Absolute Music Doesn't Exist

Gabriel Kahane, Frédéric Chopin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Anselm Kiefer's searches for meaning

Last year, Gabriel Kahane wrote an essay titled “Absolute Music Is Not a Luxury,” which opened with two anecdotes: In the first, a friend confides to Kahane that their music isn’t “about” anything, which was causing them anxiety in a zeitgeist that “seems — at least in some instances — to value subject matter more than craft.” In the second, an acquaintance tells him that she feels like she has a case of “cochlear Covid,” unable to access the “taste” of sound amid so many overlapping global crises dampening the senses.

Reader, I was the acquaintance. Kahane and I were messaging in December of 2023. By then, I had started about 70 mornings by seeing photos and videos of people who looked like my aunts, uncles, and cousins, at turns either being murdered or fighting for their lives. My algorithm was dominated by genocide and, when it wasn’t, it was dominated by arguments over the semantics of the word.

At the same time, I was living and working in a city where most of the people I knew se…