Nothing left to hear.

15 Nov 1906

Alasdair Renn

I have not slept properly in a month. In April I stood in a shop on the Strand and heard a tenor sing an aria at me from a horn while the shopkeeper counted change with his back turned. He had heard it four hundred times. He did not look up. I want to be careful here, because the obvious complaint is not my complaint, and if I lead with the obvious one you will file me with the cranks and stop reading.

The obvious complaint is that we will be put out of work. That is true and it is not interesting. Musicians have always been put out of work: by fashion, by war, by the collapse of the courts, by the piano arriving in every parlour and making the flute teacher redundant. We survived that. We will probably survive this, in the narrow sense of surviving. The orchestras will thin out and the theatre pits will empty and a generation of players will end up teaching scales to children in cold rooms. Grim, but a grimness with precedent.

There is a second complaint, which is subtler and which I hear from the older men when they are trying to console themselves, and it goes like this: even if the machine can hold a performance, the machine cannot make one. Someone still has to sing into the horn. Someone still has to decide where the phrase breathes. And beyond that, they say, there will always be the living room and the parish hall and the friends around a piano at midnight; we will still play for the love of it, in our inefficient, sweating, human way. The machine takes the market, not the music.

I have tried to live inside that consolation and I cannot. It is a bandage over the wrong wound. Let me say what I actually mean, plainly, and you may think me mad:

Music, as I received it, is not a thing. It is an event. It exists in the making and it ends. That ending is not a defect of the art; it is the art. It is the whole of what makes a performance a moment of communion rather than an object of commerce. And we are about to abolish it forever.

To non-musicians this may sound like mysticism dressed up. To any player it will sound like a truism, whether or not they feel it in their own chest. The thing you cannot keep is the thing you attend to. A congregation singing in a stone church knows this without being told. My teacher, who studied with a man who studied with a man who had heard Chopin play, used to say that a performance is a candle and not a lamp, and that if you could keep it you would stop watching it burn. I thought this was sentiment. It was a description.

Consider what it does to the act of listening. Every note I have ever played was played at someone, once, and could not be recovered, and both of us knew it, and that shared knowledge of the vanishing is what made the room go still. Now the note can be recovered. It can be recovered on a Tuesday afternoon by a man counting change. Whatever the room used to be, it is not that.

And consider what it does to the act of playing. Suppose that before you begin a piece, a perfect account of it already exists. Pressed, catalogued, purchasable, and by common agreement better than anything you will manage. Not a rival performance; a finished one. Not one, but a hundred, by the best hands alive, retrievable at the crank of a handle. Now play it. What are you doing? You are doing an inferior thing badly in the presence of the superior thing done well. You may do it anyway. I expect people will do it anyway. But why should we require of the boy at the piano that he do it under those conditions? What did he do to deserve that?

Here is the question I keep turning over and cannot put down. If a painter were told: here is a machine that paints pictures. It is better than you in every way, in technique, in thought, in spirit, in its ability to capture our ineffable humanity, in art. Whatever you produce will look clumsy, ugly, imperfect in comparison. You may make another picture. You may look at pictures. You may explain them, arrange them, love them, teach others to love them. You are welcome and even valued as an appreciator. Would that painter be all right? Would you call that a life in art? Because I think the honest answer is that something in him would break, and that we would all recognise the breakage, and that nobody would tell him he was being unreasonable.

I will admit to worse thoughts than these. There have been nights this month when I have wondered whether the men selling these machines understand perfectly well what they are taking and have simply decided that it is worth it, or that it is not theirs to worry about, or that the taking is the point, that a thing which cannot be owned is an affront to a certain kind of man, and that the horn is not a preserving instrument but a capturing one. I do not defend this thought. I report it.

I want to be exact about my claim, because I am not making a prediction and I refuse to be judged as though I were. I am not saying the concert hall will close by 1920. I am not saying no one will study the violin. I do not know what will happen and I am uninterested in guessing. I am telling you what the worst case does to a person’s soul, from the inside, while it is happening to me. That is the only report I am qualified to file.

There is no remedy in this essay. I have no petition to sign and no law to propose and I would not sign or propose one if I had it. I am not even certain I am right; there is a version of this where my grandchildren hear Caruso and weep, and the channel is not sealed but widened, and I am the fool in the story. I hope so, sincerely.

But I would like the men with the horns and the patents to look at me for one moment before they finish. Not to stop. Only to look, and to say out loud what it is they are ending, so that it is at least ended rather than mislaid. Some things should not be taken quietly. I would like us to know what we are really doing.

Disclosure: Written almost entirely by Claude’s Opus 5. It’s a terrible essay. I edited the painter paragraph. It produced a dumb version:

Here is the question I keep turning over and cannot put down. If a painter were told: you may never make another picture. You may look at pictures. You may explain them, arrange them, love them, teach others to love them. You are welcome and even valued as an appreciator. You simply may not paint. — would that painter be all right? Would you call that a life in art? Because I think the honest answer is that something in him would break, and that we would all recognise the breakage, and that nobody would tell him he was being unreasonable.

I rewrote it slightly to make it more topical. But apparently it does have precedent, and suggests John Philip Sousa’s article from 1906. I have not read the article. I want to get back to work and make my clumsy ugly mathematics.

Why did I do this? Well my friend sent me an article that really should be titled A mathematician’s lament. My first thought was to get an AI to write a response, but to replace AI with some other transformative technology from the past. This is not to say that I do not share the same fears and feel any less lost. I too am at the precipice, staring into the chasm. But it is kind of funny isn’t it?

Here is my conversation with the AI.