Preluding with Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche is widely known as the harbinger of nihilism boldly declaring “God is Dead” which is arguably his most quoted (or rather misquoted) statement. The characterisation of Nietzsche as a nihilistic thinker is an unfortunate misreading. If anything, Nietzsche’s works stare into the fearful abyss of nihilism and offer us suggestions on actively overcoming despondency and meaninglessness. In fact, Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, lends itself to the project of artistic criticism. There are many points Nietzsche makes in this fascinating text ranging from the aesthetic dualism of the Apollonian and Dionysian drives to what constitutes a real artist. Reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in a context where AI sparks polarizing debates on art’s bleak future we are left with some fascinating food for thought. Indeed, for the ailing German philosopher the purpose of art was quite simple—it makes our suffering more bearable. The last time I checked, AI did not have the capacity to suffer.

Swooning over Liszt

Franz Liszt certainly sent his fans swooning. The first celebrity of the musical world. The 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine even coined the phrase “Lisztomania” to describe the intense level of hysteria demonstrated by fans who would wrestle over his gloves and handkerchiefs. Apparently, some would even wear his portrait in their brooches, throw love letters onto the stage, and try to collect locks of his rich brown hair. But we are not concerned with Liszt. We will swoon over him momentarily before turning to his rival cum friend Frédéric Chopin. Liszt and Chopin. Chopin and Liszt. Both travelled through similar circles in 1830s Paris. Both fell in love with female writers who used male pseudonyms (Marie d’Agoult and George Sand). Both were virtuosos in their own right. The similarities are practically screaming at us but are cut short by Chopin’s premature death in 1849. He was 39 years old.

The Beautiful Victim

Liszt wrote a book after Chopin died titled Life of Chopin. It was initially released as a series of magazine articles before being published as a book in 1852. It isn’t very historically accurate. I remember reading fragments and feeling cringed by Liszt’s excessive rosy-posy sentimentalization. Besides, many historians undermine the book’s factual legitimacy and speculate Princess Carolyne (Liszt’s long-term romantic companion) was heavily involved in its ghost-writing.

Still, Life of Chopin is worth reading. There’s something very touching about one virtuoso paying tribute to another—even when that tribute is glaringly imperfect. In Life of Chopin, Liszt captures Chopin as “a victim to a disease without hope” which took him “while yet young” and “laid him in his still grave”. Liszt is even poetic enough to describe Chopin as a “beautiful victim” subjected to “the bitter sufferings which devoured his heart”. Of course, Liszt’s depiction of Chopin is highly romanticised, and we see the poet of the piano emerge more as an ethereal figure than a relatable human. Despite this, the crisis of Chopin’s bodily vulnerability is very real. Even more recent scholarship confirms his bodily tribulations. In a 1998 medical article titled The Long Suffering of Frederic Chopin the authors (who are medical scholars) underscore how Chopin’s “frailty and ill health” was coupled with his “conviction that he would not live an old age”. His conviction was right. He died young.

On Dead Composers

Classical music is full of composers who died early or lived a difficult life. Franz Schubert died at 31, Mozart at 35, Lili Boulanger at 24, Dora Pejačević at 37 and (of course) Chopin at 39. Still, such short lives produced such excellent music. Mozart revolutionized the opera. Pejačević became one of the first composers to introduce orchestral song in Croatian music. Lili Boulanger became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome composition prize at the age of 19. Schubert somehow managed to compose more than 600 musical pieces. Chopin poeticised the piano. These lives were short lived, but they were well lived. These lives were painful—some more than others, but well-spent. Chopin’s suffering was long, debilitating, and constant. He had to leave his Polish homeland and live in exile. Boulanger’s suffering was shorter but extremely intense. In Russia, Tchaikovsky lived a bit longer but dealt with lifelong anxiety and depression over his sexuality. He died mysteriously after composing his famous Symphony No. 6 in B minor. Shostakovich, despite having a relatively longer life, composed under Stalinist terror and constantly feared arrest. Still, these composers did not refrain from creating despite suffering: they created through their suffering.

Schopenhauerian Interlude

When Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy, he was heavily inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer (before he turned against him later in his career. Nietzsche, oh Nietzsche!). In The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer mentions that ‘the basis of all willing is need, lack and thus pain, which is its primordial destiny by virtue of its essence’. For Schopenhauer we cannot evade pain in our lives and “the life of our bodies is only a constantly checked dying”—“a constant postponement of death”. 

Schopenhauer is dark but if Schopenhauer is right that life is “a constantly checked dying” then these composers were not merely artists—they were humans who were actively witnessing their own unravelling and fraying out. As such, their music becomes a kind of resistance against the slow erosion of the mind and body (the beautiful Maurice Ravel lost his ability to play and compose due to a degenerative neurological disorder).

Schubert’s feverish productivity, Boulanger’s kindred intensity, and Shostakovich’s political defiance all answer to Schopenhauer’s claim that suffering is the fundamental condition of our existence. In this light, Chopin’s luminous nocturnes are not just aesthetic objects of auditory pleasure. Instead, they are metaphysical gestures that attempt to momentarily suspend the “primordial destiny” of pain through sound. The metaphysical poet John Donne once famously used the eloquent phrase “one equal music” to praise the perfect and harmonious state of heaven. Remarkably, Chopin’s nocturnes remind us that earthly music is born not from perfect cadences but from the fragile and flickering struggle against suffering—something AI does not experience.

What AI Cannot Do

I am frequently inundated with ads that showcase all the promising things AI can do for me. Apparently, Gemini can help me edit my badly taken photos while ChatGPT can help me smash out my fitness goals and Grammarly can help me write emails that impress professors. I guess these AI companies don’t know that I am an incredibly petty person. In fact, I am so petty that I will list all the things AI cannot do. AI cannot: become insomniac over a crush, stare at a cat on a fence to procrastinate, become a matcha addict, bore people with Prufrockian references, take long walks in the rain because it suddenly feels Wordsworthian, cry at music, develop a crippling fear of dogs, suffer, decay, and die.

Unequal Music

Music has always been evidence of life. Even in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis when Gregor Samsa wakes from “troubled dreams” to find himself transformed into “horrible vermin”, something in him still stirs at the sound of his sister Grete’s violin. Kafka’s novel is famously bleak but there is something so sweet and incandescent in this remarkable moment. Gregor is trapped in his dehumanised body and is confined to the parameters of his small room, but he still responds instinctively to music. There’s something about music that reminds Gregor that, despite his monstrous form, some part of his humanity still persists. Indeed, music becomes the last thread that connects Gregor to the world he is losing.

What world are we losing when AI interferes in the sphere of art, imagination and creativity? Perhaps, it’s one hundred acres of woodland, the branches of the faraway tree or the wind that whispers through the willows. References to my childhood aside, perhaps we are losing a world where art is married to the mortal humanity and suffering of the bodies that make it. When music becomes generated instead of embodied, we lose the harmony and messiness that eternalises the works of Mozart all the way to the Beatles and Taylor Swift. AI may produce sound, but it cannot produce the need Schopenhauer says we desire to satisfy. Need is a form of beautiful torment. AI cannot ache for beauty or cling to fragile melodies the way Gregor clings to Grete’s violin. It cannot create out of illness, exile, fear, love or longing.

My greatest fear in the realm of art and music isn’t that AI will out-compose us one day. Instead, I worry about something much more intimate. I worry that AI will make us forget what artistic composition really is. As a young girl I hated playing the piano and I still do. I swapped it for the guitar which has been one of the finest loves of my life (and the reason why I had a George Harrison inspired hair cut). Still, I remember my piano teacher telling me that musical melodies are not solely about the efficient arrangement of frequencies. I didn’t understand what she meant and I still don’t but there is no harm in speculating. Perhaps she was pointing to the trembling residues of a life that lies behind each musical note? A life that loved, wept, raged, and suffered. AI can imitate the basic blueprint of Chopin’s nocturne, but it cannot imitate the necessity that birthed it. Indeed, if we allow AI to generate art and music we are losing much more than our culture and legacy. We are losing the very fragility and mortal urgency that makes art worth making at all.