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 seemed to be served by completely different, at times even opposing algorithms. “You are still upset about this?” one dismayed German colleague asked me when I ran into them at a performance in late November. On top of that, the UN’s Global Humanitarian Overview for 2024 had just been published which, given my other work writing for an NGO, I read from cover to cover. It was, unsurprisingly, a bleak overview. When it came time to write the biweekly album review column I was attached to at the time, I had recently received the valid feedback from one editor that I was too quick to link music to politics and that music could just be music. I was, in a way I had never truly experienced before, at a loss for words. Listening to music then was a presentiment of when I actually did get Covid a year later and spent a week trying to eat something that didn’t taste like cotton balls or sawdust.

“We have come to ask both too much and too little of music,” Kahane wrote a few weeks after we spoke — paraphrasing what he had messaged me when I asked him how any of what we did mattered. In his essay, he adds:

“Too much in the sense that, by fetishizing ‘issues-based’ art, we risk reducing such work to the status of means-to-an-end, while setting it up for failure through unrealistic expectations of what such work can and ought to achieve. And too little in the sense that, consumed by our obsession with explicitly political art, we may overlook, or worse yet, disparage, the extraordinary power that music has when unshackled from the here and now: namely, its ability to transcend language, to transform listeners, to bring people into contact with each other, and with the deepest parts of themselves, which is to say, to touch and commune with the divine.”

It’s not that I disagree with this, particularly the point that issues-based art is often weaker for its naked attachment to social movements or ideologies — too wrapped up in ideals to offer any real ideas.¹ However, I also question the basic premise of Absolute Music, a term whose etymology goes back to Wagner writing about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (one could hardly ask for two composers who have served as larger political lightning rods): “Let us admire how the master prepares the appearance of the language and voice of man as a necessity to be expected with this moving recitative,” he writes, “which comes forth, nearly abandoning the confines of absolute music, confronts the other instruments as though with powerful, emotional speech, pressing for a decision, and ultimately transforms into a lyrical theme that swells in its powerful heights.”

It’s unlikely, musicologist Sanna Pederson argues, that Wagner was consciously coining a phrase here (which is why many attribute the term “absolute music” to, ironically, Eduard Hanslick who used it a few years after Wagner). However, it’s a term he came back to frequently in later writings from Zurich, by which point Pederson says he “invested the term ‘absolute’ with philosophical significance taken specifically from Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel…[and indicating] the highest and most abstract value.” Kahane echoes this:

“When a culture lionizes music with overt sociopolitical content, it ostensibly demotes absolute or abstract music to second-tier status. But this isn’t quite right. It would be more accurate to say that, sensing an urgent need to fight injustice, the culture begins to treat absolute music as a luxury it cannot afford, a sparkling bauble to be enjoyed only by elites who are untouched by (or benefit from) the world’s ills. By this line of thinking, abstract art is the concern of the wealthy, while social art is the concern of ‘the people.’ To subscribe to this binary view of music — that it is either actively working, say, to fight oppression, or that it exists merely as sound in rhythm — is to deprive oneself of the powerful, private, and untranslatable language that is music: that sacred, liminal realm between speech and sound in which we learn otherwise unknowable things about ourselves and each other.”

I quote at length because parsing this idea itself into any absolutes would be akin to the journalist who, in arguing for the defunding of libraries, accidentally backed into inventing the concept of libraries. But I argue with both Kahane and Wagner’s implication that there is anything absolute about a work like Beethoven’s Ninth (or, in Kahane’s case studies, a Chopin nocturne). The former, even in its first three, wordless, movements is covered with the invisible fingerprints of Napoleon and Metternich. What’s more, hearing it now means hearing the work with all of the historical baggage it’s accumulated in the intervening decades.

Kahane notes that good art is often able to straddle both sides of the divide — the abstract and the social, and I think where he points towards is music that lacks a fixed meaning but carries meaning nonetheless. The specific mentions of Chopin and Ligeti reminded me of pianist Maurizio Pollini, a beautiful and at times idiosyncratic interpreter of both composers. I wrote a coda for Pollini after his death last spring, though, despite his own political moments, I didn’t set out to focus on him as a politically-aligned or issues-based artist. He certainly didn’t consider himself that way. “Music is one thing, interest in political ideas is another,” he said in a 2012 documentary.

Nonetheless it was, at least for my purposes, impossible to separate one from the other, even in the case of Chopin — a composer central to Pollini’s career but one he was often accused of, as one 2019 Gramophone review put it, “abjur[ing] any conventional idea of beauty.” These critics seemingly forgot that the composer’s music doesn’t solely exist to serve the conventions of beauty. Growing up the son of a French mother and Polish father in the age of Napoleonic conquest and the subsequent Congress of Vienna, Chopin was hesitant to leave Poland to further his musical education in western Europe.

The year before Chopin left, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia had crowned himself King of Poland. This move came roughly 15 years after the Congress of Vienna deeded part of the country to Russia as part of the same Marie Kondoing of world order that led a fictionalized Beethoven in the film Immortal Beloved to declare that Congress mastermind Prince Metternich “should be forced to eat my shit.”² This coronation was an awkward moment, with even one Russian historian saying it marked “a rare moment of historical agreement for Russians and Poles: everyone, it seems, would rather forget that it ever happened.”

Everyone, perhaps, except Nicholas I, whose new job title led to further suppression in the parts of Poland he now controlled, particularly crackdowns on freedom of expression and the press. By the time Chopin gave his farewell concert in Warsaw on October 11, 1830, a concert that saw the premiere of his First Piano Concerto, he received a positive but tempered reaction. The Kurjer Warszawski called it “sublime” but made no mention of Chopin’s performance. No other newspapers covered the event. Biographer William G. Atwood believes this was owing to pressure from the Kremlin-aligned Sejmn, “which now counted Chopin among those seditious youths who opposed its policies.” The full program for Chopin’s farewell concert included his Grand Fantasy on Polish Airs and the overture to Rossini’s William Tell (a political parable about fighting authoritarianism and foreign oppression), two works suggesting that he was not shy about his political stance.

Four weeks after Chopin left Poland, a country he would never see again, the city became the center of the November Uprising, which in turn sparked a year of war and a Polish defeat. Chopin’s friend and traveling companion, Tytus Woyciechowski, had returned home to support the war efforts, but convinced Chopin to remain in exile. While his letters home at this time remained lukewarm towards the historical events, it’s likely that Chopin was complying with the Viennese censors, who could have easily expelled the young student for the wrong political ideology.

An 1848 letter from Chopin to Wojciech Grzymała. Grzymała was a Polish politician and banker who negotiated for British and French support during the November Uprising and ultimately settled in Paris.

Writing from a comparatively looser Paris a few years later, as the entire continent hurtled towards the revolutionary year of 1848, Chopin commented on an “epidemic” (his word) of what Wagner may have called “absolute” music in this time: “The public is indifferent and bored with everything,” he wrote in 1832. “There are various reasons for this, but the political situation is chiefly to blame.” Within all of this, I can see how Pollini — born into Mussolini’s Italy and launching his career during the tumultuous Years of Lead — would see something beyond beauty in Chopin’s piano works.

For me, as well as many others, this is where the basic premise of Absolute Music begins to fall apart. In his 1999 book on the subject, Daniel Chua argues that the idea itself is a vacuum, “a musical form that was made to empty its meaning at the turn of the Nineteenth Century…that claims to have no history.” Given the fact that we don’t live in a “Severance”-like society (at least not literally), Chua argues, music “is woven back into the epistemological fabric, and tangled with the discourses of theology, visual perspective, biology, philosophy, gender, chemistry, politics, physics. Such contextualization, far from diminishing the significance of music, actually demonstrates the centrality of music in the construction of modernity.”

“It is this denial of meaning in the instrumental repertory that has systematically blocked any attempt at feminist or any other sort of socially grounded criticism,” Susan McClary writes of the subject in Feminine Endings, in an essay where she applies a similar lens to reading Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony as used to read Bizet’s Carmen — noting that both works contain sexual politics regardless of their use of text or not. “I am not rummaging through this repertory trying to find tiny isolated details or occasional snags,” she adds of reading social and political meaning into wordless works. “Rather, it seems to me more and more that the whole fabric is at stake.”

Anselm Kiefer: Siegfried Vergisst Brünhilde (Siegfried forgets Brünhilde) — 1976

To be clear, I don’t think Kahane is making the same argument that music is or ought to be inherently meaningless, as he makes clear in pointing out the false binary between music that is actively working to fight oppression or exists merely as sound in rhythm, basta. This is, after all, a composer whose works touch on themes like the septic wounds to America’s body politic, the housing crisis, and the role of both artists and communities in wartime. However, I will argue that the math isn’t mathing when he equates music that can “bring people into contact with each other, and with the deepest parts of themselves” with “absolute music.”

I was reminded of this earlier this month in Amsterdam with an evening of music at the Concertgebouw performed by Caroline Shaw and… Gabriel Kahane. The evening began with Kahane’s “Winter Song,” a track from his 2011 album, Where Are the Arms. “Where did it begin?” it opens, noting a few lines later “one day the words were gone.” It was a keen, if unintentional, preface to the main work of the evening, Hexagons, co-written by Shaw and Kahane and based on Borges’s short story, “The Library of Babel.” Songs often work like that — their words and themes bounce around like a bouncing DVD logo, occasionally reaching the corner and resonating across time.

The painter Anselm Kiefer has a similar habit of giving the same name to works over time, creating an SEO nightmare but also placing these works in conversation with one another. He happened to be front-of-mind for me at the Concertgebouw; just before the concert, I saw a recently-opened exhibition of old and new works spread across two of the city’s largest museums, the Van Gogh and Stedelijk, which form a crooked triangle across Van Baerlestraat with the concert hall. I was reminded of Kiefer’s 1988 painting, “Siegfried Forgets Brünhilde,” with its treacherous, nuclear winter-esque landscape, when Kahane got to the refrain, singing repeatedly that “kids fall down in the snow.” The work, as one Christie’s essay on it reads, “asks whether painting might ever be restored as a vehicle for healing in a world riddled with deep-set scars.”

Anselm Kiefer: Märkischer Sand — 1982

Kiefer, born two months (to the day) before Germany surrendered World War II, has dedicated many of his works to making sense of the world he was born into, often unpacking this alongside literary references. The characters of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, particularly Siegfried (held up as a heroic figure among the Nazis), are frequently invoked in his works. The repeated use of the same title creates a continuum, or more appropriately, a matrix of these references.

A description on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website of the “Forgets”-adjacent work, “Siegfried’s Difficult Journey to Brünhilde,” quotes Kiefer: “Our historical knowledge…determines our way of looking at things. We see railway tracks anywhere and think about Auschwitz. It will remain that way in the long run.” History, for Kiefer, isn’t a cause or a theme, but rather — not unlike Kahane’s works — a medium; to be worked with, rather than worked out. He uses it in the same way he uses actual sand in a painting of sand (“Raise a black-heeled sky,” sings Kahane at the beginning of the song “Baedeker,” from Book of Travelers. “Put it up to the moon, shaking the sand from your mind.”)

Hexagons, Shaw said in her introduction to the work at the Concertgebouw, is “not an adaptation but more a loose meditation” on the Borges short story. In it, Borges imagines the universe as “an indefinite, perhaps infinite” series of identical, hexagonal galleries. In each gallery are five bookshelves, each shelf holding 32 books, each book containing 410 pages, each page 40 lines, each line approximately 80 letters. The letters on the front of each book “neither indicate nor prefigure what the pages inside will say.” Indeed, Borges’s narrator notes, many of the books have no discernible sense or logic. His father once saw a book that was entirely made up of the letters M, C, and V repeated throughout its 410 pages. “I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the ‘vain and superstitious habit’ of trying to find sense of books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the palm of one’s hand,” the narrator adds, noting that the argument that books have no meaning “is not entirely fallacious.”

For a time, the librarians in these hexagons rejoiced at the idea that all of human knowledge and achievement was contained within these books, and that they need only venture to the right hexagon to find each answer they sought. A beautiful matrix of inquiry and discovery. Hope went before the fall, with a subsequent depression that some shelf in some hexagon contains the right book, but it would forever be out of reach. The narrator exists in that depression but, nearing the end of their life, is able to see the shades of grey between the two binaries — absolute meaning and absolute non-meaning. What gives them the most peace is the “elegant hope” that a traveler with infinite time moving in one direction would eventually find the same volumes repeated in the same order.

Kahane and Shaw chart that eternal voyage in Hexagons, one that aligns with the story’s object lesson in how art outlives humanity.³ In not strictly adapting the story as an opera, as both Kahane and Shaw had separately considered in the past, they’re widening the gap between the signifier and signified, adding a wraparound porch on the Tower of Babel. But they also cut to the heart of the work: We are all, in our own way, librarians, trying to divine meaning out of everything that is left in our hexagon, along with the meaning in the hexagon itself: Why these books in this order? Why these hexagons?

Just as there are librarians in Borges’s world who look at a book consisting only of M, C, and V and see nothing except that face value, there are many who can listen to music for its own face, absolute value. (God help the Kennedy Center if anyone from the current administration should realize the barely-subsurface class implications of The Marriage of Figaro.) Fortunately, their word isn’t absolute. Music that brings people into contact with each other, and with the deepest parts of themselves, is perhaps the greatest antithesis we have to “absolute music,” whether that meaning is hidden in the repetition of three letters or more clearly spelled out. What else is there to do but look for that meaning?

That, to me, is the most elegant hope we have.

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Correction: In the initial version of this piece, I wrote that Caroline Shaw described Hexagons as “not an adaptation but more a loose adaptation” before the work was performed in Amsterdam. She actually called it “not an adaptation but more a loose meditation,” which makes much more sense. Sorry, Caroline!

1. This feels especially acute at a point where 24-hour news cycles have converged with 24-hour feeds of reactions and responses posted to TikTok and Instagram Reels. We are now just as actively involved as the traditional news media, and expected to be constantly, chronically, almost congenitally online. We’re expected to manufacture content, which is not the same as making art. As one artist said, content is made in service to capitalism, not creativity. He said it, of course, on Instagram.

2. I have yet to confirm if this was a direct quote, but since I’m not a musicologist I am choosing to believe it was.

3. An oft-cited Borges quote: “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”