Classical music offers solace amid ‘exhausting’ culture of optimisation, writer says
Joseph Earp describes a growing obsession with classical music as a source of uplift, recognition and connection across time.
Opinion writer Joseph Earp says he has turned increasingly to classical music as he grows exhausted by a culture that seeks to make every aspect of life more efficient through technology and artificial intelligence.
In an opinion article published by The Guardian, Earp describes his engagement with classical music as having become an obsession over roughly the past year. He writes about listening to works by Morton Feldman, Steve Reich and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
Earp says Mahler’s music reminds him that people have long been able to transcend daily life with little more than instruments and voices. He presents that connection with earlier composers as a counterpoint to contemporary ideas of constant optimisation.
He also recounts attending an Australian Chamber Orchestra performance of works by Alfred Schnittke. Earp says the performance conveyed what he interpreted as Schnittke’s anxiety about bodily frailty and ageing, and that it demonstrated art’s capacity to hold both the ugliness and beauty of human experience.
The piece of music he identifies as especially moving is the third movement of Jean Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony. Earp describes a passage depicting birds taking flight and says it regularly brings him to tears, partly because it evokes the composer observing the natural world and turning it into music.
Earp’s account is personal cultural commentary rather than an independently reported assessment of classical music, technology or artificial intelligence. Its interpretations of composers and their work are his own.
