... against "acoustics" in the realm of "classical music" ...

 AGAINST ACOUSTICS, 

“SOUND”

 and 

the 

“CLASSICAL MUSIC” WAY OF LISTENING

It has become almost a ritual gesture. One enters a “classical music” concert hall, whether an audience member, a critic, or a performer, and before a single note has sounded, the conversation has already been occupied by the topic of acoustics. How is the hall? How does it sound? Is it warm? Is it clear? Does it flatter the piano? Does the piano itself project, sing, sustain, sparkle? The first movement of the evening’s thought is always toward the MEANS. The first aesthetic judgment is always technical. Before the soul (ψυχή, psyché) has even "heard" anything, the ear has already been colonized by the CONDITIONS of hearing.

This obsession, a liturgy of sound about sound, is one of the great ironies of the "classical music" world. For it betrays a profound displacement of essence. What was once a question of TRUTH (poetic truth), has now become a question of EQUIPMENT. The acoustics of a hall, the brand of a piano, the sheen of an instrument, have come to function as a kind of sacramental guarantee, as if the spirit of music could only descend upon perfect materials. In this sense, acoustics have replaced “the muse”.

But music, when it is music, does not ask for acoustics. It asks for a heart (I can already hear the cynical, nihilistic laughters). It asks for PRESENCE, that burning of the interior which turns tone into word, vibration into being. It is absurd, almost comic, to imagine a mother, before singing a lullaby to her child, clapping her hands to test the reverberation of the room. Or a lover, before whispering “I love you,” adjusting the resonance of his voice to the dimensions of the space. To do so would be to destroy the immediacy, the LIVING  touch of the utterance. One cannot prepare tenderness through measurement. The voice that LOVES is already music, because it emanates from necessity, from urgency, not from control.

This absurdity, however, is precisely what the classical concert has completely and utterly normalized. The aesthetic act has been bureaucratized into a system of technical reports. Concert reviews, for instance, many times read like industrial analyses, “the piano was slightly metallic,” “the hall was too dry,” “the balance between winds and strings was problematic.” This is no longer critique as ekphrasis (ἔκφρασιϛ), or as hypotyposis (ὑποτύπωσις), that is, no longer the attempt to transfigure hearing into poetic vision or to render the invisible audible in words. It is a technocratic pathology of the ear. A report, not a revelation.

And yet, the essence of music has never depended on the perfection of its means. The universality of music, THAT which makes a mother’s lullaby akin, in its depth, to, let's say, a Bach sarabande, for example, resides precisely in its indifference to the apparatus. It is a mode of existence before it is a form of art. The voice is born not from acoustics but from the soul’s pressure to become audible. This is why the cracked timbre of a flamenco singer can pierce deeper than the most balanced sonority of a symphony orchestra. The fissure itself becomes the opening through which truth enters the world. The imperfect medium reveals the perfection of the message.

What is called “classical music” has totally forgotten this. It has confused the conditions of AUDIBILITY with the conditions of MEANING. It has transformed interpretation into performance, performance into product, and product into sound design. But the “tonos” (τονὸς), that ancient word which means both pitch and tension, is not a question of acoustics. It is the act of the soul stretching itself into sound. Acoustics belong to the world of the measurable, while tone belongs to the world of being.

It is telling that some of the most moving performances in history were born out of imperfection. The cracked shellac of an early Alfred Cortot recording, or the broken, unstable equilibrium of Thelonious Monk’s touch, or the spontaneous cry of a village singer accompanied by a detuned guitar. Their power does not derive from the equity of means, but from the total inequity between means and meaning, from that ontological dissonance in which the spirit strains against its material limitation and, precisely by straining, reveals itself. Many times, the worse the means, the more luminous the message, because the instrument becomes transparent to the urgency that inhabits it.

To sing “I love you” into the void of a poor acoustic is, paradoxically, to approach the truth of love. For love, like music, is not addressed to space but to the other. Its destination is not the hall but the heart. When music is truly music, it is not an event of sound but of communion. It passes from being to being, not from wall to wall. Its vibration is metaphysical, not architectural.

What we call “acoustics”, in “classical music”, is thus the externalization of what was once interior. It is a symptom of our fear of silence, of our need to verify that sound exists before we dare to feel it. In the ancient world, the aulos or the kithara did not need a HALL to be music. The WORLD itself was the resonance chamber. Today, the “classical music” concert hall (“audi”torium, instead of "theater", with its isolation of the sense of listening, turning it into a positivistic, biologistic domain) has become a substitute for the cosmos, a technical cosmos (kosmos technikos) in which we measure reverberation an resonance instead of grace. The worship of acoustics in the “classical music” world is the secular form of its loss of the sacred, of the poetic. 

And yet, music, when it returns to its source, abolishes the hall. The hall is the listener’s soul (psyché). The acoustics of music are metaphysical, that is, they are the way being resonates in being. In that resonance, there is no perfect sound, no ideal piano, no balanced hall, there is only the trembling of existence becoming audible. To speak of acoustics there would be as absurd as to discuss the physics of light before seeing a sunrise. One does not measure dawn. One receives it.

All of this points toward a deeper pathology in the "classical music" world. That is, the fetishization of sound over tone. In the classical music world, as both ideological framework and social practice, sound has replaced tone as the object of veneration. This substitution is not innocent. It is the mark of a civilization that has lost contact with the symbolic, allegorical, and metaphysical dimensions of music.

Tone (pitch, Ton), in its ancient and spiritual sense, carries within it a depth, an interior resonance that links the audible to the ineffable. It is a gesture toward meaning, a vibration charged with allegory, what one might call the “soul” of sound. Sound (Klang), by contrast, is mere surface, the measurable residue of tone once its metaphysical content has been extracted.

“Classical music”, as it is practiced today, thus very often functions as a simulacrum of music rather than music itself, that is, an elaborate ritual devoted not to expression but to sound quality. The perfect recording, the balanced hall, the pure timbre, these become commodities, fetishized objects of consumption. Sound becomes the pixelization of tone, its translation into the language of capital and control. We speak of “high fidelity,” but fidelity to what? To the waveform, not to the world of meaning from which tone arises.

Thus, what was once a spiritual and/or poetic art of revelation has become an industrial art of reproduction (Nachbildung). The listener no longer listens for being, but for frequency response. The critic no longer writes about the metaphoric or symbolic meaning of music, but about the texture, the color, the sonority, phonation, that is, all the measurable properties, “parameters”, that make music “sound good.” In this way, the world of “classical music” performance, under the guise of refinement, participates in a deeper impoverishment, that is, the reduction of tone to sound, of music to acoustics, of mystery to manufacture.

This aesthetic reduction has not only altered how we hear but also what we believe music to be, severing it from the sources that once animated it. That is, we have lost touch with the universals in music. What once belonged to the sphere of LIFE itself, that is, love, grief, yearning, pain, friendship, longing, has been displaced by the rhetoric of style, period, and genre. Of course, in daily life, it would be absurd to say, “My friendship is Rococo,” or “My love for this person is Expressionistic,” or “Our relationship has the clarity of Viennese Classicism.” And yet, in the “classical music” world, this is precisely how we have learned to think. We no longer think musically but historically, sylistically. 

Every feeling, every gesture, must first pass through a stylistic filter. Like those Instagram filters that overlay reality until the face disappears, in “classical music”, we adorn experience with the vocabulary of period and technique. The immediacy of tone, its universality, is thus lost behind an “interpretative” mask. We no longer sing. We quote. We no longer play. We illustrate. “Classical music”, as it is practiced and taught today, has become an invented tradition scarcely seventy years old, an artificial-museum culture that confuses mediation for depth.

But in life, when you have a friend, you simply have a friend. You do not have a “Baroque” friendship or a “Romantic friendship” (Romantic here used in the sense of "style", the usage of the word I profoundly dislike). No. You simply have a human one. Why then should one not play Chopin with that same immediacy, with the same existential nakedness with which one would sing to a friend or to a child? Of course, there will always be some minimal mediation, but why must mediation become the very content of expression? Why must we approach every piece as if through the glass of a historical aquarium?

Children, in their innocence, understand this better than we do. They say “songs” instead of “pieces.” And we correct them: “No, no, they’re not songs, they’re pieces.” But in their naiveté, they are so right. There should be songs, not pieces. “Pieces” already belong to the instrumental, the abstract, the segmented, to that ideology that has made of music a discipline rather than a life. Songs, by contrast, still belong to the voice, to the soul, to the unbroken thread of human expression. To return to the song is to recover the universal. To say “piece” is to continue worshipping the fragment.

The obsession with acoustics, with sound as a measurable entity, has not merely altered the way we play, it has altered the very nature of those who listen. Out of the fetishization of sound has emerged a new kind of listener. I call it the cultural gourmet. This figure, half aesthete and half consumer, comes to the concert hall not to listen but to sample. He is “knowledgeable”. For him, sound has become taste, a sensory delicacy to be evaluated, compared, and rated. The concert hall is no longer a temple, but a tasting room.

This is the logical culmination of the loss of universals in “classical music” as a practice. When tone ceases to be a mode of being, and becomes merely a “quality of sound”, the listener ceases to participate in music as communion and becomes a client of experience. The cultural gourmet does not enter into the music. He collects it. He speaks in adjectives, in reviews, in comparisons. His vocabulary is one of refinement, not revelation. The sacred tremor of music has been replaced by the sommelier’s nod.

And thus, audiences have dwindled, not because the music has lost its value, but because it has lost its necessity. To listen to “classical music” has become a luxury activity, a gesture of cultural capital. The concert is an event of taste, not of truth. People are turned off by “classical music” not because it is difficult, but because it has become uninhabited, that is, an art of surfaces, a museum of good manners, a theater of acoustics. It is an experience that asks for expertise rather than for openness, for refinement rather than for wonder.

The tragedy is that the universals are still there, waiting beneath the varnish, that is, love, sorrow, grace, terror, longing, transcendence, but we have forgotten how to meet them without mediation. We have forgotten how to sing, how to play as if we were discovering the world again. We have exchanged communion for commentary, tone for sound, song for piece, presence for product.

To rediscover tone is not to regress into sentimentality or naïveté. It is to strip the filters from perception until music again becomes what it once was, that is, not a representation of being, but being itself in vibration. When tone returns, acoustics fall silent. Halls cease to matter. The instrument becomes transparent. The true hall is the heart. The true resonance, the trembling of the soul when it recognizes itself in sound. Music begins again when we no longer listen to it, but within it.

It is not a coincidence that piano competitions, one of the most emblematic institutions of the “classical music” world, have become, in essence, merchant fairs for piano brands. Beneath the rhetoric of artistry and excellence lies an elaborate choreography of commerce. Rows of polished instruments await the touch of competitors, each piano a potential advertisement. Representatives from factories hover like sommeliers at a wine exposition, eager to praise the bouquet of their product. The contestants, meanwhile, are invited to “choose their instrument,” as if choosing a voice were akin to choosing a car.

Here again, the fetishization of SOUND reveals its mercantile face. What was once the sacred and/or poetic encounter between performer and material, the living alchemy between hands, hammers, and tone, has been reduced to a question of logistics and sponsorship. The piano is no longer a medium through which the soul becomes audible, but a luxury object whose brand identity precedes its musical function. The artist, in turn, becomes both a contestant and a potential spokesperson, a vessel of tone transformed into a vehicle of marketing.

The same phenomenon extends to chamber music. When a pianist plays with a string musician, the first question the cultural gourmet asks is not what was expressed, but ON WHAT. That is, what instrument was it? What year was it made? Was it Italian, French, or German? How much does it cost? And thus, the listener becomes a collector of pedigrees, an archivist of materials, a consumer of sound provenance. The dialogue between souls has been replaced by an audit of craftsmanship.

The tragedy is that the obsession with the instrument conceals a deeper impoverishment of listening. We have mistaken the condition of tone for tone itself. We admire the casing, not the song. The attention to the brand is a symptom of metaphysical forgetfulness, that is, he substitution of the work of art for the work of being.

In this sense, piano competitions are the temples of this confusion. They worship precision, branding, and homogeneity, a kind of SONIC NEOLIBERALISM where individuality must sound standardized, and where beauty is measured in decibels and balance. The audience, many of the times, applauds clarity, not presence. Power, not poetry.

But when a pianist sits before a piano, any piano,  and forgets the brand, the year, the hall, the acoustics, and listens instead to the trembling of tone as a living act, then something miraculous happens. Music begins again. At that instant, even a humble upright piano, slightly out of tune, can contain more truth than the most expensive concert grand. For the value of sound lies not in its manufacture, but in its emanation. Tone is not made, it is born. To remember this is to resist the marketization of the soul. It is to reawaken the truth that music, like love, cannot be sponsored.

Of course, I am well aware that those who will feel targeted by these reflections are often the very people whose work sustains the fetishization of sound over tone. That is, piano manufacturers, acousticians, hall architects, concert hall designers, tonmeisters, sound engineers, and others whose livelihoods depend on the careful cultivation of the classical music apparatus. These are skilled, dedicated professionals, often passionate about what they do, and many of them are dear friends. I love them, I respect them, and I recognize the beauty and intelligence of their craft.

And yet, love and friendship do not immunize one from critique. The fact that someone earns a living by contributing to a system does not make the system itself less worthy of examination. There is a difference between the value of the work and the ontology of the phenomenon. I am not criticizing the talent, effort, or technical knowledge of these individuals. I am criticizing the cultural structure in which their expertise is deployed, the collective obsession that elevates sound over tone, measurement over immediacy, and surface over depth.

It is precisely because of the existence of these professionals, because of their excellence and the persuasive power of their craft, that the fetishization of sound has become so entrenched. Their work is brilliant, their craftsmanship undeniable, but it participates in a system that has, over decades, distanced classical music from its universals, from the immediacy of tone, from the living song. A critique of the system is not a personal attack. It is, rather, an attempt to recover what the system has obscured, that is, the soul of music, the pulse of existence vibrating in tone rather than in sound alone.

I am well aware that these reflections will sting. Some will argue that my critique is naive, that it rests on tacit presuppositions that I have not demonstrated, that it romanticizes immediacy at the expense of rigor. Others will accuse me of glorifying unexpertised expertise, of longing for a naïve barbarism in which the boundaries of skill and knowledge are ignored. Some will find hypocrisy in my words, pointing out that I too sit at the piano, that I too inhabit the world of concert halls, competitions, and instruments, and that I cannot fully escape the very systems I critique. There will be those who call me an impractical and fake idealist, especially those who insist that all music exists through bodies, materials, halls, acoustics, and therefore that my insistence on tone over sound is a kind of metaphysical abstraction detached from reality.

To those critiques I would respond that none of what I have written denies the reality of the body, the instrument, or the hall. I do not romanticize ignorance, nor do I yearn for barbarism. What I defend is not naïveté, but a consciousness of universals that can inhabit even the most complex and mediated circumstances. One can be a technically skilled musician, a consummate professional, and still recognize that tone (pitch, intervals as repositories of meaning), the interior pulse of music, the vibratory trace of being, that gesture, allegory, symbol, matter more than the precision of sound or the sparkle of a hall.

I anticipate also emotional resistance. People will feel attacked. Their work, their choices, their craft will seem criticized. I do not deny that this critique will bruise. And yet, it is not meant to injure, but to invite reflection. It is possible to love the technical, to cherish expertise, and simultaneously to mourn the loss of the immediacy of tone. There is no contradiction in this, only the tension that arises when a system becomes more important than the life it is meant to serve.

Philosophically, some may accuse me of abstraction, of ignoring historical context, of underestimating the cultural conditions that shape classical music. I accept this. No argument can capture the full complexity of history and society. Yet, the universals of tone, the pulse of music itself, are not reducible to history, style, or pedagogy. They emerge in moments of attention and interiority, and those moments are irreducible.

So yes, this essay will provoke, and some may reject it outright. But it is not a call for rebellion, nor a manifesto of disdain. It is, at its heart, a reminder, a humble reminder music is alive in the soul, not in the surface of sound. Even when imperfect, even when mediated, even when the world has grown accustomed to fetishizing instruments, halls, and acoustics, tone remains. And to recognize it is to remember that music, ultimately, is the voice of being vibrating in the human heart. Not a consolation, not a prescription, merely a reminder that all of this, that is, every concert, every practice, every piano, every hall, is secondary to the pulse that gives it life.

I want to add that when I speak of tone, I do not mean the superficial golden timbre of a pianist, nor the work on “sound” or “tone” as teachers or students often refer to it: “I worked a lot on my tone,” or “I worked a lot on sound with my teacher.” That usage is still trapped in the world of the cultural gourmet, the fetishization of acoustics, of instrument quality, of surface polish. It treats tone as an abstract property of the instrument, a measurable, reverberatory, pleasing effect. This is not what I mean. No. The tone I speak of is pitch and interval in their allegorical and symbolic dimension, a repository of meaning, a vessel for universals. It carries grief, joy, longing, and love; it transmits the inner life of the music. A player can have uneven scales, a rough attack, even a so-called “ugly” timbre, and still move the listener very profoundly. In fact, sometimes, because of it. Consider a flamenco singer whose voice cracks and wavers, or Thelonious Monk whose touch is idiosyncratic and percussive. Even a folk fiddler whose “intonation” might be “erratic” can communicate truth, soul, and depth, and sometimes, precisely because of this. The music reaches us not through the polish of the instrument, but through the life and intention invested in tone as allegory, as symbol, as pulse of being.

Tone, in this sense, is the bridge between sound and meaning. It is where music ceases to be mere technical skill or acoustic perfection and becomes living expression. It is not polished sound, but signification resonating through pitch and interval. The universals live there, even in roughness, imperfection, and idiosyncrasy.

And just as the first instinct in the classical music world is to test the means, the acoustics, the piano, the instrument, there also exists a “classical music” way of listening. It is a listening of VIGILANCE rather than of SURRENDER, of ABANDON. Especially among “classical musicians” trained within that tradition, listening has become a form of surveillance, an extension of the practice room or the lesson. They do not listen. They evaluate. They cannot simply be moved or admire without reservation, for admiration implies vulnerability, the temporary SUSPENSION of “expertise”. To be moved is, for them, to lose authority. Thus, the act of listening becomes a quiet competition, an endless search for what could have been better, cleaner, more balanced.

After a concert, the feedback they offer tends to oscillate between forensic correction and polite emptiness, that is, either a technical remark about a passage or a shallow “good job.” Both responses hide the same fear, the fear of wonder, of being undone by beauty, of standing unarmed before tone. “Classical musicians” often live trapped in an internalized masterclass that never ends. Their ears have become pedagogical tools rather than instruments of love.

And yet, music does not ask for analysis before admiration. It asks for attention that trembles. The most radical act of musicianship today may simply be to listen again, not as a “teacher”, no as a “professional” (what horror), not as an expert, not as a judge, but as a being-before-sound, before tone, before the mystery of what still speaks to us when all “expertise” and “excellence” has fallen totally silent…