Thomas Bernhard’s 1985 novel Old Masters consists primarily of a long monologue by an elderly Austrian man named Reger, a classical-music critic and world-class hater. His condemnations—of composers, politicians, Austrian standards of bathroom cleanliness, of music and art in general—have the searing, invigorating quality of religious sermons. Reger, like many of Bernhard’s characters, hates because he believes the world can and should be better than it is. His stream of invective is so torrential that at first it’s difficult to see past the surface and understand why he’s so worked up, beyond this baseline spiritual dissatisfaction. But as the book progresses, Bernhard reveals more concrete reasons for his protagonist's perpetual grumpiness.
Most importantly, there is the recent death of Reger's wife. This seems sufficient to explain his bad attitude about most things, including the music that provides his ostensible purpose in life; grief, as everyone knows, can make a mockery even—especially—of the things we hold dearest. Then, as Old Masters draws to a close, Reger lets slip another reason for his disillusionment with music. The book seems to take place in the mid-’80s present-day of its publication—a time when, in Reger’s view, it may no longer be possible to maintain the sort of deep relationship with music he cherished in his youth. In a passage that could have been written 40 years later, the critic gives his explanation of why:
The reason is that listening to music has become a trivial everyday affair as a result of technical progress. Listening to music is nothing out of the ordinary any more, you can hear music wherever you go, you are practically forced to hear music, in every department store, in every doctor’s surgery, on every street, indeed you cannot avoid music nowadays, you wish to escape from it but you cannot escape, this age is totally accompanied by background music, that is the catastrophe. [...] People have been stuffed full of music every day for so long that they have lost all feeling for music.
Needless to say, it has gotten no less ubiquitous since then. For the contemporary listener, music can seem like an inexhaustible natural resource. Throw on a playlist for morning wakefulness and another for sleepy relaxation; listen to your favorite album on the way to the grocery store; wear noise-cancelling headphones to replace your lived environment with yet more music; if the perfect song for your situation doesn’t yet exist, use Suno to generate a depraved hallucination of a new one.
