Everybody Says Things Are Dead Until Someone Attractive Brings Them Back

Everybody Says Things Are Dead Until Someone Attractive Brings Them Back
by Fescennine

Everybody in performance eventually starts announcing deaths. Melody is dead. Beauty is dead. Tonal resolution is fascist now. Somebody in Brussels kills emotional sincerity every nine months and then everybody else has to spend three years pretending not to miss it.

Meanwhile dancers are still out there throwing themselves across floors to giant unresolved chords like their rent depends on it.

Which maybe it does. God.

Anyway I keep thinking about how long something has to remain embarrassing before it becomes interesting again.

Because there really are sounds that become socially unusable for a while. Not bad sounds. Worse. Beautiful ones.

There was a stretch where if you put an openly emotional string swell into anything remotely contemporary people reacted like you had released doves into the venue. Actual discomfort. Eyes narrowing across festival lobbies. Someone with rectangular glasses saying the work felt “manipulative,” which in certain circles is honestly one step below being tried at The Hague.

Then twelve years pass and suddenly some luminous little creature in translucent trousers puts the exact same harmonic language under distorted percussion and everybody in the audience is having private revelations.

I watched this happen recently. You could feel the room splitting apart physically.

The younger people looked relieved. Which affected me more than I wanted it to.

I always feel protective toward young artists when they start making work that is openly lush or yearning or emotionally excessive because the performance world punishes that instinct so aggressively at first. Especially in music for dance. God. You spend years learning how to disguise your feelings structurally so nobody accuses you of sentimentality. Then eventually one exhausted genius stops disguising it and the entire aesthetic cycle resets again.

Film music goes through this every six minutes, by the way.

One decade everyone is terrified of sounding cinematic and then suddenly there are enormous synth choirs blasting through galleries again while people nod solemnly like this is a completely new emotional experience never before available to humanity.

I don’t mean this cynically, actually. That’s the annoying part.

I think people genuinely forget how much they miss certain sounds.

A suspended chord. A melody that arrives too early and means exactly what it means. Massive reverb. A woman singing in octaves over low strings. There are textures that become embarrassing mostly because they bypass intellectual defenses too quickly.

And ambitious people hate being emotionally caught without their jackets on.

You notice this in rehearsal rooms constantly. The dancers usually surrender first. Composers are worse. Composers will sit there pretending not to be moved by something while visibly breathing differently.

I’ve done this myself. Many times. Humiliating profession.

Also there are practical politics involved. Some aesthetics cannot return until the people who publicly murdered them lose enough institutional power. This is simply true. The arts run almost entirely on socially managed embarrassment.

A choreographer once told me, very seriously, that audiences were “ready for tonal music again,” as though melody had been recovering in Switzerland this whole time.

And maybe that’s the closest thing I have to a theory.

Nothing actually dies. Certain things just become dangerous to associate yourself with for a while.

Then somebody attractive brings them back and everybody acts shocked by how good they still sound.