Sleeping in Concert

Integral to the concert hall is to be in the presence of sweet drifts of sleep. This January, I attended a concert at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, all Bach, in whose first cantata the tenor promised the release of death, the words themselves counterpoint to the music whose conspicuous beauty debunked outright the Lutheran thesis thereby expressed, of life as suffering. I would say a fourth of the audience was sleeping when the last notes exhausted their echoes in the convolutions of the buttresses, an enormous number in that largest cathedral in the world. There was a child in the row in front of me whose puzzle book, meant to absorb his complaint, lolled in his hands, as he slept upright with the frank pride that children possess sleeping, knowing how desperate their parents sometimes become in forcing sleep on them—understanding this indulgent, altogether extraneous and undemanded slumber, to be a performance of extreme magnanimity. A woman still in her scarf slept. One man nodded forward, hinging at the neck only, as if trying to see up-close the tip of his nose which familiarly renders invisible. He was sleeping. Another slept with head hinged backwards, his face perpendicular to his trunk, his mouth open under a gray moustache. This is the most abject pose of public sleep, the body in a position completely unacceptable otherwise.

I feel an intense panic rise inside me turning to find someone, in an elevator, in line at the pharmacy, with their mouth wholly agape. What terrifying prelude of violence, what disaster of health or sanity must this signify? And in the moment, half a moment, that it takes for me to realize they’ve only been caught in my vision mid-way through a yawn, all the instincts of mammalian dread and care have flooded me already—and I know that our organism spent its adolescence as prey.

The applause woke, however incompletely, everyone but this man—and the second piece began after a short reconfiguration of the stage, the Sonata sopra il Soggetto Reale from the Musical Offering, Bach’s attempt to sow confusion as to what is sacred and what is profane by means of supreme clarity in a third conception of ambiguous but provocative relation: beauty. The man began to snore.

Incomplete aesthetes wear the blinders of artistic event, carrying into the theater the biological shock response that scrubs the biography of everyday life of nearly every near-miss in the crosswalk, urban eavesdrop dopplered in recession, every abrupt olfactory outrage entering, say, the subway, or the ocular harassments of advertisement. Freud’s original formulation of the mechanism of repression developed from his physiognomic observation that an organism’s survival is more dependent on its ability to resist sensation than to receive its cacophonous manifold. Earth’s longest lasting inhabitants have refined living to a meticulously tuned yet extremely narrow band of experience: giant tube worms have squirmed on the ocean floor for longer than trees have existed on little more than a crude thermometer, with no vision, no hearing, no sense resembling smell. Human beings, coping with the dangerous overdevelopment of their senses, have always tried to outsource or diminish them. The contemporary panoply of devices to make more virtual reality are only the latest attempts, following air conditioning, any and all of the white-noising machines, sunglasses, telephones, television, the list goes on. The most successful was the domestication of the dog, which altered human evolution by offloading the most demanding feats of smell to this scent-obsessed companion. We are able to bear civilization a little easier now, nasally numb. But our sense of hearing has not been obliterated nor hyper-focused; and regular concert-goers, resigned to their vulnerability in sprouting up at this mismatched point in our animal arc, begin to develop a taxonomy of snores.

There are the gasping snores of apnea, tubercular snores that raise the spectre of suffocation and pair with the wrenching chromatic tensions of Late Romanticism, bent with opium, Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov. There are serene dove-snores of regular respiration that seem to render the eternity of the spirit audible; I like these for Handel, Haydn, even Debussy, in his mellowest moods. The fortissimo snores of unshaken confidence, the uninhibited stomach-snores of the vain, they suit Heroic Beethoven, his middle period, and Johann Strauss when his waltzes are most military. There are the incomplete snores, continually jolting the sleeper from sleep, irruptions, snorts and repetitions, for the disturbances of Bruckner and his ilk, that monumental composer who his contemporary Mahler pronounced, “Half idiot, half god.” Here, the continuo of this exposed sleeper doubled the harpsichord in the cantata and the cello in the sonata; it was a basso snore, unchopped by interference of phlegm or the lazy soft palate, healthy enough and profound.

Every concert audience needs a good snore like a theater needs a good laugh. The ascending carillons of alto hilarity, the creeping wheezes, open moos, and squeaking titters give the abstractions of any comedy the stamp of flesh—rather, the laugh is when something involuntary, some automatic spasm, enters the room and announces the performance’s claim on the body; a songbird entered through an open window.

The sonata ended. Applause. The changing of the guards of the sleep: some were awoken and adjusted their posture for attention, others accepted the watch of dreams and took their place in that parallel cathedral of rest. The stage was again rearranged for the larger forces of the cantata. This time a soprano was to play the part (so the program told us) of an exceptionally talented boy, whose original vocal flights one Sunday morning in Leipzig are recorded in Bach’s notation. My man did not wake. Neither by applause nor the cacophony of coughs that percuss in intervals. I listened to my man’s snore, suddenly feeling responsible for his missing the entire show. I could lightly touch him, if I wanted, across the aisle, nudge him awake; it would be a forgotten touch, whose source would vanish in replacement by its result, his consciousness. This spontaneous sense of obligation I felt towards the sleepers there (he was not the only one) was not mine alone. A shrunken mother in the pew in front of me bore on each shoulder the sleep of her grown children. When I had a pre-dawn commute on the six train, I would watch the heads of strangers bob and find the shoulders of their stranger neighbor. The bleary-eyed crowd aiming for midtown, in pressed shirts of robin’s egg blue, with spots of sprayed perfume still drying on their necks, would perform a morning humanity almost automatically, with the queer proprietary of strange hours. They would refuse to flinch. And the indulgence of abrupt pride which I saw fill people in their new role as human pillow—the responsibility they held for another’s sleep, in hush and stillness—was met halfway with that other social impulse, to look away from someone sleeping. We know people to be somehow naked sleeping. And the troubled and the beat-down, people sleeping at all hours around us, on the sidewalk, on park benches, under thick blankets, in cardboard boxes and hospital socks, above subway grates and in the subways themselves, laid out on rough seats and pavements—embarrassment, alongside an indifference that itself is so embarrassing it protects itself with cruelty, enforces their obscurity. And so these breakages pock and rupture any seamless sense we are to have of the city, nervous aporias in the daytime of the world that garnish each exhale with the wheezing fringe of a snore and lends the “dream” (which consists of the sleep of compassion) its sleep. New York is the city where someone is always sleeping.

And so the last cantata ended with the rolling melismas of Alleluia. This conclusion was nothing more than the ultimate exhalation, as if displaying the entirety of breath to the audience so that they may inspect it, like a magician passing his props, after they had taken part in a miracle, to the spectators nearby—I mean so that we may see the soprano’s whole soul, as if she were sticking out her tongue for a doctor to demonstrate, by their reading, her perfect health. Not the following applause but this Alleluia brought my man back to himself. His chin lifted from his chest (where it had fallen in the interval from the Pez-Dispenser backward pose, mouth agape) and he rose to his feet with a suddenness that alarmed me and proceed immediately to crash his hands together, shouting, in a voice I did not recognize (so familiar was I with his snore) “Brava!”

The concert at the Cathedral was titled Bach: From Darkness to Light. But the plot of its hours was literally the opposite—it began at sundown. This was music for Sunday morning making a concession to the admirable institution of dinnertime and performed, therefore, in the dark. Here are the most proximate causes for ubiquitous concert slumber: sleep as digestion’s victory over culture, which is to say the long revenge of the first culture, agriculture, on the latest; or the implications and habits of being in darkness, the night within the night of a darkened concert hall.

Being in the dark is the religious state, which cathedrals emphasize to such a degree that even their windows are stained to intercede on light’s entry with pattern or parable. It is no coincidence that the Enlightenment chose as its central metaphor and name illumination—demanding the uninterrupted light of disclosure. It would be easy to believe that the dark of the concert hall was a mere inheritance of this resistance, which put art in its explicitly forbidden form (graven, engraved images) between G-d themself (the sun). That is to say that art finally won and to repeat the inherited wisdom that the church was replaced by the theater in the Bourgeois centuries after having perfected theater itself in its reactionary anti-Reformation rituals, rites and mysteries. But still this does not account for the darkness of the concert hall, the opera house, the playhouse which only in the very late 19th century began to replace the rowdy social vistas of gown and gossip with an artificial religious dusk. That dark, crucially, is also the dark of the past. In fact, its rise as performance practice coincided with the technological means to overcome it, the spread of kerosene and later the electric lamp. What is the function of the most fundamental transport that even the homeliest of performances can now indulge: the dimming of the lights? Originally this was just another in the repertoire of stagecraft, viewed with suspicion like any innovation in a rarefied domain: an anecdote survives in which Mahler was advised to lower the lights during a performance of his for the sake of the mood. He replied that a performance that does not make one forget their surroundings has malfunctioned. That the question would be raised at all was ironically the effect of the influence of that quintessential artist of the 19th century, Richard Wagner, for whom Mahler himself was a great champion and interpreter. It is difficult now, after his somewhat deserved Nazi appropriations, to overstate how popular and ubiquitous Wagner was and how portable was his art. He was the artist-hero of W. E. B. Du Bois in whose Souls of Black Folks a young Black man from the deep south hears the swan song in Lohengrin as the sonic representation of freedom’s creative promise, before being roughly expelled from the MET opera house. Theodor Herzl found in this anti-semite’s Tannhäuser a nationalism so mobile it could be appropriated to even his Zion. Wagner’s music was regularly performed on Coney Island’s boardwalk by bands of enormous orchestral force to stir the sublime sense of its lazy surf’s bathers. It was Wagner who made the influential leaps into darkness at his laboratory stage at Bayreuth, where early fog machines and proto-projectors made their debut, exploiting every technology available to derange the senses. This genre of the dark was, indeed, the dark of the past, the dark of his Teutonic myth—and also the dark of what we do not know about the past. It was this double motion that made Wagner’s drama so seductive, that of revelation and concealment. Triumphant revelation, to be sure—but what is revealed is mystery, what is illuminated is darkness.

Being ravenous, I had tickets to another concert the following day, which I’d purchased during the New York Philharmonic’s doorbuster Black Friday sale, to be performed in their home venue at Lincoln Center, a proper concert hall after the cathedral. The whole program was the Ring Without Words, the music of Wagner’s monumental Ring Cycle reduced to seventy-five minutes of its greatest hits, the precise duration of a CD-ROM. The program promised this operation was performed respectfully, “without the addition of a single note.”

The lights are dimmed because culture itself has become mythical, become a mystery of vanishing definition whose presence can only be felt in the dark, or revealed afterwards like in a spirit photograph developed from the seance. Knock twice if you can hear me! Is culture in the room with us right now? The dark compensates for that great bugaboo of our entire civilizational inherence: authenticity. The most extreme lovers of, say, “classical” music are led by their love to renounce its performance entirely for the sake of this thing: they are caught between the earnest wigged costume plays of period-piece Mozart by electric candlelight and the popularizations presented in abridged and vulgar packagings couched in gimme-gimme contextualizing with tabloid anecdotes from the composers’ syphilitic love affairs. Most concerts take one of these forms: the composer’s funeral or his reincarnation as a bobble head. Neither a studious insistence, a hushed reverence, or a genial, casual familiarity can satisfy the respect a true art lover has for their tradition. And so they are forced to abandon it, or to hang around with a kind of debonair resignation and bitterness, excavating disappointment at every turn.

I am tempted by the position of the snob, the connoisseur, the gourmet—if only for its near-obsolescence. They have created something beautiful themselves. I don’t mean those that flee from the category of beauty, towards bare utility or health. But those who pronounce authenticity truthfully. They have created something else beautiful by displacing the beauty of art to whatever criterion of correctness against which they believe art’s beauty can be checked. It is that criterion itself that is their creation, an accretion of honest wisdom and faint glimpses of purity, something worthy of valor or of jealous defense. Here, too, is the spot reserved for the critic—it is the critic’s own art. Our beautiful traditions, beautiful heritage, these beautiful standards of excellence—how many times have these been the occasion for a performance, an exhibition, a concert, a publication, not the meagre collection of pigment or the piddling rhymes of a part-time doctor, a dyspeptic shut-in, or a ragamuffin street kid? How could Dickinson compete with Poetry or Satie with Western Music? The mistake here is obvious, that of believing artworks are made only to glorify their pedigree. And so is the danger: that every event of art will be inevitably inadequate and necessarily renounced. From the cheap pulp paper of the Dover thrift edition of Ibsen’s Ghosts to the supertitles above Schubert’s lieder, from the lapsed and shabby pageantry of theater-going—art must be protected from it happening.

The most expedient escape is then an untenable worship of the present, spoiled immediately by the present’s ruthless locomotion: all artworks are born into obsolescence, they are babies brained on the hospital linoleum. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the infinite scroll, the unavoidable context of our time; the appetite for the new which so quickly gets old. How much of the world that used to pomp under art’s banner do I now consume but never digest? Or do I only teethe on, toss away, pick up another, and move on again with a faint taste left in my mouth, only enough to make hunger ache? The billion artworks of any square block, window display, screen.

Darkness rescues us, rebukes the snob. It removes the artwork from its discrete objecthood, its self-containment on the stage, in its gilt frame, between hardboard covers—all the inadequate containers of the snob’s disappointment. No longer can we perceive it as a specimen of tradition, a member of a genre, an instance of an ideal—but instead a forcefield that alters consciousness, a permeable, diffused agglomeration of sensations that encounters our own. Only in darkness is it possible for art to touch us, to move us therefore. Even alone at home we prefer to shut off the overheads, cozy beside our smallest lamp and read to ourselves in the dimmest possible glow amidst our apartment made obscure. And how many times have the snobs railed against those who “merely” enjoy, who have “no words” and maintain a contented refusal to pass judgement beyond the narrative of their own feelings, whose extremity they demand at all costs? That is to say, against most people, most of the time; the amateurs, who nevertheless cannot be dismissed so cheaply. They have something that the snob jealously covets, the original amour of their name. Opposed to the husband who guards art’s purity, the amateur is the lover who revels in its promiscuity. What they demand is another kind of purity: not of art but of their experience of it, not authenticity but totality. They demand the largest screen, the most savage gesture, the most tender solo, the most subtle effect, the most hushed audience—yes, the darkest room. They paid a lot of money for the hotel: and it may be one night only but it is theirs. How else are we to take the desperate, ominous enthusiasm of the rapturous standing ovations that follow nearly every show in this town? Art is narcotic. The amateur possesses privileged use of the most unimpeachable aesthetic measurement ever invented: pleasure. The judgement of pleasure suffocates the authority of the critic. But even pleasure’s connotations are too narrow—better to say: experience.

Here there may be even more danger than in the self-imposed ascetic solitude of the snob or overstimulated disappointment of the nibbler living off of attention’s scraps. In this sense, Wagner really was a visionary—his operas made people sick, orgasm in their box seats (we are told), go mad, leave with monumental headaches, bad morals and insatiable appetites. These were the birth pangs of a new kind of audience. The blockbuster film attempts in each instance what Wagner did with the Ring. His “total work of art” was the fetish of the highest development of art as experience: and it has no lesser goal than to dominate the soul. That is why it must leap off its pedestal or its proscenium and land wildly in the room, crossing by the bridge of darkness into the most private and protected sphere of consciousness itself. Movie theaters are unthinkable without darkness. The narcotic pleasures of the “immersive” that has become the aspiration of art high and low are unmatched. Beyond sober distance, the unsatisfiable consumption of both the gourmet and the nibbler—we find this wholesale submission, hypnotic and hysterical, that asks, as the most basic barrier to art, for no less than complete subservience to sensory domination. This is the aesthetic of mass media, the nightly televised brainwash, the Fascist rally and Top Gun: Maverick alike.

It was a beautiful performance of The Ring Without Words conducted magnificently by Nathalie Stutzmann. And yet I must admit I had a hard time remaining in the hall as I was lurched by the music’s mnemonic force to recollections of the component operas that I had seen before, fully staged, recollections that prompted my reflections above. The most memorable was a production of Götterdämmerung that I heard standing in the upper reaches of La Scala in Milan for the price of seven euros. Around ten minutes before Siegfried’s death and funeral march, I witnessed the extraordinary preparations of the audience of cognoscenti to feel it. They were so knowledgeable and dedicated to their experience that men and women alike removed handkerchiefs from their pockets or purses and folded them in their laps in anticipation of their tears. Siegfried did die and indeed they did cry. I am not suggesting that their feeling was somehow falsified or cheapened by this artifice, quite the opposite. They had submitted to the command of beauty. So I ask again: how else can beauty be had today? How else can we be moved but by force? Where, in life, is there pleasure at all without the most extreme ramification of “the suspension of disbelief”, that well-polished euphemism for the self-abdication of sanity?

The hall was dark and someone near me was sleeping. I heard their snore. Really, I did not hear it but perceived it by other means in the swell and ebb of their shoulders and back. Really, it was not a snore, did not graduate beyond the airy range of deep breath. They pulsed and throbbed under the waves of lush sound, the eternal Rhine, a rhythm of their own among the thousand baited bodies facing the stage. Where does sleep take us when sleeping in the concert hall? Are we led into a personal shelter, an all too familiar burrow, when we are overwhelmed or overcome, as a guilty tortoise reveling in the stale smell of its shell at the slightest apprehension of danger? When we sleep, we are not retreating into ourselves but slipping instead into that part of ourselves that is least ourself. The Romans recognized this strange companion of human being and gave it an everyday god, Genius, to care for everything that was ours but not our own. The long career of that name towards its dull conclusion meaning “a very smart person” is illuminating. It was this god who was responsible for the loving force that pushed blood through our veins, that made squeeze our hearts, that dilated our pupils, all the composite operations of living; also for those whims and urges, cravings, pet-peeves, impulses and appetites to whose command we submit. And who watched over sleep especially, when we are little more than these operations. Sleepiness may be its most familiar compulsion, that nightly apparition of the great unknown from within the self. It is Genius who Shakespeare was perhaps remembering when he called sleep “nature’s soft nurse.” Each human birth was imbued the care of a Genius of its “own” though Genius pre-dates and antecedes any individual birth, a possibility of polytheism alien to us now, whereby gods exist in multitudinous aspects. Without contradiction, the Latin poet Horace could write in his Epistles that Genius was “the god of human nature, in that he is mortal for each person.” It survives in approximation with our idea of the guardian angel, the household spirit, or in our celebration of the birthday, a long and echoing memory of the feast day for the god Genius, who was born both with each of us and time, celebrated with honey bread, flower garlands and wine. Like all genuine festivals it celebrates something that takes place in eternity, whose each instance is only an occasion. In generation the name’s etymology is shared. The bed was chief among objects venerated in its cult: the marriage bed especially, in Latin, lectus genialis; producing sleep and children. The contemporary resonance of the name Genius is a narrow piece of its domain, recalled in the externality of creativity that poets have called Muse or artists everywhere Inspiration or which is known, in the most disenchanted language, as the Unconscious—all which, like the force that pushes blood, that produces a craving for plums, that asserts our favorite color is teal, come somehow from without. And the gentle urge that puts us to sleep.

Which is all to say that sleep is not a private retreat into the self but instead a joining with the general—and this is apparent by how permeable we become to our surroundings when sleeping or sleepy, how vulnerable our dreams are to the boom box outdoors, the sputtering radiator, the serrated light of the sunrise through our blinds, transporting us to the discos of our mother’s youth, the battlefields of Belgium (perhaps permeated itself from the book we were reading in bed), the interrogation chamber of our deepest fear. The solitary sleeping room, even the individual sleeping surface or bed was an unthinkable luxury or deviance for most of human history. How richly did my first snorer, then, experience Bach, sleeping the whole time?

It was the right of the ruler alone, whose apartness from the communal world of sleep, the individuation and superiority of his genius, was the source and icon of his power. This was Julius Caesar’s innovation whose birthday, whose genius was celebrated across the Empire beyond his natural death so emphatically that it gave its month its name: July. Elsewhere, power was amassed in sleeping ostentatiously, besides servants and eunuchs, amidst enormous harems—a living mirror of the impulse that has pharaohs buried with their slaves and Emperors their wives. The modern state emerges from the separation and solitude of its sovereign’s sleep. And so too us sovereign individuals that populate it as its reflection and construction, individuals that can pomp and revel in the private rights and property it enforces and protects. So the porousness of sleep becomes a liability, slums and tenements crammed with sleepers, the long beds of the peasantry, the vagrant sleeper en plein air; social problems, signs of barbarity and licentiousness, criminal. The last permissible place of public sleep is attending a performance.

In sleep, art comes home. Neither dominated nor disinterested, we slip back to our own body, back to the origin of any work of art, our bundle of nerves and appetites made articulate. Wagner spoke but I heard the song of the Earth. I heard: the haltering duet between the clarinet and the flute when Brünnhilde awakens for the first day as a mortal and this, perhaps alone in the dizzying sonic totality, is music of such mortality that I feel I have failed when I do not pass into sleep. I know a little more what the body can do.

I must admit I have never been able to fall asleep at the theater myself, despite my most rigorous attempts. Actually I am quite prissy to the conditions of my slumber, attuned with avarice and fear to my sensorium anywhere, wanting to know and eat even the littlest pea under my mattresses. And I insist on challenging any artwork’s attempt to make my world with the lucid struggle of my intellect. But to know that amidst even my highest transports—I, alas, love art—sleep is possible; to know the recalcitrance of human attention: this is the only thing that gives me hope in our species’ ability to resist the mass-mediated blare of spectacular violence and panic that threatens every day to replace any rarefied category of art. There are those for whom art is only an aid to sleep. Who read before bed. Who go to the cinema to find insomnia’s cure. Never embraced by politics or aesthetics is our organism’s ingrained unwillingness to struggle. I mean the bodily obstinance of sleep. The order not carried out.

In the end, a funeral pyre is lit so large it consumes Valhalla and the old gods make way for the new. A chord sounds so densely I may never know its parts. The lights came on and there were five curtain calls, all deserved. I did not wake up.