“Human Music” — A Conservative Reaction?

I don’t love the new Rosalia album. I don’t hate it either. On a basic listening level, I simply find the music mostly unchallenging and more to the point, just not moving in the way pop music at its best can be. It’s fine, there’s nothing to really dislike about it, and that’s part of the problem for me, it feels calculated and lackluster. It doesn’t take much risk, despite the hype. Musically, it’s harmonically derivative, melodically unremarkable, rhythmically unmoving, unadventurous in timbre. It lacks tension. To say that classical and pop don’t go together would be misguided — popular music and classical have always shared an attempt at universal appeal. So the hybrid Lux is not necessarily a watershed, there are plenty of precedents for it, pretty much all pop music and all classical music worth their names. But the overloaded historical references implies something else — a need for history by those who feel it slipping away. But is it actually slipping away, or is this paranoia? In many ways Rosalia 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 (it does) 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 this represents — 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 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 they have also failed New Music. Another Millennial failure. 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 hodge-podge of anti-technology, 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. Is this possible with Lux? Is it sincere? Or does it rather make an art of holding fast to history in its most caricatured and reified forms, as a kind of smartism? Is merely referencing history enough?

While it’s apparently a historically intelligent album, Lux is very much contemporary. This hybrid form of classical-pop is basically a similar genre-mixing trend that we see everywhere in the postmodern pastiche machine. That alone doesn’t make it bad, and Lux is truly new in what it represents of the cultural turn away from the new and into history more broadly. It’s analogous to the return of figurative painting and the trendy medieval organ girls. 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 the 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. But prove what? The most cynical, and maybe also accurate reading is that the allegedly classical Lux represents a new conservative turn, people who want to appear cultured but who actually lack historical consciousness and will certainly 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 for 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 character who can’t take pleasure even in pop music unless it checks a lot of boxes first. For well over a century, the melancholic has fetishized history as the solution to their problems, and thus might contain some hidden revelation. Those keen to overturn the rock of classical music and uncover some perfect 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. It historically transformed into the strange forms the 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. Classical music answers nothing, but poses deeper problems. It’s rich mainly in the sense that it’s the richness of decay. 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?

Also of our moment, not classical, new — it represents a conservative reaction to technology on the grounds that it’s “human”. It’s music for the revised Neo-Luddite culture, a kind of 19th century throwback also. Yet it’s calculatingly robotic itself, typical of so much academic music today. Some humans may be disappointed to learn that, apparently, the Millennial’s idea of a "human" means being melodramatic, derivative, calculating, performative, and repressed. An influencer’s video on Rosalia's new album 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 a video that hardly talks about the actual music form is hot on the tails of pop music conservative Rick Beato, a tasteless 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 by a human, 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. This kind of approach to music listening is analogous to the museum goer who only reads wall texts by bureaucratic curators and can form no aesthetic judgment of the painting right in front of their face without being told how to. 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" is comically ironic. It's not "evolution", it's a conservative reaction often led by musicians that are too often robotic and unimaginative themselves. Indeed, Rosalia embodies the academic, conservatory-trained Millennial artist, at its best and at its worst. But Lux is at best in its abstract production arranging, and modern collage.

This inevitably leads to a broader return — or fetishization – of classical music, which strangely persists today. But what does that mean? Is music "classical" just because violins are present? Such a conflation of classical music with its instrumentation is first of all extremely superficial for a variety of reasons, and secondly maybe historicist and conservative. Regarding the first, it's important to note that 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 music could and should move tonally, because tonality had not yet been mastered. Today, its been so over-charted and moved beyond that it’s a question of why return at all? It’s a bit like going back to your Ex. It’s well-documented that tonality was spinning its wheels in the late 19th century, outright demanding new forms. Originally, its form was intellectual and didactic, thinly veiled by its religious connection. Classical music is differentiated from Romantic music on these pedagogical 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. To pretend that this is happening in Rosalia 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 the hell are people talking about when they want a return to classical music? Do they want music to serve God again? Are such people just traditionalists? Likely many are. And if so the call is retrograde and conservative in my opinion. But many are also artists who want to refine their art and learn, who’ve probably been miseducated and are seeking something. Do they just want to reflect on good compositional form? Perhaps, and that's very understandable, perhaps necessary even. But that is not what is happening in Rosalia et al, primarily, I think, because of the fetishization of musicianship, which is not about artistic form but rather an obsession with performative technique. Music is far more than technique, but the culture can’t seem to understand this, with all its Youtube tutorials and Jacob Collier technicians calculating lists of chord progressions and dutifully following rules that original composers knew how to break for the sake of original artistic form. And it’s been broken, for sure, for well over a century. Are we really just trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together or put the paint back in the tube? Is that what 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 approach, Adorno wrote a lengthy essay titled Bach Defended Against His Devotees which discusses exactly this fetishization of classical music, and how the historicist approach to Bach tragically misses what was actually radical about his music — his embrace of new technologies and forms, most notably the very new equal temperament, and also experimenting with new keyboard instruments. The historicists who need to hear Bach on a harpsichord 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 electronics because what makes Bach Bach is the form, not the instrument. Musicians today rarely rise to that level of articulated form that transcends instead of reifies instruments. 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 have loved shredding MIDI on his laptop today. And it would have been no less "human" for embracing the new technologies. 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 more broadly, as observed by Ancient Greek philosophy. It's so obvious it hardly needs to be said. So then why do demagogues today resist the whole concept of artistic ingenuity, are they just traditionalists who think musicians channel God or part of a new luddite movement? Or is it rather that they can’t get beyond an antiquated conflation of skill and art, when art is truly also about deskilling? Those defending classical music and all things historical are usually the ones who understand it’s spirit the least. 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. Almost two centuries later and music's still at the heel of obnoxious divas. Get them 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 has a pithy quote 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? 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, wasn’t bound up in the life of the mind? This is where we are today. 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 of people can now open up a DAW 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 public, who, it should be said, might be more concerned about being put out of work in an era where music has liberated itself from 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?) Is this 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 stupid fetishization of authenticity, a jargon that authorizes a 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? 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 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 never 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 Rosalia because it seems to furnish proof that she’s a benevolent manager giving jobs to the poor 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, or perhaps even Rosalia. But if it could, wouldn’t that just raise the bar? Perhaps music artists are simply not up to the challenge? Even so, 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 Rosalia a cause célèbre. But music is indeed in the 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, composers may need them at times. But also not. 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! 99/100 times 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 Rosalia is the mass ornament, the culture industry trying to save itself. It’s music for the public, not artists. The 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? As if EDM, for example, doesn’t provide divine pleasure for millions of people, despite it’s lack of strings and erudite historical references? A decade ago such a conservative attitude would 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? 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 Rosalia et al want to be are monumental artists, to make monuments to history, whereas critical artists draw out the latent meaning of history, and fulfill it by changing it.

Musicians enchanted by artists like Rosalia 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 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 the pond to watch the ripples, transfixed by his 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. In making a virtue of necessity, new music both experimental and pop has stupidly become about the artifacts of so-called “physical” music — fetishizing the breathe of people in the background, a breathe that is also disembodied to be sure. But does it perhaps provide the solace of the human exactly because it is abstract, immaterial, free-floating? Isn’t that where the beauty comes from?Because there is some beauty in Lux. As if the tones emanating from electronics acoustically in a room are somehow not real or material? And isn’t that electronic transmission how music is reproduced and experienced 99% of the time? Don’t waste our time. It's all a diversion — and abstract ideology itself. Don't fall for it. Instead, you can actually enjoy plenty of good music being produced today, 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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