At this fundamentally exhausting moment in human history, we find ourselves slap bang in the middle of a progress arms race, where everything – literally everything – is posed as perfectable.
That’s not just thanks to the AI industry, though its acolytes shout the loudest when they tell us that their plagiarism robots can help us blast through life more efficiently. Somehow, the myth of endlessly optimisable production has infiltrated every part of our lives.
Now, you can listen to your podcasts on double speed for ultimate uptake, max out your sleep for ultimate restoration, biohack your mind for ultimate clarity, and relax more intensely than your peers.
In such a landscape, where nothing is ever good enough or fine as it is, the past only appears more distant. We used to marvel at how people lived their lives a hundred years ago; now we’re being told even life before AI should be viewed as a kind of rudimentary stone age, filled with cavemen who submitted to the barbaric indignity of writing their own emails.
Call me a luddite but this endless pursuit of progress for progress’s sake has, if anything, pushed me the opposite way. Exhausted by art that promises to explain how we live right now, marketed with buzzwords and posed as the diagnosis to problems I have become too fatigued to even care about, I find myself instead retreating further and further backwards into the annals of art – and, in particular, into the world of classical music.
My love of classical composition has been with me always but in the last year or so, this love has become an obsession. To my partner’s mild alarm, I now cook dinner while listening to the abstract atonal textures of Morton Feldman. I’ll go for a run while blasting Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite (the repetitive rhythms really do something special to your pacing, believe me). When asked to plug into a shared aux chord, I experience a blast of mild panic, knowing that a quick play of Schoenberg is likely to clear the room.
If this makes me sound insufferable, then it’s because I probably am becoming so. But what it also makes me feel is immensely, profoundly uplifted. It’s not just that listening to Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a dizzyingly agonised exploration of mortality, reminds me that humans have always been capable of transcending the lock box of daily life with little more technology at their side than wood, string, a baton and their voices. It’s that I am reminded, with stunning clarity, that Mahler wasn’t so different to us after all.
Just a few weeks ago, my partner and I watched the Australian Chamber Orchestra perform a selection of Alfred Schnittke’s works. Schnittke, ailed by poor health, targeted by Soviet bureaucracy, lived in a world fundamentally unfamiliar to mine, at least on the surface. When the orchestra began squeaking out his ugly yet uplifted chords, I knew almost nothing about the man. By the time they were done, I felt as though I knew everything. His anxiety about the frailty of his own body and his age permeated every note.
The performance did what all art should do – it reached out, wordlessly, and insisted on the ugliness and the beauty of human experience, and the transcendence we reach when we aim to capture them both. I recognised it. And that recognition, spanning time, reminded me how little things actually change.
There’s one piece of music in particular that I can’t stop listening to these days, from the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony. Sibelius’ life wasn’t happy – an alcoholic and a chain smoker, he enjoyed significant popularity but critical drubbing. Though often emphatic, his Fifth also broils with moments of confusion and melancholy, chords souring almost as soon as they have erupted.
But there’s also a moment in its third movement when Sibelius mimics the sounds of birds taking flight near his country home. Above a bed of swirling strings, a sudden peal of brass sounds out: wings uplifted, moving heavenward. It regularly brings me to tears. Not just thanks to the music itself, but the image of Sibelius, watching the skies, wowed by the birds, seeking to turn them into song. And because it reminds me that, while we might have complicated and entangled our lives, we haven’t fundamentally altered them.
Sure, technology might one day kill us all but it won’t be able to erode or change some deep bedrock inside us. Something intangible, untouchable, that happens when we step outside and watch birds take flight. Something we might call our humanity itself.
