... what's wrong with classical music ...

The phrase “classical music” is probably one of the strangest combinations of words in our modern languages. It sounds so venerable, rooted in marble and gold, carrying the weight of centuries. And yet the reality is almost the opposite. “Classical music”, as we now know it today, that is, the world of auditoriums, recitals, concerts, competitions, recordings, festivals, managers, orchestras, conservatories, fidelity to the text, and the cult of the score (etc, etc, etc), is a totally new invention, scarcely about 70 years old, largely a product of the post-World War II era. It is an “invented tradition”, one that wears the mask of antiquity while being thoroughly modern in its anxieties, its institutions, and its obsession with correctness. What we call classical is, thus, not the past preserved, it is the past totally reinvented, embalmed, and turned into a museum.

    In truth, what we now call “classical music” refers almost exclusively to a specific kind of musical culture, one centered on abstract, pure, absolute instrumental sound, and on "interpretation". It is, mostly, music without words, detached from ritual, theatre, or communal function, purified of dance, song, lyrics and narrative, that is, music existing for itself, and therefore dependent on “interpretation”. Its highest value is not creation but re-creation, that is, the art of the performer as medium, the work as sacred text, the concert as a sort of ceremony of obedience. In this sense, “classical music” does not mean a historical period or style, but rather an IDEOLOGY, a culture built around the notion that the interpreter’s task is to resurrect, reproduce, or preserve a past ideal through sound.

    The idea of an “invented tradition,” coined by historian Eric Hobsbawm in his 1983 book The Invention of Tradition, perfectly captures the paradox of what we call “classical music.” Hobsbawm used the term to describe modern practices that present themselves as ancient, cultivating the illusion of continuity with the past in order to legitimize new social structures and values. In this sense, the modern “classical music” world, its rituals of the concert hall, its hierarchies of authority, its fetish for the score and the “faithful” performance, functions precisely as an “invented tradition”. It projects a myth of timelessness to conceal its historical contingency, that is, to conceal that it is a culture born not from the organic flow of artistic evolution, but from the need of modern institutions to anchor themselves in a fabricated sense of permanence and prestige.

     The word classicus, in Latin, did not mean “eternal,” or even “excellent.” It actually referred to the first class of citizens in the Roman military system, those who paid the highest taxes, who could afford armor and horses, who fought in the front ranks. It was a term of military hierarchy, not beauty. To call something classical, therefore, was to align it with an elite order, disciplined, trained, authoritative. The later European use of classical carries this same invisible residue of military and social control. “Classical music” was not the spontaneous flowering of the people’s song, but the disciplined product of certain kinds of institutions, of conservatories, academies, etc. Thus, when we say classical, we basically often mean authorized.

    Paradoxically, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert (to name just some at random), that is, those we place today at the heart of the “classical music" tradition, were not classics at all in their own time. They were, in a certain qualified sense, revolutionaries, poets of the vernacular (“roman(tics)”), artists of rupture. Their music breathed the same air as the street, the tavern, the theater, the folk song, sometimes mixed with the liturgical too… What we now call “classical” was thus born when this living tradition was declared dead (tacitly or explicitly), when immediacy of expression was replaced by scholarship, and vitality by veneration. The “canon” did not emerge out of love, but out of loss. The “classical” became a category of preservation, a tomb built for a body that once moved.

    In the contemporary world of what we call “classical music,” thus, creation (poiesis) has given way to curation. In this specific cultural ecosystem, performers rarely compose, composers rarely perform. The musical text is treated like a sacred relic to be handled with gloves. Interpretation becomes a kind of “sublime archaeology”, a delicate operation upon the corpse of a masterpiece. Every note, every articulation, every dynamic marking is weighed, compared, and justified by reference to the urtext, the stemmatic, ancestral, oracular text. The performer becomes a kind of art restorer or old furniture collector, cleaning the canvas without daring to alter it. But the paradox is that this carefulness is itself a form of violence, the violence of sterilization, of erasing the living uncertainty that once animated music.

    Improvisation, once the very breath of music, is now treated as an anachronism, or at best, as a curricular plus. In “classical music,” the performer’s duty is not to invent anything but to reproduce (Nachbildung). To roll a chord, to alter a rhythm, to let a phrase wander too freely, to ornament, to cut sections, to add sections to a piece, all these are acts of disobedience (unless, of course, done under the rubric of a “historical style”; then “ALL” is “permitted”, always within a certain "informed", “stylistic” framework).

    Before the middle of the twentieth century, a keyboardist who could not improvise or compose would have been probably regarded as incomplete, even “unmusical.” The idea of a performer who merely reproduced what was written, without invention or spontaneity, would have seemed impoverished, like a speaker who can only recite but not converse. Today, however, the situation has reversed, the performer who dares to improvise, to compose, or to intervene creatively in the text is often treated with suspicion, accused of being “unprofessional,” of blurring the boundaries of expertise, of failing to “stay in their lane.” The modern "classical music" interpreter is expected to specialize to the point of sterility, to execute but not really to imagine.

    We have thus replaced imagination with accuracy, inspiration with compliance. The musical act, once a living negotiation between order and impulse, has been bureaucratized into a sequence of correct gestures. The "classical music" performance is a performance that no longer unfolds in the mystery of time, because it is largely premeditated, rehearsed, and fixed, its contingencies neutralized in advance. What was once, in music, a dialogue with uncertainty, in "classical music" has become the recital of a verdict. The concert hall, accordingly, has turned into a polite temple of control, a sacred space where freedom is forbidden not by decree, but by a sort of decorum. There, the silence of reverence conceals the absence of risk. The ritual of applause replaces communion. Some semblance of music sort of survives, but only as choreography, a reenactment of vitality, perfectly executed, and perfectly dead.

    The modern orchestra and ensemble, for example, idealize togetherness, the perfect synchronization and homogenisation of bows, of bowing in general, the unified breath of the winds, the single pulse of the timpani. Homogeneity has become synonymous with excellence. Yet in this perfection, something human is lost. The natural differences of bodies and souls, the tremor of individuality, are erased in the name of blend and precision. Music once arose from dialogue, now, in "classical music", it aspires to unison. What was once a conversation is now a chorus of obedience.

    Therefore, perhaps the most pervasive dogma of “classical music” is EXPERTISE. The musician must know, and must be seen to know. The audience member must listen knowingly. The critic must explain. And so the raw, innocent act of wonder is replaced by analysis. Even in everyday conversation, musicians speak of one another in terms of level (a pianist of this or that “level”, the “level” of musicianship, etc), as if artistry could be measured like the engine potency of a car. One is said to be “on a higher level,” “not at that level yet,” or “playing at another level altogether.” This mechanistic vocabulary would sound absurd in poetry or in love, no one speaks of the “level” of a poet, or the “level” of a lover, yet in “classical music” it has become normal. It reveals a culture obsessed with quantification, technical gradation, and the mirage of perfection, where mystery is translated into horsepower.

    At so-called "orchestral concerts", musicians rarely express public, open enthusiasm for a soloist they play with. Neither do the critics. Neither do other fellow musicians in the audience. Because to appear explicitly moved is to appear too naïve. Tears are “unprofessional”, admiration is amateurish. The new virtue is composure, the serene detachment of the expert who “understands” the technical difficulty, the harmonic strategy, the stylistic correctness. But wonder and understanding are not the same. In the temple of expertise, the sacred is excluded. We have thus built a culture, in "classical music", where to be astonished is to be ignorant, and where to know is to no longer feel.

    In “classical music,” emotion has thus become suspect. Too much passion (they now call it “emoting”, like a dirty word), too much movement, too much vibration, all are seen as vulgar (vulgate, plebeian), "gypsy", excessive, or “romantic”, in a pejorative sense. One must play with restraint, with knowledge, with proportion, with a clear head. Enthusiasm must be disguised as discipline.

    In this way, emotion is tolerated only when domesticated, when filtered through irony, distance, or technical control. The modern performer must appear to feel without ever truly surrendering, to simulate passion while remaining “architecturally precise”. It is a theatre of suppression, where authenticity is measured by how well one conceals it. The great paradox is that what was once called expression, the trembling bridge between sound and soul, has been redefined as style, a codified grammar of gestures that signal emotion without risk. The result is a kind of emotional bureaucracy, where even ecstasy must pass through the channels of propriety and taste, as if the only acceptable form of fire were one safely contained in a laboratory flask.

 

    And then again there is also a tendency today for a certain kind of emotionality in playing that veers into the histrionic. I see it sometimes in historically informed performance groups or in other types of performers, where the emphasis on period authenticity can lead to exaggerated gestures that feel more theatrical than genuine. But that’s NOT the type of emotionality I’m speaking about and advocating here. The one we encounter today, if we ever see it at all (it’s still rare) is this histrionic emotionality that doesn’t truly risk anything, because it’s too historicized, too bound by scholarly reconstruction or stylized affectation. Or one that manifests as a very vulgar, base emotionality, not popular in the sense of communal or folk-rooted, but crude and superficial, appealing to the lowest common denominators without delving into deeper vulnerability. That, too, risks little, as it hides behind shock or sentimentality rather than exposing the raw, personal, existential stakes of true expression.

But music, of course, is not the art of correctness, it is the art of the soul’s trembling. By policing expression, “classical music” has amputated one of music's limbs, the capacity to move and be moved. We have forgotten that a wrong note played with love may speak more truth than a thousand perfect ones performed without it.

    Competitions, conservatories, juries, and agencies, these are the bureaucratic organs of the "classical musical" order. Credentials replace charisma, approval replaces vision. What matters is who you studied with, who manages you, where you play, who you play with. The hierarchy of recognition is self-referential, the artist’s worth derives not from the art itself but from its network of validations.

    This boring and superficial culture of CREDENTIALISM extends far beyond the stage. It actually infiltrates even the most casual encounters. Sit at a dinner table with a group of “classical musicians,” and the conversation will inevitably orbit around credentials, who won which competition, who is managed by whom, which orchestra invited whom, what festival accepted or rejected which colleague, what concerts and international cities one comes from and is going to... It is a liturgy of prestige, a collective recital of résumés. The question of what one plays, or why one plays, or what one composes, or improvises, or reads, or loves, seldom arises. In such gatherings, curiosity gives way to comparison, and admiration to envy. Art becomes a currency of social capital, traded through names, prizes, and affiliations. It is a culture that confuses distinction with distinction-giving institutions, where recognition no longer follows from revelation, but from recognition itself.

    And so a pianist who moves an audience to tears is much less valuable than one who plays “correctly” in the eyes of the establishment. Because emotion has no curriculum vitae. Even the audience has been disciplined. One must sit still, cough discreetly, and applaud only when permitted. The silence of the concert hall, once a space of true poetic reverence, has become a symbol of control. In this ritualized quiet, the listener no longer participates. The music passes before him like an exhibition behind glass. He is there not to commune, but to comply.

    The concert thus becomes less a shared act of presence than a performance of etiquette, a choreography of submission. Every gesture, the tuning, the bow, the applause, follows an unwritten protocol that reassures everyone that culture is intact, that we are civilized, that art is safe. Yet this safety has a cost, that is, the exclusion of spontaneity, of laughter, of astonishment, of the unpredictable gasp that once belonged to real encounter. The public no longer risks anything, just as the performer no longer reveals anything. What was once a living dialogue between sound and soul has hardened into ceremony. We do not experience the work, we observe it, embalmed in silence, like a relic whose holiness we fear to touch.

    And yes, of course, “classical music” is often praised for its universality, yet it is the most segregated of all musical practices, and one of the most segregated of all social practices. It has exiled itself from the people, from dance, from song, from oral traditions, from collective joy. Its practitioners fear contamination from anything “popular.” But in doing so, they have amputated the very root of musical experience, the need to sing, to share, to remember together. Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, they did not write for a museum. They wrote for the heart, for the street, for the living.

    Today, however, this living pulse has been replaced by a cult of purity, where every deviation from the written text is treated as heresy. The score has become both scripture and prison, and interpretation has turned into exegesis. What was once a social art, sung, danced, improvised, imperfect, human, has been purified into an academic discipline whose goal is not communion but conservation. The result is an art estranged from its own origins, a music that speaks endlessly of emotion yet fears the spontaneous gesture that could restore it. In seeking to transcend life, it has forgotten how to breathe.

    What we need is not necessarily the abolition of “classical music” (let those who prefer its self-referential boredom continue to anesthetize themselves in their rituals of sterile reverence) but its rebirth as simply music once more, music as an act, not an artifact. The way popular musicians and their audiences speak simply of “music” should remind us of what has been lost, that is, immediacy, participation, risk, the shared warmth of sound made by bodies. To play, to sing, to improvise, to err, these are not imperfections but the very gestures that make music alive. The tragedy of “classical music” is not that it is classical, but that it has ceased to be musical, that it has turned its musical practice into a simulation of eternity, a porcelain imitation of life. And yet, of course, beneath the polish and the protocol, one can still sense, thank God, a hidden pulse, faint but stubborn, like the heartbeat of a body that refuses to die under its own embalming. It trembles beneath the layers of formality, waiting to break through the veneer of mastery and decorum. That pulse is the memory of what any music once was, an act of breathing together, of daring to sound before knowing. When we finally cast off the posture of expertise, the armor of taste, knowledge, and correctness, we may again rediscover the trembling joy of simply making music, fragile, human, and alive.

    Critics may dismiss this essay as a sentimental defense of “expression” against “technique,” as if what I mourn were the triumph of skill over emotion. But that very framing is the disease itself. It locks us inside the false dichotomy that has hollowed the arts, that is, the notion that one must choose between feeling and form, heart and craft. I am not nostalgic for some lost “pre-professional” innocence, though the phrase "professional artist" has always struck me as obscene, like saying professional lover or professional friend. What I lament is deeper, it is the eclipse of the whole by its fragments, of intuition by procedure, of meaning by method. The problem is not that we have too much technique, but that we have forgotten what technique is for. For technique without love is grammar without speech, motion without voice, knowledge without song.

        For instance, in the world of “classical music”, we often hear the saying, “the devil is in the details.” In the modern "classical music" world, this has become a creed. Every bowing must match, every articulation be uniform, every dynamic be balanced to the millimeter. But the proverb is true in a darker way than they imagine, because the devil IS in the details, because detail, when worshipped, devours the whole.

    The two main “professional” workshops of what we now call “classical music”, that is, the INSTRUMENTAL LESSON and the orchestral or chamber music REHEARSAL, have become, de facto, laboratories devoted to this cult of detail. In many if not most cases, they no longer shape musicians, but technicians. In the lesson, the teacher calibrates the student like an engineer tuning a machine: touch, tone, alignment, intonation, fingering, pedaling, all “variables” to be optimized. The studio becomes a clinic of correction, where the imagination is anesthetized in the name of refinement. In the orchestral rehearsal, the same spirit reigns: the ensemble is treated as a specimen under a microscope. Sound is dissected, purified, synchronized. Bowings are standardized, articulations homogenized, individuality ironed out in the name of “togetherness.” What was once a gathering of voices has become a single, faceless voice, perfectly balanced, perfectly blended, and perfectly dead. And so, the orchestra and the lesson, once the living centers of apprenticeship and communal art, have turned into laboratories of obedience. They produce results, never revelations. Their goal is not to awaken the soul, but to align it. The devil, indeed, is in the details, because that is where the human has been buried. The capacity to think panoramically, to grasp the gesture, the essence, the form, has been replaced by micrology. Parts belong to reason, wholes belong to intuition. And intuition requires education of the soul, not only of the hand. It requires generalism, the kind of vision that can connect a Bach fugue with a Persian ghazal, a Chopin mazurka with a folk lament. Without that breadth, all that remains are details: polished, correct, and utterly dead.

And so, I insist again: what increasingly passes for serious musical work today is what might be called the junkyard rehearsal, or, to give it a more academic name, the workshop of disassembly. Here, music is stripped down to its smallest replaceable units, its individual parts treated as autonomous, technical components: articulation, balance, rhythm, texture, phrasing. The score becomes a heap of fragments, an exploded diagram rather than a living organism. Each element in the disassembled wreckage is calibrated, polished, and reinserted into the mechanism with the precision of a lab technician, while the larger sense of the whole, of breath, of gesture, of destiny, quietly disappears beneath the white light of method. This process feeds the illusion of mastery: that if one can fix the wheel, the engine must therefore run. But what emerges is not a rediscovered vitality, only the sterile satisfaction of control. The junkyard rehearsal masquerades as depth, yet it remains a ritual of anxiety, the musician’s desperate attempt to domesticate the uncontrollable vitality of sound by reducing it to measurable procedures. What once was rehearsal in the true sense, an act of recollection, of re-hearing, of re-animating, has become a kind of laboratory autopsy, where the music’s living pulse is sacrificed for the comfort of technical certainty.

What is most striking is that this junkyard method is now what passes for “working on the piece.” It is praised as serious, professional, even profound, the very emblem of artistic rigor. To speak instead of the whole, of the work’s atmosphere, of its emotional contour or expressive necessity, is to risk being dismissed as naïve or untrained. The modern rehearsal thus inverts the old hierarchy: attention to affect, to the inner coherence of the piece, to the living tension between its parts, is treated as amateurish sentimentality, while the atomization of music into quantifiable segments is mistaken for depth. Yet this obsession with refinement is profoundly narcissistic, for it reduces interpretation to the performer’s own anxiety about control and correctness, rather than opening to the piece’s reality as a total phenomenon. The junkyard rehearsal becomes a mirror of self-scrutiny, not a dialogue with the work, an exercise in technical self-love disguised as seriousness.

     And thus, if we do not resist, the professional guild of “classical music”, a creature barely seventy years old, will go on claiming ownership of everything we hold sacred. It will present itself as the rightful heir, the custodian, the sole legitimate voice of the musical past. In doing so, it will rewrite history in its own image, erecting walls where once there were bridges. Through its narrow lens, we are taught to forget the deep kinship that unites a tango by Gardel with a sonata by Beethoven, or the primal cry of a cante jondo with the trembling intimacy of a Chopin nocturne. One is dismissed as “popular,” the other exalted as “art,” as though culture could be divided between heaven and earth. These are not truths but inventions, rhetorical tools for maintaining a caste. Yet the resonances between these musics have nothing to do with postmodern relativism or the flattening of all values; they arise from something older and more sacred, that is, the shared pulse of being, the human need to sing one’s condition into form. For music, in its essence, recognizes no such frontiers, it belongs to the realm of vibration, of breath, of presence, where the soul of a shepherd and that of a symphonist still speak the same language.

    If "classical musicians" truly wish for music not to die, they must liberate it, not from the past, but from those who claim to protect it. The past is not the enemy, it is the soil. What kills music is not memory, but the bureaucrats of memory, the curators, the credentialed interpreters, the professional guardians who mistake possession for preservation. Music does not need defenders, it needs lovers. It does not need to be protected from time, but to breathe in it again.

 

    Perhaps one day we will cease to call it “classical,” as though it were a marble statue behind glass. Perhaps we will simply call it music again, without adjectives, without genuflection. For before it was a system, a curriculum, an institution, it was a song: a trembling of the human voice, an act of presence, a bridge between solitude and communion. And if that song still flickers beneath the ruins of our sophistication, then there is hope, not for the survival of a genre, but for the rebirth of listening itself.

 

    The irony of all this is that those whom we now worship as classics were, in their very essence, roman(tics). The term romantic descends from roman, which first meant not “idealistic” or “sentimental,” but vernacular, vulgar/vulgate Latin, and its resulting Romance language (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, etc), the living speech of the people, as opposed to the frozen Latin of the elites, the classicus. The roman was simply the language of life as it was spoken, sung, and imagined beyond the institutions of empire. From this same root came roman as story or novel, the art of narrating existence in the language of the heart rather than the code of authority.

 

    The Romance languages are called “Romance” because they descend from the language of Rome, that is, from Vulgar Latin, the spoken, popular form of Latin used throughout the Roman Empire.

 

    The term romance (from Latin romanice loqui) literally meant “to speak in the Roman way”, as opposed to latine loqui, “to speak in Latin.” After the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin remained the language of the Church, law, and scholarship, the classicus, formal and institutional tongue, while everyday people continued speaking evolving local dialects derived from it. These vernacular tongues gradually diverged and became the Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and others.

 

    In medieval Europe, a roman text was simply a text written in the romance language rather than in Latin. From this came the word roman in French and romance in English to mean a story or novel, a narrative written in the vernacular, in the language of the people, not the clerics.

 

    So, “Romance” doesn’t refer to love or sentimentality originally, it refers to Rome and its linguistic legacy, the living descendants of Latin, spoken not in the courts of empire but in the mouths of common people.

 

    The distinction between romanticus and classicus is therefore not a matter of style, but of ontology. It is the difference between the organic and the codified, between the breathing word and the embalmed word. When 19th-century "Romanticism" arose, it was not a rupture with the past, but a reawakening of this ancient tension, the eternal return of the vernacular against the institutional, the song against the statute. Romanticism was the perennial revolt of the living voice, the vindication of the roman, the story told in one’s own tongue, the poeticizing of reality against its bureaucratization.

 

    To be romantic, then, is not to dream or to flee into naïve subjectivity, but to re-enter the world through its resonant PARTICULARS, to speak again as humans, not as officials of culture. It is to recover the tone of the hearth, the road, the field, to listen to art as one listens to a story told by a friend at dusk. It is to reclaim art from the marble citadel and return it to the soil from which it sprang, to make it once more the language of the living, not the liturgy of the institution, not a dead tongue, like Latin is today. In this sense, "classical music" is the Latin of music, a dead tongue.

 

    And here lies the heart of the problem with what we now call “classical music.” It has become the classicus once more, a dead tongue, frozen in its own grammar of reverence. Like Latin in the late Empire, it survives through CITATION, not creation, through commentary, not speech. It is an invented tradition that pretends continuity while cutting itself off from the living pulse of the roman, from the vernacular vitality that once gave it breath. Its temples, the conservatories, the competitions, the orchestras, the management companies, are like monasteries reciting immaculate liturgies in a language no longer spoken by the people. By contrast, the romanticus, in the original, etymological sense, is the art that speaks in the living universals of the I, of the embodied and particular human voice that sings before it theorizes, that invents before it codifies. To return to the romanticus would mean to rediscover in music not an institution but an act, not a canon but a conscience, a living speech of sound that belongs once again to the earth, to the breath, and to us.

 

    I thus insist, in that light, again, “Romanticism” was not a nineteenth-century excess of sentiment but most probably the very LAST reappearance of the vernacular impulse in art, that is, to speak from life, through form, not about form. What we now call "classical music" betrayed this vernacular spirit when it transformed living eloquence into administrative style. The roman(tic) ideal was to move, while the ideal of "classical music" is not to err.

 

    The tragedy of “classical music” is thus that it has totally confused classicus for truth and romanticus for excess. It has mistaken life for error. What once was the language of breath and encounter has become the grammar of institutions. The music that once SANG, now EXPLAINS. If music is to live again, musicians must recover the courage to disobey. We must reclaim the right to play movements rather than entire works, to make cuts, to ornament, to insert an improvisation in the middle of a sonata, to end differently from how we began, without fear of committing sacrilege.

 

    The performer should not tremble before the score as before a law. He should treat it as a field, not a prison; a map, not a decree. One should be able to decide one minute before walking on stage to change the order of the program, to mix "styles" and "genres", to intersperse a song or a silence, to sing, to act, to recite, to act, to improvise, to do comedy, or drama, to compose, to merge theater and music, tragedy and laughter. The great masterpieces do not need our reverence, they simply need our presence. They were written not to be preserved but to be risked.

 

    To play emotionally, even to the point of excess, to cry, to breathe audibly, to move, to sweat, this is not to betray Beethoven or Chopin. It is to restore them to life. The musician should be free to treat the “masterpiece” with irreverence, even with tenderness, as one treats a friend rather than a monument. Perhaps only when we dare to play “disrespectfully” will we begin to respect what music truly is, not a system of rules, but a living gesture of love.

 

    In this sense, among pianists, one of the most revealing superstitions of our age is the stigma attached to the score. To play with the music before one’s eyes is now regarded as a mark of weakness or insecurity, a confession of dependence, as though the performer were a child still tethered to his lesson book. To play from memory, on the other hand, has been elevated into a badge of superiority, a proof of authority, of self-possession, of mastery. But this opposition is false, and deeply symptomatic. The score is not a crutch, it is a companion, a window through which sound and meaning pass in both directions. It is not something to hide or to conquer, but to inhabit.

 

    This fetishization of playing “by heart” betrays the confusion of mastery with memory, of presence with control. It is the outward symptom of a culture more concerned with the spectacle of autonomy than with the inward act of communion. The question should never be whether one plays with or without the page, but whether one plays from within, whether the sound is truly born in the performer’s own interior space, whether the gesture flows from necessity rather than display. The tyranny of appearances, this idea that authenticity must be visible, that inwardness requires proof, reveals how far performance has strayed from presence.

    For presence is not a state of polish but of permeability, a condition in which the self is both concentrated and transparent, at once active and offered. The I is not, as certain fashionable philosophies claim, a fiction or a residue of bourgeois humanism. It is the living locus of art, not an idol to be worshipped, but a threshold through which the world becomes audible. To efface it in the name of objectivity is to silence the very organ that allows art to exist: the consciousness that listens as it creates.

 

    We must bring back enthusiasm, enthousiasmos, the state of being inhabited by something greater than oneself. In orchestras, musicians who play with visible emotion, who breathe with the line, who move their bodies and souls, should be praised, not chastised. Intonation should not be worshipped; togetherness should not be the highest virtue. Precision is not the same as truth.

 

    Technique, articulation, clarity, style, these are the tools of the artisan. But art begins when those tools become transparent, when what remains is PRESENCE. Presence, that unrepeatable event in which sound becomes spirit, in which the performer’s entire being is at stake. We should value not those who play correctly, but those who BURN. Not those who reproduce, but those who risk. Not those who know, but those who speak. Music is not an exercise in uniformity, it is an act of incarnation. When a musician truly commits, appropriating the material existentially, playing as though it were his own confession, the room changes temperature. That, and only that, is "interpretation". We have had enough of STYLE. Let us return to PRESENCE. Presence, presence, presence, presence, until sound becomes flesh again.

 

    Also, I think that “classical musicians” must stop recording so much, or at least stop believing that the recording is the culmination of their art. Recordings have become too important, too definitive. They have transformed the living art of interpretation into a vitrined object, sound embalmed in glass, a butterfly pinned under the lens of eternity. Through recordings, “classical music” has completed its transformation into a museum: a place where time no longer flows, where sound no longer breathes. The concert hall imitates the museum’s silence, the musician imitates the curator, and the listener becomes a tourist wandering through a sonic exhibition of great names and canonical relics.

 

    Critics, too, have become archivists of this mausoleum. They no longer listen to concerts, they compare recordings. They speak in terms of reference versions, benchmarks, “definitive takes.” But nothing alive is ever definitive. Every performance should be provisional, porous, vulnerable, trembling on the verge of failure, because that is the condition of life itself.

 

    Recording was once a miracle, a way to capture the fleeting. But it has now become a norm, a tyranny of perfection and fixity. It teaches musicians to fear risk, to mistrust spontaneity, to control every decibel. It tells them that the goal is to sound like a recording, when in truth the recording was only ever a shadow of the event. The art of music must return to the air. To the unrepeatable, the improvised, the momentary. The only true recording of a performance is the heart of the listener who was there. All else is archaeology.

 

    Also, "classical musicians" must stop practicing so much. Not because discipline is unimportant, but because repetition without revelation kills the soul. The endless hours at the instrument, those solipsistic, monastic rituals of self-flagellation in the name of “technique”, have become a new form of aesthetic chastity. We call it dedication, but it is often fear, fear of freedom, fear of silence, fear of not being perfect.

 

    This cult of practice produces instrumental monks, artists who spend ten hours a day polishing the same passage until it reflects nothing but their own exhaustion. The result is purity without poetry, precision without presence.

 

    Technique must give way to poetical commitment, a fidelity not to the surface of sound, but to its meaning. A musician who reads, who loves, who suffers, who walks under the rain, who listens to the world: that musician plays with more truth after one hour of living than another after ten hours of practicing. To play an instrument should not be an act of penitence, but an act of discovery. The fingers should serve the imagination, not replace it. Practice should be a dialogue with life, not a wall against it.

     Let the musician read philosophy, poetry, novels. Let them fall in love, despair, travel, listen to silence, and then return to the instrument as one returns to a friend, with stories to tell, with tenderness, with the vulnerability of someone who has lived.

 

    Music does not come from the repetition of gestures, but from the ripening of the soul. So-called "technique" (yuck) can be transmitted, ok, yes, but depth must mature. No amount of study can replace the slow inner fermentation through which experience becomes sound. Yet in an age that worships productivity and visibility, this ripening has become almost impossible. The artist is expected to grow not inward, but outward, to project, to promote, to remain constantly seen.

 

    It is in this climate that a certain question, often asked with genuine bewilderment, reveals more about the sickness of our musical culture than any theory ever could. It is the question some people ask musicians after a concert: “How is it that you play so well, and yet we’ve never heard of you?” Behind this seemingly innocent remark hides an entire civilization’s confusion between excellence and visibility. As if greatness required marketing. As if sound needed publicity to exist. As if the value of art depended on its currency in the social economy of fame. This is the same logic that drives competitions, managements, careers, and reputations, the same shallow conflation of truth with recognition, of art with approval.

The question assumes that music is not about being, but about being seen.

 

    Sometimes excellence and visibility coincide, of course. But when they do, it is often accidental, not CAUSAL. The sunlight sometimes touches the flower, but the flower does not bloom for the sunlight.

 

    And then there is the other question, the one asked backstage, when the applause fades and someone, with kind intentions, asks: “How did you feel?” (instead of simply saying congratulations). There is no good answer to this. It is a question that already presupposes distance, as if feeling were something one had, a possession to be reported, rather than something one was. The question betrays the same poverty of enthusiasm that pervades the world of “classical music.” The listener who truly felt would not need to ask, he would be silent, trembling, grateful.

 

    When someone plays from the depths of being, the right response is not analysis, not curiosity, but communion. One does not ask the ocean how it felt to be a wave. These questions, “why haven’t we heard of you?”, “how did you feel?”, are not innocent. They show how even our language has forgotten how to revere. We have become a civilization that can only ask about success and self-consciousness, never about truth. But music does not need to be understood, explained, or advertised. It only needs to be met.

 

    Another symptom of the disease of "classical music" is the cult of "teachers", the obsession with lineage and pedigree, as if truth could be inherited by proximity. Students now collect professors the way travelers collect passport stamps. They boast: I studied Schubert with this one, Beethoven with that one, Chopin with a Polish master… as if each name added a seal of authenticity to their playing, a guarantee of legitimacy, a custom stamp at the border of style.

 

    It has become absurdly common to see a biography that reads like a genealogical chart: Student of X, disciple of Y, who studied with Z, who once met Cortot. This is not reverence, it is credentialism disguised as tradition. It is the belief that art can be transmitted through prestige rather than through experience, that one can borrow authority the way one borrows light from a neighboring flame.

This obsession with biographies extends even further, turning the lives of musicians into sterile catalogs of conquests rather than poetic narratives of the soul. It would be ridiculous to chronicle the biography of a lover, a friend, or a poet in such a manner, reducing their existence to a ledger of battles won, prizes claimed, and territories conquered, devoid of the intimate struggles, passions, and revelations that define a human journey. Yet in classical music, biographies are written precisely like reports of military campaigns or corporate achievements, a timeline of competitions triumphed, halls filled, recordings released, all tallied like spoils of war. They ignore the inner landscapes, the doubts, the ecstasies, the quiet transformations that make an artist truly alive, favoring instead a veneer of success that reinforces the very hierarchies I critique.

 

    But art does not descend through the hierarchy of teachers, it arises from the interior silence of the learner. Imagine a poet saying, “Now I can write about love, because I studied in the school of love.” The idea is laughable, and yet this is precisely the logic of the conservatory.

 

    We have transformed mentorship into bureaucracy. The teacher is no longer a witness to awakening, but a brand. The student no longer seeks revelation, but accreditation. The question is no longer What have you discovered? but With whom have you studied?

 

    In this world, to be self-taught is almost a crime, as if sincerity needed supervision. But the great artists were always, in the deepest sense, self-taught. They learned not from their teachers, but through them, and then beyond them. Real learning is not about collecting signatures, it is about burning the letters once you’ve read them.

 

    The musical vision I have evoked throughout this essay, the musical vision which is opposed to “classical music”, belongs to a world in which the person is not dissolved into the cosmos, but rather stands within it as a center of meaning, finite yet luminous. It presupposes a cosmos ordered toward interiority, where creation is not an emanation of blind flux but an act that proceeds from love, from a will that knows and desires the good. In such a view, sound is not the echo of indifference but the vibration of a presence. The universe itself listens. Music, then, is not a diffusion of energy through matter, but a dialogue between souls and the invisible. Its space is not cyclical but dramatic: history has weight, and each gesture carries the trace of destiny.

 

    By contrast, in the world of “classical music”, there exists today a metaphysical confusion that cloaks itself in serenity, the idea that art should dissolve the self into an undifferentiated totality, that the highest wisdom is detachment, and that emotion is an error of perception. This view, though it often speaks of compassion and balance, ends by abolishing both personhood and form. It replaces the living heart with an oceanic calm in which nothing can be truly loved because nothing truly endures. When imported into music, it yields an art of textures without speech, of surfaces without incarnation, a sonic landscape where nothing is at stake because no one is speaking. It calls this peace, but it is the peace of disappearance.

 

    At the same time, a certain scientific cosmism, equally impersonal though outwardly opposed, mirrors this dissolution. It too dreams of a music without subject, an acoustics of pure data, a harmony of particles. Both extremes, the mystical void and the mechanistic infinity, tacitly converge today in their denial of interiority. They imagine the cosmos as either too vast or too empty for the trembling of a human soul. They forget that the axis of being is not size but depth. In their company, music ceases to be invocation and becomes experiment: either a ritual of evanescence or a computation of frequencies. The result is the same: the disappearance of meaning under the guise of universality.

 

    The ontology that breathes through the great music of our tradition (NOT “classical music”), the one that I prefer to defend, does not flee from individuality into either dissolution or mechanism. It affirms the singular as the gateway to the infinite. It sees form not as a cage but as a body, freedom not as release but as incarnation. Its metaphysics is dramatic, not static: the finite bears the trace of the eternal, not by escaping it, but by revealing it through struggle, suffering, beauty, and joy. In this vision, harmony is not equilibrium but reconciliation, not the calm of stasis, but the peace that follows encounter. It is an art of resurrection, not of evaporation.

 

    To return to that understanding of music is not to regress into dogma, but to remember that sound itself longs for personhood. The great composers did not seek dissolution but communion; not silence, but word; not extinction, but transfiguration. Their music believes that the world has a heart, and that every note is a way of approaching it. Against the modern confusion that unites scientism with mystical depersonalization, we must reclaim the dignity of the soul (the psyche, the I, that idea so denigrated by certain ontologies as a mere illusion) as the true resonance chamber of music. For only where there is a self that can listen, can there also be a world that can sing.

 

    In the professional, cultural ecosystem of “classical music”, what is very broadly called historicism (HIPP), AND the so-called avant-garde "contemporary music" as a STYLE, not the music written today), though they pretend to be adversaries, are in truth twins born of the same parentage: the loss of origin. One embalms the past, while the other embalms the future. Both treat music as an object outside of being, one by worshipping the relic, the other by worshipping the experiment. The historicist obeys the calendar of yesterday, the avant-gardist the calendar of tomorrow, but both calendars hang on the same wall of time, where meaning is measured rather than lived. In each, the present, the living moment of encounter, is absent. They agree, secretly, that music must be justified by its position in history, whether as conservation or as rupture. But history, when divorced from presence, becomes bureaucracy. Thus the conservatory and the laboratory, the museum and the research center, reveal the same metaphysical poverty: both produce works without world, and sounds without destiny.

 

    My choice of these two examples is not accidental. They represent the classicus at its most refined and therefore most dangerous, its perfection as system. Both historicism and the avant-garde embody the consummation of the classical impulse: the will to mastery, to structure, to closure. Each aspires to a total order, one through the canon, the other through the concept, but both are expressions of the same metaphysical instinct: to control time by abstracting it. In this sense, the historicist and the experimentalist are mirror images. The former believes in a past so sacred it can only be imitated; the latter in a future so pure it must be invented from nothing. Yet both abolish the present, the living encounter, the trembling uncertainty in which music actually exists. They are, in the end, the two final dialects of a dead tongue.

 

    Of course, there will be those who will accuse me of golden-ageism. They will say that I idealize a past that never existed, that my lament is merely a symptom of nostalgia. They will insist that today, we actually have the greatest musicians in history, technically supreme, stylistically informed, expressive, poetic, intelligent, and refined, and that my criticism of the contemporary musical world reveals only envy, impotence, or resentment toward an excellence I can no longer reach. They will say that I am erecting a false dichotomy between expression and technique, between intellect and passion, that I am attacking a straw man, that the best artists of our time have already transcended such oppositions; that everything I describe as sterile is, in fact, the sign of a higher subtlety, a spiritual sophistication invisible to the naïve ear.

    I have heard all of this, many times. And I must confess, if I believed it, I would be relieved. But I do not.

Some might even accuse me of writing this essay from a sort of moral high ground, positioning myself as a detached critic above the fray. But I must admit, and I do so without hesitation, that all the things I’m accusing the world of classical music of doing, I’ve done myself. I’ve unfortunately contributed to this hollowed-out culture through my own past compliances, my rehearsals of sterile precision, my pursuits of credentialed approval, and my silences in the face of its rituals. That’s precisely why I want to repair it now, in other words, by writing this essay, to poetically and philosophically "atone" through reflection and to invite others toward a reclamation of music’s vital essence.

The paradox is that this rhetoric of progress (“we have never played better, never known more, never listened more deeply”) is precisely what conceals the disaster. It is the same refrain one hears in every empire before its collapse: we are the most advanced, the most cultivated, the most humane. The perfection of the surface becomes the proof of the rot beneath it. When someone says that our musicians are “so expressive,” I often ask: expressive of what? Expression is not an ornament of form; it is the revelation of interiority. But interiority cannot exist where the self has been evacuated, replaced by pedagogy, production, and professional composure. The contemporary virtuoso is expressive the way a well-trained actor is expressive, he can simulate emotion flawlessly, reproduce the gestures of feeling, the inflections of sincerity, the tremor of meaning, all with impeccable precision. The result is convincing, even moving, but only in the way a wax figure can move: it gestures, but it does not breathe.

    The accusation of nostalgia is the easiest defense of decadence. To denounce those who point to decline as “reactionaries” is the oldest trick of those who profit from it. One need not believe in a golden age to perceive that we are living in an age of gilded emptiness. What I contest is not the level of ability, which has maybe never been higher (although I have my doubts about this too), but the purpose of that ability. Technique today is perfect, but, in a certain qualified sense, perfectly useless: it serves nothing beyond itself. Our culture admires skill as such, detached from meaning, detached from risk, detached even from pleasure. It is the same logic that praises an engineer for designing an exquisite cage and calls it freedom because the bars are invisible.

    Those who claim that expression and technique are not opposites are right, in theory, but in practice, they have allowed the latter to consume the former. They speak of synthesis, but what they produce is absorption. They believe they have reconciled passion and control, when in fact they have anesthetized both. The truth is simpler, and more tragic: what passes for refinement is often fear. Fear of error, fear of excess, fear of vulnerability. It is not mastery, but paralysis disguised as mastery.

    And so we applaud the Emperor’s new clothes. We stand before a generation of impeccably dressed sounds, woven of theoretical silk, glittering in the light of our institutions. Critics gasp, juries weep, audiences nod in reverent agreement, and no one dares to say that the music is naked, for fear of being called crazy, or envious, or resentful, or egotistical. But the child in us, the one who once loved sound before knowing its name, still sees it. He still whispers, amid the applause: there is nothing there.

    And perhaps the cruelest irony is that this age of supreme refinement still imagines itself revolutionary. It believes that perfection is liberation, that control is authenticity, that information equals depth. But the more “freedom” we proclaim in art, the narrower its real territory becomes, because the self that could take flight has been disciplined out of existence. What we call “progress” has become a system of preventive restraint, a regime of invisible fences: one may go anywhere, as long as it is already mapped. We have mistaken the multiplication of possibilities for the presence of freedom, when in truth, it is the excess of choice that paralyzes will. The result is a world of eternal rehearsal, everything prepared, nothing risked.

    And yet, the most unsettling truth is not the falsity of this order, but its success. The lie triumphs quietly, elegantly, under the guise of civilization. The concert halls are still, for now, adequately filled, though increasingly by the same faces, the same docile congregation that rises, applauds, and departs on cue, their gestures more habitual than heartfelt. The applause has become a liturgy of approval, a reflex rather than a revelation, echoing with the same tepid solemnity I once heard in the pews of the Catholic masses of my youth: a choreography of reverence performed long after belief had vanished.

    The recordings, too, testify to this new orthodoxy. Every note gleams with surgical precision, every imperfection excised with the discreet violence of the editing studio, the ubiquitous Frankenstein edits that everyone knows, everyone practices, and yet no one dares to mention, as if silence could preserve the illusion of authenticity. What remains is an art form scrubbed clean of contingency, of human error, of the very friction through which meaning once arose. These are not performances but replicas, immaculate corpses animated by voltage, embalmed in fidelity to their own perfection.

    The institutions of “classical music” (conservatories, festivals, record labels, orchestras) have thus accomplished what every exhausted religion ultimately desires: ritual without faith, beauty without risk, order without presence. They offer transcendence on demand, catharsis without cost, the comfort of an experience already mediated, pre-verified, and guaranteed not to disturb. In this world, art has become the last refuge of the well-behaved: the promise of passion without chaos, of emotion without exposure, of eternity without tremor. What once sought to awaken has been reengineered to soothe. It is not decay we witness, but perfection’s terminal phase, the moment when the statue, having achieved its final polish, forgets that it was ever stone.

    The culture of technique has learned to counterfeit the aura of transcendence so persuasively that even the sensitive ear begins to doubt its own unease. We are surrounded by sounds that shimmer, but do not sing; that move, but do not reveal; that imitate spirit so well that the absence of spirit becomes invisible. Yet the soul still knows. It hears the silence behind the resonance, the vacancy that hums beneath the surface perfection. For all our brilliance, we have lost that trembling imperfection through which mystery once entered, the human crack, the breath that faltered, the living instability that allowed the infinite to speak.

    To recognize this loss is not to scorn our time, nor to retreat into nostalgia, but to mourn it lucidly, to refuse the narcotic of admiration that mistakes excellence for life. We must learn again to listen through the surface, to hear not only what sounds, but what does not sound: the unsaid, the risk, the quiver of being itself. For art that no longer risks failure no longer lives, and perfection without vulnerability is not mastery but mummification, a glittering corpse, dressed for eternity but already without pulse.

    And yet, this is what we continue to call “classical music”, a field that mistakes its own rigor for revelation, its procedures for purpose. It is not a living tradition but an elaborate pseudoscience, an autopsy performed endlessly upon the corpse of sound, under the delusion that dissection can yield resurrection. Born in the laboratories of postwar modernity, the conservatories, the competitions, the climate-controlled concert halls, it adopted the vocabulary of research and the posture of faith. It measures what cannot be measured, systematizes what should be sung, and calls this discipline art.

    It does not seek revelation, but replication. Its theology is fidelity, its ethics, precision, its metaphysics, control. The modern classical musician is no longer a troubadour, prophet, or artisan, but a kind of scientific monk, performing experiments in obedience, recording data called interpretations, and mistaking the repeatability of the ritual for the truth of experience. This pseudoscience has its tools of measurement (metronome, tuner, score, jury) and its institutions of validation: the peer-reviewed competition, the consecrated festival, the carefully worded artist statement. What it many times lacks is a soul.

    Music, in its origin, was not a discipline but a sacrament, an act that revealed being through vibration. To treat it as an object of study rather than a form of prayer is to invert the order of creation: to analyze the flame instead of warming one’s hands by it. “Classical music,” as it now exists, is not the continuation of the musical tradition, but its interruption, the replacement of the living encounter with the sterile observation of its traces. It has transformed the art of listening into an industry of explanation. It claims to preserve, but it preserves by embalming. It claims to honor, but it honors by freezing. It claims to elevate, but it elevates by removing the ground beneath our feet.

In "The Myth of Artistic Progress", Olga Hazan exposes the fallacy of applying Darwinian or technological notions of progress to art. The arts do not evolve the way machines or species do; they transform, refract, and return. To speak of an “advanced harmonic language” or a “progressive technique” is to betray a confusion between invention and evolution, to imagine that art, like science, moves toward an ever higher form of mastery. But is Bach more advanced than Monteverdi? Is Stravinsky a step beyond Mozart? The question itself is absurd. Yet musicians speak this way habitually, as though harmony were circuitry and beauty a function of innovation. Hazan reminds us that such language does not illuminate art; it industrializes it. It reduces the symbolic to the technical, the ineffable to the measurable, and in doing so, it enshrines a new hierarchy of the initiated, those who can quantify what should only be experienced.

If we continue on this path, the future of MUSIC will be kidnapped by the filter of “classical music”, resembling a mausoleum of progress, a museum of perfect sounds, perfectly executed, perfectly meaningless. For art cannot live in a world where everything has already been solved. To call this “music” is to call the anatomy of a body love, to confuse the map with the territory, the technique with the voice, the silence of reverence with the silence of death. But somewhere beneath the polished marble, beneath the layers of doctrine and discipline, there still beats a faint pulse, the stubborn rhythm of life itself, waiting to be heard again…

Beware, too, the consoling illusion of alternatives. From time to time a charismatic maestro or a ferociously gifted soloist appears to rupture the decorum: costumes loosened, lights lowered, tempos stretched to the breaking point, manifestos whispered between movements. In appearance, they offer an exit from the museum; in essence, they rarely step outside it. The ontology remains unchanged: the work as relic, interpretation as exegesis, history as the final court of appeal. What is new is the voltage, the dramaturgy of disobedience, the sheen of curated risk. Transgression becomes a style cue, authenticity a brand asset, shock a production value. This is not emancipation from historicism but its glamour phase, orthodoxy rebottled as rebellion.

This is not a condemnation of charisma or theater. Both belong to music when they grow from necessity rather than from marketing. The caution is subtler: when intensity is engineered, when “edge” is scheduled, when surprise arrives on time, we are still inside the same enclosure, that is, the ontology of style, where sound must justify itself as concept, placement, or stance. One may electrify a ritual and still leave it a ritual; one may dress freedom in velvet and still forbid it entry. If the present does not truly risk the past, if the I does not truly risk itself, then the old metaphysics persists, now with better lighting.

Somewhere, far from the doctrine of levels, far from the hush of correct applause, a child hums a line she does not yet know how to name. A hand finds a keyboard in the half-dark and plays what it cannot quite explain. Breath becomes tone; tone becomes time; time becomes a room where two or three are gathered and the world, for a moment, is not measured but felt. Perhaps this is all we can ask of music: that it return us to the nearness of our own hearts. When the page is needed, let it be opened; when it is not, let it lie still. When knowledge is needed, let it serve; when it intrudes, let it be silent. And when the pulse beneath the polish begins to sound again, faint, stubborn, unbidden, let us not analyze it. Let us answer it, with our voices…