent us from liking it — as pop musicians are desperate to understand and implement tested formulas with a branded twist that often isn’t even musical but rather theatrical. Indeed, Rosalía embodies this academic, conservatory-trained Millennial theatrical performer, at its best and at its worst. But Lux is without a doubt an abstract production — the cameos, as well as other parts of the album are anything but seamless and are collaged in a modern constructed kind of way. This is where it actually imposes form and doesn’t just follow antiquated tonal rules.

These conservative “experts” inevitably feed into the public’s tendency towards philistinism and hatred of new art. They are essentially the mouthpiece theorists of the philistines. But as Schoenberg said, all art is categorically new. Analogously, there are an increasing amount of social media vids of people in museums talking about how much they hate modern art, saying the same tired garbage of how their kid can do it bla bla bla. These new influencers are the kind of close-minded representatives the status-quo will choose when there is no avant-garde to lead them into more open-minded aesthetic transformations and sincere historical reflection. In the Millennial lifetime, the culture has gone from dogmatic abstraction to a growing intolerance of anything resembling abstraction. So what does the traditional art mean to them? Is music "classical" just because violins are present? Such a conflation of classical music with its instrumentation is first of all extremely superficial, and secondly historicist and conservative. Regarding the first, classical music in the moment of its inception with Bach et al was not primarily concerned with musicianship, but about compositional form that can be followed by the listener, listeners who were expected to learn something in the process about how tonality could and should move in the abstract, because tonality had not yet been mastered. It’s form was bound up in its working out, so to speak. Today, it has been so over-charted that it’s a question of why return at all? It’s a bit like going back to your Ex, and is more likely to lead to repeating crises than redemption. Pathology. It’s well-documented that tonality was spinning its wheels in the late 19th century, outright demanding new forms. At the same time, there is something about tonality that is also an unsolved problem — there were problems with its original ‘discovery’ by Pythagoras, and every subsequent system of tone has been imperfect in its own ways as well. Thus, tonality is inherently an incomplete and imperfect system — even Bach’s equal temperament is far from perfect, a proposal more than anything for what it could be, and tonality is still undergoing transformation and reconceptualization today. The contemporary well-trained conservatory musician is not likely to understand the nature and history of tone, but rather is adept in moving around in a historically specific proposal for what tonality could be. To be in touch with the could be, not the what was is what made the classical composers so interesting. It’s more likely that La Monte Young’s very strange Well-Tuned Piano, for example, is more ‘in tune’ with Bach than any Neo-Classical music superficially loyal to Bach, the extent to which it’s in touch with this modern tendency for artistic invention. Originally, its classical form was intellectual and educational, thinly veiled by its religious connection. Classical music is differentiated from Romantic music on these educational grounds, but also its overt expression of God. Music and art had not yet become secular, though it was strongly implying its own autonomous development, moving towards and not away from that. To pretend that this is happening in Rosalía or other popular music today would be extremely silly and unnecessary. No one’s learning anything new, it’s all already known and that’s fine. It's not to deride pop music today — which we all love — but to note that we love it for different reasons than those which made classical music what it was. So what are people talking about when they want a return to classical music? Do they want music to serve God again? Are such people just cultural traditionalists? Likely the majority are! Are they incapable of hearing the beauty in dissonance, and of feeling the freedom in atonality? Often yes. But many are also artists who want to refine their art and learn, who’ve probably been miseducated and are seeking more substantial education and inspiration than what New Music has offered. Do they just want to reflect on good compositional form? Perhaps, and that's very understandable, perhaps necessary even. And a “superior consciousness of history” is still the best description of what it means to be avant-garde. But that is not what is happening in Rosalía et al, first of all because of the general unadventurousness or exhaustion of contemporary ears ~ a  neurotic listening faculty ~ not to mention a historicist tendency that is not a superior consciousness of history, but rather an inferior one ~ and because of the current fetishization of musicianship, which is not about reflecting on artistic form but rather an obsession with performative technique within a potentially insincere pastiche of styles. It’s akin to how many musicians today have a dozen “projects” in different styles (because they’re overeducated, well-trained) but don’t really believe in any of them. Music is far more than a technical craft for mastering reified styles, and one can’t just chord-progression their way through any music worthy of classical inventiveness, especially Romantic music, which was very lyrical in tone. Beethoven preferred to call himself a tone poet, and that is very different from the rigid chord pastiche tendencies of today. You’ll never understand the form of Chopin if you try to understand it merely in terms of chord analysis. The culture can’t seem to understand the poetry of music, with all its Youtube tutorials and Jacob Collier technicians playing chess with music and athletically following rules that original composers knew how to break — and felt they must extend or overcome — for the sake of original artistic form and to extend what music could be. And it’s been broken or extended for sure, for well over a century. But regarding the Neo-Classical concern with history, are we really just trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? Is that all art is now? At its worst, the masses who want classical music don't really know what its spiritual meaning was, and associate anything with a violin and some whiff of tonality with classical music. It doesn’t even reach the level of historicist.

Regarding the historicist, antiquarian approach, Adorno wrote a lengthy essay titled Bach Defended Against His Devotees which discusses exactly this fetishization of classical music, and how the antiquarian approach to Bach foolishly misses what was actually radical about his music — his embrace of new technologies and forms, most notably the very new equal temperament, and also considering new keyboard instruments. The antiquarians who demand to hear Bach on a harpsichord out of some literalist historical fidelity completely ignore that the keyboard was undergoing continual development, technological innovations, and was by no means ideal for Bach. It says more about them than Bach. As we all know, Bach can be “switched on”. He survived electronic music because what makes Bach Bach is a form that transcends the instrument. Musicians today rarely rise to that level of articulated form that transcends instead of reifies its material. Bach’s ideal instrument may not have even been invented yet today. Even Bach's biographers like Christoph Wolff note that for Bach, the keyboard was a virtual instrument. The 19th century then saw the development of the piano, which can be viewed as a proto-synthesizer, a symphony abstracted into a single instrument. Bach would have loved not only the piano, but its ongoing developments into the 20th century, and would love shredding MIDI on his laptop today. Neo-Classicists don’t understand that what music “is” is rather more what music can be, which is perhaps why we love the movement of tonality, it suggests a going somewhere new. And Bach would have been no less "human" for embracing the new technologies, but certainly moreso. Music, technology, and enlightenment values of ingenuity, were always interrelated in classical music, and actually going all the way back to Pythagoras. More broadly techne is an inextricable part of what it means to be human, according to Ancient Greek philosophy. There’s a reason why Bach called many of his pieces inventions. It's so obvious it hardly needs to be said.

So then why do demagogues today resist the whole concept of artistic invention, are they just traditionalists who think musicians channel God, or mere Neo-Luddites? Or is it rather that they can’t get beyond an antiquated conflation of skill and art, when art is also about deskilling? Maybe they just haven’t caught up yet? What were these composers really trying to do? Regarding the 19th century Romantic, even Chopin — the alleged representative of performative virtuosity today — loved the singing "androids" of his day, hoping they'd replace pretentious "divas, who cost a lot and cause a lot of trouble", not to mention that he thought concerts were entirely artless, and despised the “acrobatic” performer. Almost two centuries later and music's still at the heel of obnoxious divas and musical acrobats. Get divas out of music! Beethoven hated being reduced to a piano player, calling it "manual labor". Schoenberg noted that in a letter to his brother, Beethoven called himself a "brain-owner", raising his enlightened thinking mind above all the other aspects of his art, including instrumental virtuosity. No, a thousand times No, musical artists do not need to be virtuosic performers. It is in aesthetic reflective thought that we are most free. Milton Babbitt on the matter —

I can’t believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can’t imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen.

This raises another important point regarding this conservative turn — the Millennials' obsession with performative musicianship. Does everything the Millennial does have to be performative? It’s really quite obnoxious and narcissistic. In their philistine value of music as performative entertainment, Boomers raised their children to think of music as a performing art, funneling them into performing arts centers. Most Millennials were too lazy to ask if music could mean much more than that. And is it any surprise, when those conservatory trained musicians were taught not to ask questions or to think? As if Beethoven didn’t read philosophy and have a curiosity for the ideas of his moment, and if classical-romantic-modern music, as enlightenment forms, weren’t bound up in the life of the mind? The conservatory-trained musician might as well be a robot, we all know they are trained to be machines, so is it any wonder why they are competing with AI now? This is their struggle, not the composer’s or the artist’s struggle. But music is not reducible to a performing art, and this philistinism has made for a lot of lame music and now a culture who reaches for classical music yet again as a means to understand what it was really about. If a "human" didn't play an instrument with their hands in front of the viewer listener, it's not real music, is what people seem to think. As if we need to watch a painter paint to appreciate a painting? Or watch a writer write to take pleasure in a novel? They say music is different, but is that actually true, or is it just ignorance and literalism? It's strange that in the year 2025, a century after the electronic music revolution — which was itself built upon the Classical-Romantic tendency towards a dissolution of performance and virtuosity as a type of manual craft that was perfunctory or even inhibiting for art — that the dogma persists, even as millions can now open up a DAW or Sibelius etc. and write and learn music themselves, a very modern type of creative freedom that seems to be cut short by music industry demagogues like Beato and their unimaginative “followers”, who, it should be said, might be more concerned about being put out of work in an era where music has liberated itself from both the trained expert and the divine genius. Artists should be able to make a living, of course, but it’s not as if the great romantic artists were primarily after “jobs”, was it? Recent concerns are much more a symptom of the PMC character of the Millennial mind than it is about art. Is this skilled performativity what makes us "human", playing with our hands in public recitals or formless jam bands? It's often a part of it, but is writing a novel on a computer not "human" because it doesn't involve pen on paper? Perhaps writers can only write on scrolls with a quill and ink to have authentic thoughts? The Millennial has a fetishization of authenticity, a jargon that authorizes a conservative culture industry. Is it not rather the thoughtfulness we put into things, which our hands and our tools may work in concord with, when they must be used? Isn’t it rather the shapes that harmonies and melodies make in our imagination, and the indescribable feelings that result that makes music so appealing? And haven’t composers dreamt for ages of an immediate music, transcribed directly from the imagination to the listener’s ear? And isn’t this what the radical invention of the recording medium represents? The performative turn in music (and beyond music) is deeply anti-intellectual. Generally speaking musicians today like to brag that "I try not to think when I'm playing". Yea, it shows! Are we supposed to be impressed by thoughtlessness? But actually, musicians do think, it's just a different kind of thinking. But the ideology of the times, and the "human music" demagogues suggest thinking and any kind of indirectness is bad — shame! — that music is only about slavish manual dexterity, socializing, and the natural timbre of instruments. Because they’re certainly not channeling God. But music is much more than this ideological reduction. Much, much more, and they’re missing out.

The final reason why there's such a reaction is due to AI specifically. Now, AI is especially problematic perhaps, but no one who's complaining about it does so on the grounds of music, but rather social critique and morality. Millennials are such philistines! AI is bound up in Spotify's support for Israel, it gives jobs to machines instead of humans, etc. etc. All very bad! But rarely do people have anything to say about the music. To be sure, one of the reasons so many artists hate AI is because they might be put out of work — a labor issue. People love all those strings in Rosalía because it implies she’s a benevolent manager giving jobs to the poor musicians. The poor suffering musicians! But what this shows — and I'm sorry to have to break the news — is that such artists were already doing work that was generic and easily reproduced by machines that are really not even all that sophisticated yet. The plagiarism of AI vs the plagiarism-pastiche of postmodern pop artists … I’ll take neither, thank you! Whereas true artists make work that is truly inimitable, every great artist creates their own genre, as they say. AI still can’t do Beethoven or Autechre; more likely Rosalía is easier because it’s of the easily digestible, simplistic status-quo culture that AI is trained on. So if one really wants to “beat” AI, then it’s going to be paramount that they actually compose something inimitable and new, not some derivative Neo-Classicism that is easily reverse-engineered and reconstructed. I certainly think so. But if it could do e.g. Beethoven, wouldn’t that just raise the bar? Artists for decades or even centuries have postulated a sublime man-machine symbiosis, where human subjectivity is challenged by the uncanny machine, a creative mirror and a profound cybernetic collaboration that might help humanity reach God status through more perfect form. Lets not pretend that this sci-fi imagination hasn’t been appealing just because a few corporations are currently trying to profit from a dream that is more artistic in nature than not. Perhaps music artists are simply not up to the challenge? Afraid to look in the mirror? Or perhaps its the offense against God that is considered blasphemous to these new traditionalists? Art historically, the extreme reaction to what I would call more virtual modes of creation is a symptom of the gradual secularization of art and craft. The conservative wants to stop the separation that has long been underway, and will see in artists like Rosalía a cause célèbre. But music is indeed in the midst of fighting for its ongoing secular autonomy. The question is why millions resist it, even while culture is clearly drifting in that direction.

But the inimitable artist is not the kind of "artist" that is upset over AI anyway, such artists are more likely to be craftsmen, and we all know that many musicians, like actors, are not necessarily artists. Some are, but most merely perform a music work that was more than likely worked out in the privacy of the artist's individual imagination. And bless their souls, we need them at times. But lets also not overstate their importance. It's truly debatable whether or not musicians bring anything to the table that a computer doesn't bring more of, excepting of course social problems! Much of the time, the computer will have better pitch and timing, the timbre is more customizable due to advanced synthesis, and you don't have to deal with difficult personalities, drama, basic incapacity, scheduling delays, and other extraneous factors. To be sure, what is aestheticized in Rosalía is the mass ornament of Millennial musicians ~ an aestheticization of the music industry ~ and furthermore a culture industry trying to save itself from the mass hallucination of musical apocalypse. It says more about social paranoia than music. It’s music for the hysterical public, not artists. One argument that such people will make against this is that music is a "social experience" or something, that it's about the players playing together. No, no it's not, music is not just kum-ba-yah drum circles, it’s about listening, reflection, feeling, and imagination, a listening that isn’t accessed in playing — listening and playing are two different neurological processes. In this sense is music social, that one individual projects living form into another individual’s imagination. Most people listen to music in private, and are thrown into personal reveries that are inaccessible to other people even in the midst of others. Where crowds exist, they serve as a warm blanket sheltering the fragile autonomy of the individual, not a true community in the ancient sense. Hence why people love the ambiguity of cities. As it should be, we should have interior lives, no? But the social music ideology says no, no individual reflection, and reflects the anti-individualism of our era, unable to discern its own conformist ethos. A society that doesn’t cultivate and support individual freedom and reflection is not a society worth the name at all, but rather a herd fed by the state. Yet that image of Rosalía surrounded by string players supporting her is key, they are not a community playing together, but rather an attempt to raise the poetry of the private individual above the meaninglessness of the herd. Playing together can be fun and therapeutic, and necessary at times, but that fetishized community spirit is by no means what music is reducible to, it’s not why it speaks to our heart.

People also seem to fear that musicians are dying out, whereas there are more musicians living today than ever. The fear is irrational, musicians aren’t a dying breed, quit the melodrama. There are millions of well-trained musicians, and yet only a handful of music visionaries. Is art just for tasteless community centers now? The "human music" demagogues make virtue of necessity on this front — as if all these musicians crammed into small rooms was desirable for classical composers? They merely had to endure it because they had no choice, they didn’t have the luxury of our technology — a technology directly responding to historical artistic needs — and would likely be dismayed at artists today who opt not to use it out of some abstract ideology of our weird politics. Remember Beethoven rocking in the mall in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, joyfully integrating with the machine? As if the thousands of lone producers in their private studios are somehow not making music because they’re not performers? As if Burial isn’t music? As if EDM, for example, doesn’t provide divine pleasure for millions of people, despite it’s lack of performative strings and pseudo-erudite historical references? To more adventurous listeners, the development of dissonance and more experimental forms may have a kind of alienated beauty to it, but the Neo-Classical tendency seems to equate beauty with a cloying sentimentality that may actually be ugly to more refined artists, so there’s a taste issue here too. We all know that it’s not really about being pro or anti-technology, that it’s the ideas of forms which determine the music. A decade ago these terms of debate might have been laughed out of the room, so why is this entertained so stridently now? Is it just podcast talking head culture, where every charlatan is a “theorist” but no one says anything original or enlightening? Or is it the tragic nature of the Millennials reared in the Cultural Turn, where art was given paramount importance but the trained artists often received anti-art educations? Is it the overdevelopment of musicianship paired with an underdevelopment of taste and aesthetic intuition? There’s something truly barbaric about a culture trying to prove to itself that it’s cultured. Thus, an insecure and empty culture grasping desperately for anchoring. But why not be happy on the open sea of the new? Only a decade ago, many artists would have been disgusted at the association with tradition. I think it’s really a response to the failure of New Music to grip the masses. (something I’ll explore next essay.) Or at least an indication about the crises of New Music. But this is where historical consciousness is important — what Rosalía et al want to be are monumental artist-historians, to make monuments to history, whereas critical artists draw out the latent meaning of history, and fulfill it by changing it. Recent physics research suggests that our decisions in the present actually influences the past — perhaps this is true of art too.

Musicians enchanted by artists like Rosalía may also contest that there is some kind of supernatural magic or material reality in acoustic instruments inaccessible via e.g. computer. First of all not true, such whiners wouldn’t know because they’re too lazy to actually find out. And is that what art is about, is it only about obdurate material, or is it rather the spiritual extensibility of material, the artist working against the material? Poetry was never just about the word, but also worked against the word, to reveal something hidden about language and ideally much more. Sculpture is more than just marble. Music is similar concerning instrumentation. Actually, instrumentation is more about the domination of instruments, the will negating the material, the way Hegel compared the original artistic act to a child throwing pebbles into a pond to watch the ripples, transfixed by its own activity upon the water, not the natural state of water itself. Hence the fetish on the “material”, for its complete and ongoing transformation in the modern world. The inability to perceive this is an entire generation’s literalness. And with this in mind, isn’t the artist who exerts their will upon technology the one who poses the possibility of actually transforming it? Whereas those who ignore it leave it unchanged and extant in its current, unfortunate manifestations? What is missing is an art historical understanding of naturalism, which is not about nature in its given forms, but the way human activity is bound up in nature, and allows nature to be revealed via art, which has been developing its own naturalism, a second nature, even and especially in more modern music forms. For example, there is something more natural about Stockhausen than 19th century instrumentation. An artificial sine wave which does not occur in nature sounds more natural to the ear than a violin. As if violins are not also feats of engineering? In making a virtue of necessity, new music both experimental and pop has stupidly become about the artifacts of so-called “physical” music, very unnaturally enlarging those characteristics — fetishizing the breathe of people in the background, a breathe that is also disembodied to be sure. But does music today perhaps provide the solace of the “human” precisely because it is abstract, immaterial, free-floating? Isn’t that where the beauty comes from? Because there is some beauty in Lux. But actually, isn’t Autechre’s music more natural and human sounding than Rosalía’s, in some strangely unexpected way? As if the tones radiating from electronics acoustically in a room are somehow not “real” or material? And isn’t that electronic transmission how the music we love is reproduced and experienced much of the time, didn’t Brian Eno elucidate this decades ago? Must we switch Bach off to prove some silly Neo-Luddite point that will most certainly be reversed yet again in times to come? Catch up, people. Don’t waste our time. This natural and human fetish is all a diversion from music form — and abstract ideology itself. Don't fall for it. Instead, you can actually enjoy plenty of music being produced today by humans manipulating machines to sound like what we think nature should sound like, if, like Bach, you have ears for the new. Musicians don’t have to be performatively sawing away at their violins to be a music artist. Maybe think about form. Artists should listen to and learn from classical music, as a means of having a critical orientation to history. And if you’re a listener, just enjoy the music, even if you are an uncultured barbarian.

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