... classical music's disenchantment ...

    Why are there so many depressed and disenchanted classical musicians? It seems to me that “Classical music” education today kneels daily and at every single moment, at every single turn, before TWO constant, great, silent idols. They are the two great pillars that sustain most teaching content in conservatories and in private music lessons. In fact, without them, many teachers, critics, etc, would be hard-pressed as to what exactly would their daily activity positively consist of. These are: STYLE, and TECHNIQUE. These twin idols shape not only how we PLAY, but how we ARE as musicians. Behind their noble façades (history/philology, biomechanics), though, hides a much deeper truth. The truth that these are not just “neutral methods”. They are actual regimes of control that have replaced the living act of music with its careful management and have disenchanted and alienated musicians for a very a long time now…

    [A small DISCLAIMER, before we begin; a little warning of sorts. This is a LONG POST, deliberately long (some less generous souls might even call it "long-winded"), unapologetically slow, and entirely un-optimized for scrolling. It does not flatter the eye trained to skim, nor the mind addicted to the instant. It asks for time, the one resource our age distrusts most. So, those who equate brevity and efficiency with intelligence, or who take patience for pretension, should probably stop reading right about HERE. I like to write for those who still believe that thought, like music, needs duration, and that meaning cannot be reduced to a caption or a click. So, if you are still here, welcome and thank you. Allow me to continue.]

Now, this is both a critique and a sort of confession from within, about how these twin authorities (STYLE, and TECHNIQUE) have turned the musical event into something to be REGULATED rather than LIVED. My personal feeling is that, if we cannot name these idols, we cannot free the music they have captured. So. Let us start.]

    Under the idea of STYLE, a metaphysics of the archive and curation slowly installs itself. The work ceases to be an act and becomes a document. Listening becomes commentary and performance becomes illustration. History, philology, stemmatic ecdotics/textual criticism, moderately useful as mediation, very soon harden into a compulsory filter. We train students to basically “avoid the wrong century” before we train them to say anything true, anything meaningful. What gets lost? Kairos (the living now) yields to chronos (the map) (thanks for reminding me of that in one of our conversations, Lucas Debargue). Lived, vital, experiential time gives way to measured, systematized, represented time. Song is reduced to syntax, tremor is reduced to evidence, and breath is reduced to punctuation. The MUSEUM of imaginary works (thank you Lydia Goehr) becomes the total horizon, that is, a devoted fidelity to a "reconstruction"/"reproduction" ideal (Nachbildung) that, in its loyalty to the DEAD, expels the LIVING. Ontologically, this confuses the BEING of music (embodied presence) with its historical referent (trace, notation, usage, etc). The result, at the end, is a total ALIENATION and DISENCHANTMENT of the musicians themselves, who now find no sense of any kind of individual AGENCY any longer. The performer stops being a subject of experience and becomes a curator of styles. The soul is suspended. Here, interestingly, the so-called “long line” is suspected. The sigh is rationalized. Music no longer springs from the voice (just one more “style”), the voice, which is the first measure of human time, but from a “school dialect”. In this new regime, interpretation ceases to be an event of revelation and becomes a protocol of compliance. The performer, once a witness to the trembling instant where sound and silence meet, now calibrates gestures to historical plausibility rather than necessity. Authenticity becomes a bureaucratic virtue, and the imagination, once the faculty that linked memory to invention, is recast as error. The act of music-making is no longer a leap into the abyss of the present but a citation of authorized ghosts. What was once an initiation into mystery becomes an act of restoration, supervised by the specters of correctness. Thus the lineage of creation, which once flowed from imitation to transformation, now ends in quotation. The living, now embalmed as a well-researched past.

    Now, on the other hand, under TECHNIQUE, POWER disguises itself as scientific neutrality. Biomechanics promises efficiency (industrial management of “effort”, alla taylorism/stakhanovism) and injury prevention, all good things, in a certain qualified sense. But once enthroned as a regulative principle, biomechanics turns the body into a mere tool, intention into a vector, and sonority into a measurable product. Gesture (allegory, symbol, semiosis) is studied as output, not any more as epiphany. Time fractures into exercises. Form fractures into protocols, and phrasing into micro-adjustments (the instrumental lesson as a kind of scrapyard of nuances). “Phonation” is “optimized”, but the VOICE is lost. However, to me, the body is not and must not be, a mere “apparatus” at the service of “style”. Instead, it is the place where meaning itself actually appears. When technique ceases to be “diakonia” (that is, a service) to tone and crowns itself sovereign, we get this sort of destinationless virtuosity, a gymnasium of the ego that never really becomes rite. And thus the pedagogy of touch becomes, at the end of the day, a pedagogy of control. The student learns to measure, but not really to marvel. They learn to anticipate feedback, but not always to listen. The intimate reciprocity between will and resonance is thus replaced here by an algorithmic vigilance over movement. The hand, that ancient mediator between “spirit” and “world”, is demoted to an actuator in a mechanical chain of cause and effect. Breath, once the root of phrasing, is abstracted into metronomic calibration. The entire body becomes a laboratory where gesture is constantly rehearsed but never revealed. Technique, in its obsession with MASTERY, forgets that the deepest mastery is actually surrender, the capacity to “be played” by what one plays. And so, paradoxically, the more the performer conquers the body, the less the body speaks… (I can hear the protests already…).

    These two idols, Style and Technique, feed off of each other. One dictates what must be, while the other dictates how it must be done. Together they produce a musician obedient to the archive and physically very “efficient” in gesture, yet sort of mute before the abyss of meaning. The musical event, an act of presence, a sacrament of time and breath, is thus replaced by the correct fulfillment of a protocol, a protocol that is historically correct, and also biomechanically correct. Correction masquerades as truth.

    What disappears is not merely spontaneity, but the very metaphysical condition of music as advent, of music as the totally unforeseeable arrival of meaning through sound. In its place stands a liturgy without faith, a ritual performed in absence of belief. The player, having mastered every single code, confronts the terrifying emptiness of perfection. Nothing resists, nothing reveals. The score has been obeyed, the body optimized, and yet …. no SONG is born. The mystery that once required incarnation (embodiment) has been replaced by verification. In this silence, one begins to sense the hidden cost of our worship of order, that is, the slow erasure of wonder itself. A kind of total disenchantment. I see this every day in the “classical music” world…

    Now, instead, my dream is that musicians might begin elsewhere, with music as an embodied act of meaning, arising from the infinitude of the now. Not as a segmentable object but as a manifestation of being-there, a voice prolonging the world so that it does not break.

     To me, from this vision follow three consequences.

FIRST, the primacy of song over schema. That is, before style and technique, the voice, breath, vibration, inner duration. The “long line” is not a “nineteenth-century affectation” but a real anthropology of tone. We sustain a note so that what we love might endure one second longer…

SECOND, the primacy of lived time over dated time. That is, a work happens in kairos, it is not produced, it occurs. The performer does not reproduce it (again, Nachbildung) but raises it, transfigures it, consecrates it. History and philology serve art only when they open the ear, never when they close the gesture.

THIRD, the primacy of the symbolic body over the instrumental body. That is, technique as “applied poetics”, the organization of flesh and breath to speak sonic truth. If it does not lead to rite, shared presence, it is simply mere drill.

    Now, it is important to me to state that when I speak about song, I mean song in the ontological sense, not just a genre or a style of music. To me, “song” is not even simply a metaphor for being. It is actually BEING in vibration. Before word, before concept, before measure, there is resonance, an oscillation that gives the world its first shape. To “SING” (in the broad sense) is to affirm that existence itself is always rhythmic, relational, and alive. Ontology begins not in the “is” but in the sounds of being, that is, tone as the pulse through which reality knows itself. Every genuine musician, then, is not a reproducer of works but a custodian of this trembling, one who keeps open the passage between silence and presence, between the possible and the real…

    To dwell in song is therefore to inhabit being WITHOUT MEDIATION, to live in the trembling instant where meaning is not asserted but unveiled. In that vibration, thought and flesh coincide. Sound becomes the mode through which reality feels itself. Every note, every inflection, every breath carries the trace of this ontological intimacy, that is, the world listening to itself through us.

    However, in a certain sense, our times, in their hunger for control, cannot bear such immediacy. It prefers abstraction to resonance, information to incarnation/embodiment. Thus it builds instruments, systems, and theories to stand between us and the act of sounding, to tame the shock of presence into the safety of representation. The result is a world in which vibration is measured, but not really heard, where music’s task is to confirm the map, not to reveal the terrain.

    It is precisely this dimension, the living ontology of “song”, that our culture now treats as a sort “sentimental” aberration. Those who refuse to run absolutely EVERYTHING through the filters of HISTORY, NATURAL SCIENCE, or POLITICS, are pushed to the margins, and called “romantic” with a kind of smirk. I see it all the time in the “classical-music” world, where the expression is almost a dirty word, an insult of sorts. The word “Romantic”, once a name for an aesthetic and spiritual revolution rooted in the ROMAN (story, novel) and in the ROMANCE TONGUE (that is, in the vernacular!, versus the CLASSICUS, which was LATIN), has been now downgraded to an insult. Today it basically means naïve, anachronistic, un-informed, un-professional, unserious, etc… This is not a scene-decorating issue. It’s actually an ontological one. “Romantic,” in its living root, means the vernacular, “mother” (motherly) tongue, the human voice NARRATING in its mother tongue, the voice of the popular, not the voice of tribunal or treatise. It names what does not lend itself to instrumentality, that is, excess, expenditure, flame… In a culture addicted to usefulness and calculation, this is, of course, totally unforgivable. To call someone “romantic” should be an ontological recognition. It should mean that you still speak in a human voice, that you still remember that meaning is narrated, not deduced. Which is precisely why power fears it. One authentic “romantic” gesture, a letter, a song, a whispered story, can undo a thousand correct discourses. Where there is story, there is people, and where there is people, there is soul, and where there is soul, power trembles… In this sense, I would prefer not to be considered a "classical musician", but a "romantic/popular musician" (popular, NOT in the sense of populism nor "popular republic"...).

    But of course, in our field, the myth now says: the “long, lyrical line” belongs to “Romanticism” (a “19th-century style", as if the 19th century invented love, tears, laughter or yearning), while “Baroque” and “Classical” are more segmented, speech-like rhetoric. To me, ontologically and musically, this is simply false. The so-called “long line” actually belongs to the human voice, to breath, to body. Sustaining a vowel beyond verbal necessity (MELISMA) is simply perennial, universal. One sees it in Byzantine lamentations, muezzins, African funerary songs, Sephardic lullabies, Andean vidalas, Gregorian chant, synagogue melismas, filo di voce, etc, etc, etc, … It is not STYLISTIC but existential. It means to prolong the voice so the world does not break. “Classical” “rhetoric” itself (from Aristotle to Quintilian), in fact, is not even fragmentation but breath-art, a poetics of pathos. The orator summons worlds, suspends, climaxes, weeps with the voice. Rhetoric, thus, is not the enemy or the “reverse” of song. It is song’s elder sister. Machaut sings. Bach sings. Monteverdi sings. Palestrina sings. Monk sings. Diego del Gastor sings. Mozart writes arcs, not fragments. Even the severest recitative breathes. The supposed dichotomy between SONG and SPEECH is a modern “classical-music industry” convenience that justifies our very own limitations. Good so-called “Baroque” playing sings. Good so-called “Romantic” playing articulates. The difference is not the score. It is the prejudice.

       And so, under our current pedagogy, musical life drifts toward three hegemonies: the LABORATORY, where music becomes sonic experiment, dazzling, soulless; the MUSEUM, where music is an archaeological document, correct, breathless; and the virtuoso GYM, where art is technical spectacle, immaculate, aimless. Three paths, one exile: that of the soul, of the body, of meaning. Against them, my wish is that we restore music as POETIC GESTURE, ACT OF PRESENCE, and EMBODIED LOVE.

    A different pedagogy is possible, one that begins with the human voice and the act of listening. Every lesson should start with “song”. NOT a “vocal warm-up” (in my many years as a repetiteur I witnessed the voice guild’s fetishistic obsession with phonation versus meaning), but true “singing”, the kind that breathes before it measures (even, of course, if you are not a “professional singer”). Find the breath of the line before the fingering, the bow, the articulation. Read the score with the body, not merely with the eyes. Let improvisation and composition become the new literacy: ALL performers should compose and improvise. ALL. All composers should performer and improvise. ALL. Why? To restore agency, to reconcile form with breath. Teach rhetoric as the poetics of pathos. Let technique become a liturgy of gesture, biomechanics, ok, yes, if you must, but please, at least reinterpreted through the singing line, where hand, bow, and breath are organized by phrase, not by metronome. Any “exercise” that does not sing is a bad “exercise”, however “correct”.

    Root everything in place and community. Play for present bodies in spaces that return the voice, intimate rooms, churches, schools, town squares, the streets… Not only in AUDItoriums… The ear is educated by response, not by isolation. Practice silence as meaning, and memorize not to display control but to interiorize time. “Evaluate”, if you really must, not by “checklist” but by truth: one can miss a “stylistic comma” and still speak honestly, just as one can fulfill every requirement and say absolutely nothing. Adjudication, if it must exist, should ask only one question: did MUSIC happen? In such reordering, Style and Technique recover their rightful place as ANCILLARY means. History becomes springboard, not border, and biomechanics, servant of tone, not tyrant of gesture. The pedagogical center returns to the event itself, a single note, sounding, that gathers us here and now into the same living time.

    What we must unlearn is simple. The fetish of “authenticity” that confuses map with territory. The moralism that equates correction with truth. The false charity that calls spiritual anemia “professionalism.” The nervous irony that mocks feeling to avoid being wounded by it. We do not need to renounce what is valuable. We need to invert the hierarchy. First melos, then logos. First presence, then reference. First the mother-tongue of sound that founds a world, and only then, if it must, the school that explains it. Only then will we stop producing efficient curators and sonic athletes, and begin again to form musicians, that is, acting witnesses of the absolute, guardians of the tremor.

    Here are the theses you can tape to a studio door, if you want to and if you have so far survived this very long post:

If it doesn’t sing, it’s not technique, it’s training. History is a window, not a wall. The body is not a tool, it is where meaning appears. A correct performance without revelation is beautifully wrong. The long line is human, not historical. Music is not managed, it is conjured.

    The GREAT ILLUSION of our time is that more knowledge (the “informed” “performer”) brings us NEARER to the heart of things. But, unfortunately, the heart is never reached by accumulation. It is reached by transfiguration. The score, the treatise, the instruments, they are mere maps, not the territory. Music, like life, is not a cartography. It is a tremor. Let Style and Technique serve again. Let the museum open its windows. Let the laboratory rediscover breath. And perhaps, when we are no longer historicists, nor correct, nor informed, nor anything, we will hear the old miracle again, that is, a note, a silence, an accent, returning us not to History, but to life. If anything is worth saving, it is the courage to let sound begin before certainty.

    I say ALL of this, because to me, it is no accident that the classical-music world, for all its beauty, harbors some of the most disenchanted souls I have ever seen in my whole life (and I'm 43 years old). Depression, burnout, anxiety, a pervasive sense of futility, these are not incidental side effects of a difficult career, they are constant symptoms of a deeper metaphysical wound. When music is stripped of its ontological meaning, when Style and Technique replace melos and kairos, the "classical" musician ceases to be a creator of presence and becomes a kind of “functionary of correctness”. The result is a very deep and silent, existential void daily masked by constant exertion (the busy, concertising musician, the composer with a million commission, the "teacher" with a million competition winners...). I have recently realised that a very big part of my daily practice as a teacher is to actually act as a constant “shield” against the daily threat of this disenchantment in my students, produced by the guild itself...

    The conservatory, that temple of discipline, too often produces souls schooled in obedience but starved of wonder. From the earliest years, one learns to equate worth with precision, legitimacy with approval, truth with compliance. The spontaneous joy that drew one to music, the thrill of resonance, the ecstasy of sound becoming meaning, is quietly displaced by the anxiety of verification. What was once a vocation becomes an audit. Each note is cross-examined, each phrase policed. It is no wonder that so many, behind their impeccable performances, live in silent despair.

    Again, and this is very important, this despair is not merely psychological. It is ontological. For when music ceases to be a revelation and becomes a task, the self is severed from its symbolic body. The hands move, but the voice no longer sings. The mind calculates, but the heart remains mute. The great irony is that in our age of technical mastery, musicians have NEVER felt more powerless, because the meaning of what they do no longer flows from being, but from constant and ubiquitous systems of evaluation.

    What we call “burnout” is often nothing but the soul’s rebellion against mechanization. Depression, in this context, is not weakness, it is actually lucidity!!! It is the mourning of a world where everything can be done correctly and yet nothing truly happens. The musician’s malaise mirrors that of late modernity, the exhaustion of form without fire, knowledge without transformation, control without love.

    To restore health, we must restore MEANING. The cure is not psychological hygiene or better “time management”, but ontological reawakening. When music once again becomes a sacrament of presence. a shared act of being, not a demonstration of mastery, the body itself begins to breathe differently! The line regains gravity. The gesture regains soul. Technique ceases to be a yoke and becomes a prayer.

    Perhaps this is why, despite their fatigue, musicians still return to the instrument each morning, because some part of them still remembers the original promise, the child who sang before knowing what “style” meant, the breath that first discovered tone, the miracle of sound arising from silence. That memory is not nostalgia. It is the buried ontology of art itself, waiting to be lived again…

    The epidemic of disenchantment that runs through our profession will not be healed by more data, more pedagogy, more “wellness” initiatives. It will only begin to heal when we dare to say, with trembling certainty that music is not an object to perfect, but a mystery to inhabit. And that the purpose of learning was never to control sound, but to be transformed by it…

Madrid, October 25, 2025