music

2025 in Books

Every year, I have a personal marathon to read at least 52 books — one per week. It sounds more complex than what actually is, because that’s about 35 minutes of daily reading. It doesn’t look like much if you break the monster of ~15,000 pages to read.

Once I realized that half an hour of the 17 hours I’m usually awake isn’t a painful act, I developed a thirst for reading. It didn’t happen in the first year, nor in the second, but it gained traction, and now I can surpass that number easily if I just put in a little effort. However, the number is allowed to go down if there are more dense books, like The Brothers Karamazov. Nevertheless, this year I got soft on the style of reading, avoiding intense texts in sequence. Therefore, reaching the number 52 wasn’t such a struggle.

Without further ado, here are my top 10 books of 2025 (without a particular order):

The City of God (Part I), Augustine of Hippo
The Blue Book, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Same as Ever, Morgan Housel
The Culture Matters, Roger Scruton
Room for Good Things to Run Wild, Josh Nadeau
The Concept of Anxiety, Søren Kierkegaard
The Idea of Holy, Rudolf Otto
The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer
Inteligência Humilhada, Jonas Madureira.

This doesn’t mean I think all of them are timeless (even though some are), but they touched me in a way that shaped my character — and that’s what books are all about. Unless the book is your living manual, you don’t need to memorize every line; the goal is to understand the book’s central concept and see how the core ideal can be applied (or avoided). For example, this year I read two books by Nietzsche, yet even though I find them very insightful, I use them as a model of how my mind should not be shaped. Therefore, reading should be thoughtful and careful, because you’re consuming ideas that shape actions, and actions have consequences.

This year was quite introspective, focusing on the interior rather than the exterior (productivity). That means next year will likely have an outward perspective, as the seeds planted need to bear fruit.

De civitate Dei contra paganos
Augustine of Hippo
*****

This is a masterpiece by one of the most significant figures in the foundation of Christianity during the early years of the Church. Augustine’s “Confessions” already brought me to my knees as he reflects on how his vast knowledge wasn’t enough to comprehend how desperately he needed God. The book addresses several aspects of our lives. Now, while reading “The City of God,” Augustine expands the perspective to illustrate how hollow our society was. Even though they achieved many things, people were often blind to the most essential aspects of life.

“Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”

The version I have splits the book into two parts, and in the first, he dissects the basis of the Roman society. Part I is primarily a demolition project: Augustine systematically dismantles Roman religion, showing that the gods never protected Rome and that Roman virtue was invariably compromised by pride. The deeper argument: earthly cities rise and fall because they’re built on disordered loves. The City of Man seeks glory, power, and domination. The City of God seeks God himself.

Augustine reminds us that we are here as pilgrims, and no city will ever be our real home.

The Blue Book
Ludwig Wittgenstein
****

What stands out to me in this book is the influence of Wittgenstein’s philosophy on the development of artificial intelligence. Although his ideas were not directly used, they significantly shaped our understanding of language and the construction of thought, which form the foundation of AI.

Wittgenstein argues that meaning comes from use. We become confused by grammar, which leads us to ask malformed questions like “What is time?” and “What is knowledge?” This confusion leads to the construction of elaborate metaphysical answers to problems that are actually misunderstandings of language. Philosophy doesn’t solve problems; instead, it dissolves them by revealing how language has misled us.

The process can be dense, recursive, and often frustrating, but once you understand it, you stop asking specific questions entirely. It goes back entirely to the core of philosophy, as formulating the right questions is better than just providing answers. This is how we get the best results from AI, and it’s also how we can improve everything we think and do.

“Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science… Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.”

Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
****

Following the success of “The Psychology of Money,” Morgan Housel began to release more intriguing works, including his latest book, “The Art of Spending Money,” which I also read this year. However, I preferred “Same as Ever” because it explores a range of topics. In contrast, “The Art of Spending Money” feels more like an appendix to “The Psychology of Money.” His writing style is comfortable for most people and reduces complex issues into palatable words.

For those familiar with Nassim Taleb’s work, this book will find a home, as Housel talks about how people obsess over predicting what will change, but the real edge comes from understanding what never changes — greed, fear, envy, tribalism, the need for narrative, the gap between expectations and reality.

“The more history I read, the more comfortable I became with the future. When you focus on what never changes, you stop trying to predict uncertain events and spend more time understanding timeless behavior.”

Even though it’s a pop hit, the book delivers important content that makes one wonder how to go deeper into the subjects. The core idea is that the world changes; people don’t. Plan for permanent features of human behavior, not temporary conditions. This book is a nice parallel to Will Durant’s The Lessons of History, as both arrive at the same conclusion.

Culture Counts
Roger Scruton
****

“The purpose of education in the humanities should not be to benefit the student with a set of instrumental skills, but rather to look after the culture itself by training a fresh set of guardians to look after it.”

Scruton argues that culture isn’t just a form of decoration, but rather the operating system of a civilization. High culture transmits meaning across generations, cultivates emotional intelligence, and provides the shared symbols through which a society understands itself. Modern progressivism, he contends (and also finds resonance with my own perception), has systematically dismantled this inheritance: attacking tradition as oppression, replacing judgment with relativism, and substituting political messaging for genuine art. The result is a cultural vacuum filled by commercialism and ideology. Scruton isn’t merely nostalgic; he’s making a functional argument. Without high culture, people lack the resources to navigate suffering, beauty, and moral complexity. The loss isn’t only aesthetic; it’s existential. That reflects how anxiety, depression, and all sorts of mental disorders are trending.

Even though Scruton has a different perspective from Adorno or Lipovetsky, they both agree that the mainstream butchered culture in order to profit, but differently from the Frankfurt School, Roger points out that not just the market profits from the degradation of culture, but also the gatekeepers in academia and the “so-called” elite.

Culture is how a civilization teaches its members to feel the right things about the right objects. Destroy it, and you produce people who can’t perceive meaning.

Room for Good Things to Run Wild
Josh Nadeau
****

Well known in the Instagramsphere, Josh debuted with this book, which takes its title from a G. K. Chesterton work, as Christianity establishes order so that good things can flourish freely within it. The book can be interpreted as a contemporary Confessions, but not in the sense of a mundane character achieving enlightenment; instead, it depicts a Christian awakening to true Christianity.

Nadeau draws heavily on Chesterton, Lewis, and Dostoevsky— a curated tradition of writers who saw glory in the mundane. The book includes original illustrations and a “liturgy” that builds chapter by chapter. It’s more poetry than system, more invitation than instruction.

“I’m on the same path as you, still learning the hard way. But there has been a real change in me. I tasted a bit of the flavor of Death, and I also tasted some of the Life to come, and I know which I prefer.”

Begrebet Angest
Søren Kierkegaard
*****

Kierkegaard is a fascinating person. His perspectives on philosophical and Christian subjects are unique. I consider him one of the most important authors to read for how he twists the way problems of life are perceived.

Anxiety isn’t fear (which has an object) — it’s the dizziness of freedom, the vertigo we feel before infinite possibility. Anyone reading this book will relate to this conclusion. Anxiety reveals our freedom to us; it’s the mood of a self that must become itself through choice. But the core insight lands: anxiety is not a malfunction. It’s the price of being a self capable of becoming something — or nothing.

“Anxiety is freedom’s possibility; this anxiety alone is, through faith, absolutely formative, since it consumes all finite ends, discovers all their deceptions.”

Das Heilige
Rudolf Otto
*****

Das Heilige, or The Idea of the Holy, was an essential book for introducing the concept of the numinous. C. S. Lewis rarely named other authors in his books, but Otto was one of them because this concept is unforgettable. Numinous means a felt encounter with the holy—mysterious, awe‑filled, and otherworldly. It is less an idea than an event in consciousness: the soul sensing it stands before something real, alive, and greater than itself.

I consider this concept to be an upgraded version of Kant’s sublime. Otto’s numinous is a felt encounter with the “wholly other”—a personal, irreducibly religious presence that evokes awe, dread, and attraction. It is relational and theistic in flavor: one senses being addressed, judged, or invited. Kant’s sublime is an aesthetic-judgment experience before nature’s vastness or force (a starry sky, storms), where imagination fails to grasp the magnitude, and reason asserts moral freedom. It is impersonal and reflective: the mind discovers its supersensible vocation, not a divine presence.

“In contrast to ‘the overpowering’ of which we are conscious as an object over against the self, there is the feeling of one’s own submergence, of being but ‘dust and ashes’ and nothingness. And this forms the numinous raw feeling for the feeling of religious humility.”

The book also draws on the history of how mankind relates to the sacred, and how that shaped humanity since the early days. The book isn’t just theological; it also takes a sociological perspective.

The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
****

Jonathan Haidt’s name is spreading all around these days because his book “The Anxious Generation” was a tremendous bestseller, with good reason: it hits a nerve in our society and the future of our generation. Even though I think Michel Desmourget’s work should’ve gained more attention, it had the same subject and was written years before. Nevertheless, Haidt already had a stronger name, primarily because of “The Righteous Mind.” Therefore, I decided to read it too.

This book tries to conceal both political spectrums, or at least make one side more empathetic toward the other. He points out that neither side is entirely irrational, as they’re attending to different moral dimensions. The book explains why political opponents talk past each other — they’re not disagreeing about facts but perceiving through different moral matrices.

“Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”

I don’t agree with all of Haidt’s arguments, and surely some are a bit shallow in how he sees that this might resume as a sense of community and meaning. The strongest argument against his religious point of view is that he completely misses conversion. When people convert, they aren’t precisely seeking safety or communion, as many of them face quite the opposite of that: persecution and hatred. However, the book offers strong explanations of why we tend to increase tension through different perspectives, which, in itself, is already a triumph of his writing.

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

Practicing the Way
John Mark Comer
***

Pastor John Mark Comer has a very contemporary writing style that almost feels like you’re reading a conversation or even a social media post — his target is the young folks. Even though the style is not to my taste, John’s approach towards the content and importance of setting the proper standards for becoming a faithful follower of Jesus.

The “Way” is apprenticeship to Jesus — not just belief in doctrines but imitation of a life. Comer focuses on spiritual disciplines: silence, solitude, sabbath, simplicity, and community. The argument isn’t moralistic (“do these to be a better person”) but formational (“these are how you become the kind of person who naturally does good”).

“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”

The book is a sequel to The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (which I also read this year), and it’s clearly a mature version of the previous book.

Inteligência Humilhada
Jonas Madureira
****

Now, something off the radar for most people, as Jonas is a niche writer in the Brazilian theological scene. However, his understanding of philosophy and theology is blended here in a masterful way. The book should be translated into English for a broader audience.

Madureira argues that modern intellectual life suffers from pride disguised as sophistication. True intelligence requires humility before God, tradition, and the limits of human reason. He draws on Augustine, Calvin, and the Reformed tradition to show that the fall didn’t just corrupt the will but also the intellect.

The book critiques both secular rationalism and evangelical anti-intellectualism, arguing for a third way: rigorous thinking that knows its place. The call is for chastened reason — rigorous thinking that knows its place, submitted to revelation and aware of its own distortions. What hit me in this book is how, after millennia of reasoning, we still haven’t scratched the surface of wisdom.

“True wisdom begins when reason kneels.”

The whole reading list is the following, in reverse chronological order:

1. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry – John Mark Comer
2. A arte de gastar dinheiro – Morgan Housel
3. A World Without Email – Cal Newport
4. Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman
5. A mente moralista – Jonathan Haidt
6. Christ and Culture – H. Richard Niebuhr
7. Como tudo começou – Adauto Lourenço
8. Por que ler os clássicos – Italo Calvino
9. Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide – John Cleese
10. O Sagrado – Rudolf Otto
11. On Jiu Jitsu – Chris Matakas
12. A Fazenda dos Animais – George Orwell
13. A Morte de Ivan Ilitch e Outras Histórias – Leo Tolstoy
14. From Strength to Strength – Arthur C. Brooks
15. O Anticristo – Friedrich Nietzsche
16. O Processo – Franz Kafka
17. Ogilvy on Advertising – David Ogilvy
18. Ecce Homo – Friedrich Nietzsche
19. Estética: Textos Seletos – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
20. Ferrari: O homem por trás das máquinas – Brock Yates
21. O Conceito de Angústia – Søren Kierkegaard
22. Inteligência humilhada – Jonas Madureira
23. The One Thing – Gary Keller
24. Why Nations Fail – Daron Acemoğlu
25. The Lessons of History – Will Durant
26. Aesthetics – Theodor W. Adorno
27. Ask Pastor John – Tony Reinke
28. A Educação das Crianças – Michel de Montaigne
29. The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz
30. Supercommunicators – Charles Duhigg
31. The Anxious Generation – Jonathan Haidt
32. Skin in the Game – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
33. Room for Good Things to Run Wild – Josh Nadeau
34. Poor Charlie’s Almanack – Charles T. Munger
35. A Conexão de Leipzig – Paolo Lionni
36. Practicing the Way – John Mark Comer
37. Quem educa nossas crianças? – Susan Linn
38. Ética a Nicômaco – Aristóteles
39. A cultura importa – Roger Scruton
40. Lifespan – David A. Sinclair
41. O Livro Azul – Ludwig Wittgenstein
42. A Cidade de Deus: Parte I – Augustine of Hippo
43. Eu, Robô – Isaac Asimov
44. Não Terceirize o Ser Filho – Karen Mortean
45. A Mente Organizada – Daniel J. Levitin
46. Sobre o livre-arbítrio – Augustine of Hippo
47. O Velho e o Mar – Ernest Hemingway
48. The Age of AI and Our Human Future – Henry Kissinger
49. The Comfort Zone – Kristen Butler
50. Same as Ever – Morgan Housel
51. The Case Against Education – Bryan Caplan
52. Onde Existe Amor, Deus Ai Esta – Leo Tolstoy
53. Cartas de um Diabo a Seu Aprendiz – C.S. Lewis

Marcelo Baldin In MIND

AI Can’t Dream

This is a trend subject, ultra-processed, and even if new, it’s getting worn out before reaching its peak. Nevertheless, there’s still interest, and some might not be looking at the core of the issue.

We’re shifting towards the age of AI, where everything can be produced in the blink of an eye. What will be left for the creatives when people lose sight of what is artificial and what is authentic? Of course, the live performances will still be relatively significant, but what about products or services based on creative assets? Where is the music industry heading? Will the film industry survive? Custom AI-ads might even knock out the advertising market as a whole. There might not even be work for ghostwriters.

Now, after an apocalyptic intro, let’s dig into what the real deal is with AI in the creative field, because people might freak out about the possibilities of oblivion, including me. Still, I have a different perspective on why the creative business might struggle, but for a better cause. If you look back in history, you will notice that technology created more jobs than it eliminated, creating new fields, shifting people to new media, atomizing production, and even creating new art forms, such as cinema and animation. The internet brought new ways to create advertising, and hey, we didn’t even have social media a few years ago, which made many jobs, not fewer.

Skilled and creative people have managed to navigate every technological shift, and this time isn’t any different. However, I must acknowledge that this time the technology is tackling the skills, not just the format. This is where the worry and anxiety kick in, because it’s not just about adapting to new tools, but is a different approach to how to think as a whole, not a mechanical issue. The way artists relate to the tools might differ from now on, not because they won’t be able to produce art, but in how to make their art relevant. As we all know, the more available a product is, the less valuable it is. This happened to music recently, initiated by Napster and ending up now with Spotify. The medium shift made music a commodity. Production costs have fallen significantly, and producing music with AI now has a value close to zero… unless there’s added value.

And here’s the point I want to reach: added value. AI can’t produce value. It can reduce costs, but can’t add value. Value is added with intention. AI doesn’t have intention. It can’t even prompt itself without imagination. The reality is that AI isn’t even close to a human mind yet; even if it can produce impressive results, the technology is still far from dreaming.

The challenge lies in adding value and intention, and without character, knowledge, and taste, it won’t be easy to compete. A person might even use AI to produce content and imbue it with relevance, but only if the person adds purpose to the art. Therefore, those who are art history-savvy, with proven taste and rhetoric, might thrive, but those with technical skills yet lacking in communication skills are more likely to struggle. Being able to manage all that data with human imagination is already proving different, and it will only get better as technology evolves. As Walter Benjamin noted nearly a century ago, “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition.” People, not machines, weave that fabric.

In some ways, this dystopian future might shake the creative world, not to steal jobs, but to actually make creatives prove a point on why their art has value. The value might be the person themselves, their philosophy, or even physical traits; however, one thing will be required the most: their soul. AI doesn’t have a soul; people do, and their art thrives when people notice their soul. A musician shouldn’t play just for the sake of playing; they have to add their soul to it, as does the painter, the writer, the actor, the filmmaker, etc.

Once again, we are going back to the core: the anima. Everything goes back to this. Technology will keep evolving. Tools will keep improving. But the hunger for meaning (as Viktor Frankl famously pointed out), for connection, for something that feels human—that won’t change. That’s the constant. And as long as that hunger exists, there will be room for those willing to feed it with something only they can offer. Not perfection. Not efficiency. Presence. Art will always remain with the relationship between the author and the audience. Fewer transactions, more relationships. That’s not a downgrade. That’s a return to the original deal.

Marcelo Baldin In AESTHETICS

Music for the Masses

When Andy Hildebrand accidentally developed autotune, the music industry experienced a significant shift toward pitch-perfect music. The aesthetics of mainstream music underwent a complete transformation. The mass-production industry could now adopt formats for the widespread standardization of music. The tool even became a feature when T-Pain extrapolated the usage of the tool, creating a new genre of music. Everybody wanted to autotune their tunes. A little later, the vocal-chopped snippets with distorted pitches also became mainstream when Major Lazer’s “Lean On” hit 1 billion streams on Spotify.

A song rejected by top-selling artists was brought to life by Major Lazer (Diplo) and garnered billions of plays, making “Lean On” the fourth song on Spotify to reach that number.

Every time a new tool is released, artists strive to find innovative ways to utilize it creatively, whether intentionally or by chance. The same thing has happened with guitar distortion, vinyl scratching, and sampling. People are always attracted to new trends, which come and go in waves. However, with the spread of information through social media, there are many new micro-trends that we can barely keep up with. The latest I was able to follow was LoFi Girl and its nemesis, the hyperpop.

Lofi Girl YouTube channel captured the essence of a niche

However, to add to the pulverization of music creation, artificial intelligence isn’t just creating near-perfect songs based on current genres; we can’t keep up with the rapid release of music. Spotify’s Release Radar can’t show us everything that we could keep up with. This is a complicated scenario for new artists to break through, or even for new genres to gain widespread adoption among people. We are shifting to a scenario of niche massification.

But how does the atomization of music influence its aesthetics? The music industry will always profit from something; however, music itself is no longer the focus (and it barely was in the past). We had major music scenes that lasted a couple of decades, then shifted to short trends, and now the music creation is insignificantly related to all the rest that the artists are adding their effort to. Some niches still maintain a high quality of composition, but there is little to no progress in the mainstream regarding music itself. If we consider Spotify’s top 20 artists, most of them aren’t there because of their music, but because of the aesthetics they created alongside it; the songs are just background noise.

Xania Monet is a fake AI artist who somehow managed to reach the Billboard charts.

Many writers have already published books, articles, and essays regarding the problems of creating music for the masses. Adorno, Scruton, and Lipovetsky are worth mentioning—and their warnings were prescient. These critics were right to identify the leveling effects of mass production on art. Their so-called “elitism” wasn’t mere snobbery but a recognition that aesthetic standards exist and matter—a position I share without reservation. The dopamine shots became shorter and shorter, so that we are in a scenario where the addiction no longer cares about music; they gotta get the listener by other means necessary. Let’s listen to mainstream music (I carefully advise against it): you will find the artificial additives on every sonic wave, as it is an auditory version of ultra-processed food. The consequences of it are the same as ingesting unhealthy food; your brain is going to atrophy to the point of no return.

Music is a metaphysical process: we listen to enter another place, either through communion or solitude with ourselves. The dopamine hit eliminates this element. As Rudolf Otto pointed out, music is one of the most important artifacts used to access the sacred, as every religion incorporates it into its liturgy. Music is even mentioned as a vital element in the afterlife, as, for example, mentioned many times in the Bible, where angels sing to extol God.

‘And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God: ‘ – Revelation 19:1

Mozart’s Lacrimosa captures the essence of music created for the sublime.

Now, let’s put all elements into place: ultra-processed aesthetics, artificial intelligence producing endless pieces of music, an overwhelming amount of information pushed through self-fed algorithms, and the elimination of music metaphysics. What’s left for music? The probable solution to this would be the rejection of mainstream and technological abuse of art, adopting a Luddite stance. Neo-Luddism has recently been adopted by individuals overwhelmed by the pressure that technological advancements place on society, causing them to prematurely embrace new trends. Nevertheless, we know beforehand that it’s impossible to avoid the winds of change, like a single sailor in a storm with a raft.

Certainly, discretion is advised. A balanced approach is needed, but we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in society, where we can’t trust any media or information. The exact process will happen to music consumption. Will we blindly embrace music created by AI, with the plastic hyperrealism it produces? If history shows us a pattern, we have to agree that it’s a certain yes. The aesthetics of music will reveal a shallow, unholy, addicted society, not as a norm, but as a Zeitgeist. We can’t pretend to have a crystal ball, but we see the data and realize that this path was taken.

The obvious objection to this critique is: who decides what’s good? But this question itself reveals the depth of our cultural crisis—it assumes aesthetic value is merely subjective preference, that one person’s masterpiece is another’s noise and neither judgment holds more weight. In reality, criteria exist: technical mastery, structural coherence, emotional depth, metaphysical resonance. These aren’t arbitrary impositions but accumulated wisdom from centuries of musical tradition. Rejecting expertise and canon in favor of algorithmic popularity or radical relativism—the notion that “everyone’s taste is equally valid”—has produced precisely the aesthetic wasteland we now inhabit. The democratization of creation tools doesn’t eliminate the hierarchy between craft and noise; it merely obscures it under the illusion that all output is equivalent.

Therefore, acknowledging that the trends are becoming extreme and aware of how music for the masses is being produced, we, as a minority that thinks critically about the situation, will not simply become Luddites; we will have to construct a new path. We must reassert that not all music is equally valuable, that mastery and tradition matter, and that standards are not oppressive but liberating. The gatekeepers and curators—critics, educators, artists who maintain these standards—aren’t obstacles to progress but necessary filters against cultural entropy. Using the premises of the classical standards created by the giants on whose shoulders we stand, we must produce a counter-wave of discriminating, sober use of technology so that we can thrive through this storm: a tech-culturally savvy elite that filters and shares what is good, pure, and meaningful. There’s no wishful hope in the midst of a dystopian future, only pragmatic solutions grounded in the recognition that excellence exists and must be preserved.

Not by coincidence, Depeche Mode had a song called Sacred on their album “Music for the Masses”. What a unexpected turn of events.

Marcelo Baldin In SOUND

The Death of Classical Music

Recently, I stumbled upon a YouTube video that was suggested to me, entitled “No Seriously, Classical Music is Dying”. The video was not particularly viral, nor the author is massively followed. The content was created by someone who actually has a bond with classical music but feels frustrated that it needs artificial means to survive.

She has some interesting points of view; nonetheless, we should dive into the arguments where the concern is raised. For example, why is it not popular or accessible, and why do patrons need to keep classical music alive, and why don’t they let it die because of “elitism”? All of those points are valid, but they don’t hold if you take into consideration the history of music itself: classical music always relied on the elite to survive and to be developed, as the universities and intellectuals of the world also did. Those things don’t rely on popularity for full development; they need a few people with money and vision. The best example of that was made in the Renaissance by the Medici. They not only supported music but also art in general, and because of people like them, we could further develop culture and science.

If we let the mob decide whether one style of music should live or die, we would end up regressing toward the most primitive forms of musical expression. This isn’t a moral judgment about anyone’s taste—it’s a structural observation about how cultural evolution works. When accessibility becomes the only criterion for survival, music optimizes for instant comprehension. But instant comprehension favors the familiar, the repetitive, the immediately graspable. Over generations, this creates a ratchet effect: each iteration must be understandable by ears trained on the previous iteration’s simplicity. There’s no mechanism for complexity to enter the system—no pathway for forms that reward sustained attention, no infrastructure for music that reveals itself gradually.

We can already observe this trend in contemporary popular music: the diminishing importance of melody, the simplification of harmonic structure, the reduction of song length, and even the decrease in instrumental variety. These aren’t accidents but adaptations to an attention economy that penalizes anything requiring more than a first listen to appreciate. The issue isn’t that simpler music is morally inferior—it’s that if we dismantle every institutional support for complex forms, we don’t get democratic complexity. We get only what survives without cultural scaffolding, without mentorship, without the time to develop ears capable of hearing what isn’t immediately obvious.

If we just “let classical music die,” we are letting go of music’s capacity for depth. We’re not preserving this tradition because it’s “better” in some absolute sense, but because it represents a pathway to experiences that require preparation—earned transcendence, revelation through training. That’s not an elitist movement; that’s a humanist movement. It’s defending the human capacity for growth, for the delayed gratification of understanding something that once seemed opaque. Without preserving forms that demand apprenticeship, we eliminate the very possibility of such transformations.

The Myth of Classical Music’s Popular Past

When people claim that classical music is “dying,” they usually imagine a golden age when it was popular, when concert halls were packed and symphonies were a shared civic ritual. But this is a modern projection. Classical music was never popular in the democratic sense — it was always the music of a minority, sustained by institutions, courts, and patrons who could afford the space and leisure to cultivate listening. Its apparent exclusivity was not an accident of privilege but the necessary condition for its depth. Classical music wasn’t accessible; by an unexpected turn of events, it’s more accessible today than it was ages ago.

Roger Scruton would say that beauty requires “disinterested attention” (Kant’s view) — something that cannot arise in a commercial environment where every sound must justify itself by numbers. The salons, chapels, and aristocratic courts of Europe were small, but they were listening communities, bound by reverence rather than market demand. Adorno called this the “autonomy of art”: the right of a form to develop according to its own logic, not the logic of the crowd. What sustained that autonomy was precisely its distance from popularity.

Schopenhauer, who believed music expressed the inner structure of the world itself, saw in this distance something metaphysical: only those freed from the immediate struggle for existence could fully surrender to the Will revealed in sound. Access, therefore, was not simply economic; it was existential — it required quiet, contemplation, and an inner discipline that most of life discourages.

When the public concert finally emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it didn’t democratize classical music in substance, only in form. The bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy, but the function remained the same: a small, cultivated public acting as custodians of a complex art. The present obsession with “accessibility” forgets that every art form that endures does so through apprenticeship — through the few who carry the knowledge for the many. It was during the Romantic period that classical music became more introspective and took center stage. Before that, music was part of something else: a ceremony, a party, liturgy, background noise to anything else.

So yes — classical music was never popular, nor was it meant to be. Its power lies in its resistance to mass consumption. What made it valuable was not its reach but its refinement — the density of form, the intricacy of its inner life, the demand it placed on its listener. To expect it to thrive on the same terms as pop culture is to mistake a cathedral for a shopping mall.

Elitism versus Consumerism

Classical music never asked for a crowd; it asked for a congregation. As Roger Scruton reminds us, beauty is not an opinion but a demand—the demand that we learn to attend. The aesthetics of Classical Music rely on contemplation, not consumerism. Beauty creates obligations: to listen with patience, to refine taste, to make cognitive sacrifices for meaning. Elitism, in this register, is not snobbery but structure: an acknowledgement that some goods require apprenticeship. Adorno, writing from a different angle, calls mass culture production a machinery of regression. The “culture industry” trains the ear to crave the easily repeated and the instantly known. When the ear is trained downward, patronage becomes scandalous and difficulty becomes “elitist.” When the ear is trained upward, patronage appears as what it once was: the practical mechanism by which high forms survive periods of low appetite.

However, some degree of self-judgment among the classical elite must be revised, as pure intellectuality bypassed moral judgment and relativism emerged as a wild card. This prompted the decay of virtuosity, and the beast of emotions was loosened in the scene. Contemporary classical music paid more attention to its form than its content. This is where the sublime lost its place. Even Stravinsky reflected on that when he shifted his compositions towards neoclassicism.

The Medici were not merely pursuing a pastime; they were establishing a symbolic monument (maybe even greater than what they actually envisioned). Scruton is clear: high art grows where there is a conception of the sacred—of things before which we stand, not things we use up. Patronage concentrates resources around the holy so that difficult goods can appear in the world at all: cathedrals, fugues, instruments that require decades to master. Perhaps the sense of death in classical music reflects the refusal of the sacred in this Gestalt.

The Sacred and the Profane

Perhaps what we call the death of classical music is not an aesthetic crisis at all, but a spiritual one. It is the symptom of a civilization that no longer acknowledges the sacred — or rather, that refuses to admit the sacred as a legitimate category of experience.

In the classical tradition, music was never merely entertainment. It was an anamnesis, a remembering of order. From Pythagoras to Bach, sound was bound to number, number to cosmos, cosmos to God. Harmony was not a style; it was a metaphysical statement — that the world had a hidden architecture and that the ear, properly trained, could perceive it. In that sense, every fugue, every symphony was a small enactment of the sacred: form imposing itself upon chaos, proportion rescuing sound from noise. Kant and Hegel were fond of this notion of virtuosity and the sacred, as Rudolf Otto points out, as well as of music as a reflection of the numinous.

Roger Scruton repeatedly insisted that beauty is a “glimpse of the transcendental,” a way for mortal beings to perceive something eternal. To experience the beautiful, in his words, is to stand “in the presence of the sacred without needing theology.” When we lose the sense of the sacred, art loses its vertical axis — its striving beyond itself. It becomes horizontal, functional, flattened to the level of consumption.

Adorno, from a different temperament, diagnosed the same pathology: the “administered world,” where art’s aura decays because meaning itself has been instrumentalized. In such a world, the concert hall becomes just another leisure venue; silence becomes awkward; and transcendence is confused with branding. The sacred — that sense of something before which one stands — becomes alien to the social order, even offensive to it.

Schopenhauer would have seen this as the victory of the Will’s lowest expressions: endless striving, restless distraction. The contemplative dimension of music, which once offered temporary deliverance from the Will, now competes with background noise. The “death” of classical music, therefore, is the death of contemplation — the death of the listener who could still experience music as metaphysical deliverance.

When you write that if we let classical music die, we let music as a whole die, this is what you are really describing: the loss of the sacred gesture itself — the bowing of the soul before form, the recognition that sound can be more than sensation. Classical music’s disappearance would mark not the extinction of a genre but the completion of secularization — the total refusal of transcendence.

The Death of Music

If we acknowledge that Classical Music is dying, we might as well say that music itself is dying. Music became a commodity, and a really worthless one, as the mass production of its production, enhanced by today’s artificial intelligence, makes us lose the connection to what music really is: “The beauty of music is the beauty of the world itself, revealed to the sense of hearing.” (Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music).

Somehow, though, music will find its way out of this hyperrealism where nothing satisfies the soul anymore, as the abuse of technology and the market will turn things around and make people cultivate the purity of music created by humans for humans, as a way of transcending the sublime. Or we might head towards a time when people take their auditory version of SOMA and become numb. I rather hope for the opposite.

Core Philosophical Foundations

Roger Scruton – The Aesthetics of Music (1997) Scruton argues that beauty demands “learning to attend” and that music reveals transcendence without theology. His chapter on tonality and meaning is crucial for the “sacred architecture” argument.

Roger Scruton – Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (2011) More accessible summary of his aesthetics. The section on “desecration” directly addresses what happens when the sacred dimension is lost.

Theodor Adorno – Philosophy of New Music (1949) His critique of the “culture industry” and defense of art’s autonomy. Warning: dense, but the sections on Schoenberg vs. Stravinsky illuminate the “contemporary classical paid attention to form over content” point.

Theodor Adorno – Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962) More approachable. His typology of listeners (expert, good, culture consumer, emotional, resentment, entertainment, indifferent) maps perfectly onto the accessibility critique.

The Sacred and Music

Arthur Schopenhauer – The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, Book III (1818) The section on music where he argues music expresses the Will itself—the metaphysical foundation for your “music as deliverance from striving” argument.

Rudolf Otto – The Idea of the Holy (1917) Defines the “numinous”—that sense of the sacred you’re invoking. His concept of mysterium tremendum explains why beauty creates obligations, not just preferences.

Cultural Patronage and History

Jacob Burckhardt – The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) The definitive account of Medici-style patronage. Shows how cultural forms require institutional support, not popularity.

The Crisis of Contemporary Culture

Christopher Lasch – The Revolt of the Elites (1995) Argues that contemporary elites abandoned their custodial role—directly relevant to the point about “pure intellectuality bypassing moral judgment.”

George Steiner – Real Presences (1989) Argues all serious art and literature are predicated on the wager that transcendence exists. When culture loses this wager, art becomes mere commentary. Essential for your sacred/profane section.

On Listening and Attention

Alex Ross – The Rest Is Noise (2007) Accessible history of 20th-century music. Shows how classical music’s relationship to audiences transformed.

Pierre Bourdieu – Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979). Maps how “cultural capital” works. Helpful in understanding the infrastructure of taste without dismissing it as snobbery.

The Populism Question

José Ortega y Gasset – The Revolt of the Masses (1930) Classic argument that mass society threatens cultural excellence. Controversial, but articulates the concern about “letting the mob decide.”

Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America, Volume II, Part I (1840). Chapters on how democracy affects arts and letters. He predicted exactly the tension describing between democratic equality and cultural refinement.

Contemporary Diagnosis

Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism (2009) Short, sharp analysis of how market logic colonizes all cultural space. His concept of “depressive hedonia” (can’t enjoy anything but can’t stop consuming) illuminates the sense of “nothing satisfies the soul” closing.

Jonathan Haidt – The Anxious Generation (2024) On how technology destroyed contemplative capacity in young people. Directly relevant to the “tyranny of immediacy” point. A very popular book by Haidt.

Counterpoints Worth Engaging

Richard Taruskin – The Oxford History of Western Music (2005). A Monumental work that challenges romantic myths about classical music’s autonomy and purity. Reading him would strengthen your argument by forcing you to address his critiques.

Lawrence Levine – Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988) shows how the classical/popular distinction is historically constructed, not natural. Engaging with this would make essentialism more defensible.

Marcelo Baldin In SOUND

Metaphysics

Music as a Metaphysical Experience

Music is a metaphysical experience because sounds interact directly with your brain, independent of other senses, and can transport you to different realities. Therefore, the power of music goes beyond its source; it’s sublime [1][10][11].

Many philosophers contemplated music as the most sublime art form, primarily because of its characteristics. Even Nietzsche said that life without music would be an error.

How Sound Interacts with the Brain

Physical entry:
Air vibrations reach the cochlea in the inner ear, where hair cells convert them into electrical signals. These signals travel via the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe [2][10].

Emotion & memory:
The auditory cortex has strong connections to the amygdala (emotion), hippocampus (memory), and nucleus accumbens (reward/dopamine).
This is why a song can trigger goosebumps, nostalgia, or even tears [3][10].

Imagery & mental travel:
Music activates parts of the default-mode network and parietal association areas involved in mental imagery and spatial processing.
Brain-imaging studies show that listening to certain sounds—like ocean waves or cathedral echoes—can create vivid inner scenes, almost as if you’re in another place [4][5].

Altered sense of time and self:
Rhythms entrain brain oscillations; tempo can change the perception of time. Deep engagement (like in trance or flow) can reduce activity in the prefrontal cortex, which can feel as though self-boundaries dissolve [1][11].

It’s fascinating that one can be mentally transported to another state purely through sound.
The Pavlovian-like effect of sonic cues can be used deliberately: when a composer understands how specific sounds trigger emotional reactions, they can shape the listener’s feelings [3][10].

Pop Music and the Hook Economy

The pop-music industry has long experimented with what keeps audiences engaged. While verse-chorus (ABAB) song forms pre-date the 20th century [6], record labels and radio learned that hooks, repetition, and brevity boosted listener retention and sales.

In the streaming era, songs have become shorter and hooks appear earlier to meet the fast-scroll attention economy [7][8][9].
Long-form tracks still thrive in niche scenes, but mainstream pop increasingly favors the “fast-food” style—often around two minutes.

The Composer’s Deeper Role

Recognizing that emotions can be influenced through sound makes the composer’s task even more intriguing. It’s not only about harmony or melody—it’s about shaping collective memory and meaning.
Throughout history, music has been used to embed ideas—from protest anthems and theatre music to advertising jingles and even the Psalms, whose lyrics and metrics endured long after their original melodies were lost.

However, the commoditization of this art may disrupt one of humanity’s most sublime forms of transcendence. I’ll share this song by Porcupine Tree as a critique of the current scene.

Footnote Key

Brain Connectivity & Aesthetic Experience — PMC
High-Order Areas & Auditory Cortex — Princeton fMRI Study
Music-Evoked Nostalgia & Reward Circuits — Wiley
Sad/Happy Music & Mind-Wandering — Nature
Music Enhances Script-Driven Imagery — arXiv
Three-Minute Pop Song — Wikipedia (Historical Context)
Hit Songs Are Getting Shorter — The Economist
Pop Songs Shorter in the Streaming/TikTok Era — Washington Post
Mean Song Duration by Year — Statista
Daniel J. Levitin – This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (2006) – A popular-science classic explaining how music perception, memory, and reward work in the brain.
Roger Scruton – The Aesthetics of Music (1997) – A philosophical exploration of the metaphysical and aesthetic nature of music.

Marcelo Baldin In MIND

Silence

“Silence is the language of God. All else is poor translation.” – misattributed to Ludwig van Beethoven.

To get inspired, we must find a way to be quiet. Countless people retreat to reflect and recover. Lent is an ideal time to do it. Beethoven took long walks in nature to develop musical ideas. Claude Debussy – Found inspiration in the quiet contemplation of nature. Henry David Thoreau – Lived in solitude at Walden Pond to connect with deeper insights. Max Richter – Uses silence and minimalism as core elements in his music, often retreating into solitude for composition. Arvo Pärt – Known for his “tintinnabuli” style, he spent years in near silence before returning to composition. Björk – Frequently isolates herself in nature for inspiration, especially in Iceland’s quiet landscapes.

Lamentations 3:26 🤫

2025 in Books