The Real in the Illusion – In Memory of Peter Ablinger

Peter Ablinger is dead, and no metaphor suffices. Writing a eulogy for Ablinger cannot be »like« anything. To do justice to his invaluable work – his contribution to music, visual art, and philosophy – one must write with clarity and precision: fine lines on white paper. Canvases in the wind. A window through which we glimpse the blue sky.

To remember Ablinger himself is an impossible task. What fascinated him most, »the greatest of all questions, the greatest of all riddles,« was the wonder and the question of what another person sees/hears/thinks when I see/hear/think something. It was »the impossibility of thinking (feeling) the other.« To fully understand how he experienced the world, how he was able to turn it upside down, to turn it inside out and reveal the construction of reality itself to our ears and eyes – our astonished minds – is impossible. But because he conducted fundamental research into perception, because he persistently showed us the difference between how we thought the world was and how the world really is, he also showed us that something in human perception connects us all as sentient beings.

He wasn’t interested in sound itself, but in how he could use sound to create something that enables us to experience the world – and ourselves

Among Ablinger’s methods, shifts and transfers were the most essential. As a trained graphic artist, jazz musician, and composer, he always asked what the implications of a specific visual artwork might be for music. The astonishing solutions he arrived at (such as the »phonorealism« of his Quadraturen series) revealed not only the inadequacy of the aesthetic discourses of his time, but fundamentally, the inadequacy of how music was created and perceived.

Hearing Hearing Itself

He wasn’t interested in sound itself, but in how he could use sound to create something that enables us to experience the world – and ourselves. His music is a space in time, a »moment-place«, as he called it, where we may dwell and from which we may sense something beyond music itself. A space through whose windows the world breaks in – both poetically light and mercilessly noisy, real, actual. We are not an audience to Ablinger’s work. We are not merely listeners or »experiencers« when his work unfolds – that would be a ridiculous simplification. Ablinger’s work is a window onto the world as he must have experienced it – and more. It allows us to experience our experience, to recognize ourselves as perceiving beings. The real in the illusion, and the illusion in the real. A sober psychedelic daydream, both objective and dizzying.

Ablinger was an anti-Cage who loved white noise – all frequencies at once – more than silence

Ablinger was an anti-Cage who loved white noise – all frequencies at once – more than silence. His oeuvre encompasses musical compositions, installations, graphic works, and concepts. He planted trees with the intention of listening to the noise their leaves make in the wind. He took acoustic »photographs« of the minimally differing ambient hum in village churches around Berlin. He created a waterfall – or the idea of one. He was not merely interested in the objective, but wanted to »find out how we relate to what is given. For it is only this way of relating that creates the real.« He didn’t just want to hear – he wanted to hear hearing itself. He called it Hören hören, or hearing Listening.

From the perspective of the academic music tradition, his position was extreme. Extremely distant from any Beethovenian or Schoenbergian form, or post-serial thought. Where can we go from here? What is left to do after someone has shifted the boundaries so fundamentally? Ablinger himself was not ready to abandon the categories of »composer« or »music«. Those categories were necessary for him to keep recontextualizing, to keep moving them. »To keep dancing«, as he wrote. All we can do is keep learning from him.

The reality in the perceived illusion of his death is that he will no longer create

A Radical Openness

To learn from Ablinger is to reject the simplistic polarizations that dominate our discourses. It means, quite literally, to keep an open mind. To be honest about one’s real experience of reality, music, and art. To reject the fetishization of technique, to reject the superficial, the humanly inhuman. To ask for the musical consequences of every fact. To embrace freedom, but also to radically refine one’s thinking until the one solution, the one path, shines clearly before us. (He only wanted as much freedom as it took to feel the constraint.) To meet the world with skepticism and humor. To begin, humbly, from one's own perspective but ambitiously strive to understand as many other views as possible. To accept that nothingness is a precondition for life. To transform the simple into the universal, and the universal into something simple. To dress in white, and to gather acorns outside one's front door to brew tea from them.

The reality in the perceived illusion of his death is that he will no longer create. That his voice, ahead of time, has become part of the white noise he preferred to silence. From there, we can only hear it as one of the auditory hallucinations the brain conjures. Reality denies us more of his insight into what it means to be. But what he created is inescapable. To deny it would be to deny one's own perception.