I recently had the chance to visit the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg and see the ballet The Nutcracker. I have to say, going to the theater is an amazing experience — there are no boundaries between you and what’s happening on stage. No vinyl player, no matter how great the acoustics, can compare to that. There will always be a thin film separating you from the experience — not just because of sound quality, but because of the context surrounding the performance, which adds depth to it. John Cage explored this in his piece 4’33”, where the audience hears only the sounds of the concert hall, because the music itself is silent for 4 minutes and 33 seconds — highlighting the idea that the environment itself becomes part of the musical experience.

What’s interesting is that ballet used to seem completely inaccessible and abstract to me — I couldn’t understand how the “language of dance” could convey meaning. As a kid, I even jokingly tried to match every “pas” to a word or syllable in Russian, but of course, no such mapping could be found :) Now, I hope I actually understand what’s happening on stage.

What I took away from the experience is that the same emotions and feelings can be communicated without using words, or saying anything directly at all. I think the same is true for opera — you don’t need to understand every word in the arias, because it’s about emotional expression through music, not lyrics. The same goes, interestingly enough, for genres like black metal — the music is basically the scream of a suffering soul: in pain, or fear, or anger, or some awful cocktail of all of those. Sure, modern music is simpler than classical — it has fewer themes — but it can still convey ideas, which is why it’s easier to listen to more often.

I think this difference exists because, in the past, we didn’t have as many forms of media, or as much content being delivered through them. Artistic works were like treasure chests — you could find all kinds of things inside: clothing, coins, recipes, time alone with yourself. Today’s media is incredibly varied, and the content it carries is vast, but increasingly fragmented. To put it simply — first there were newspapers, where content had to fit into a column. Then TV, where it had to fit the stream of that medium. And now we have things like shorts — content so bite-sized that you can lose hours watching them without even realizing it, and they don’t really carry any meaning. They’re like colorful bursts of events from random places — flashing all at once, and an hour later you’re left with a scattered, fragmented picture of the world.

But they’re not connected — and connection is a crucial part of both experience and learning. I’m not sure yet how media that delivers this kind of content can provide anything meaningful to the person consuming it. Or rather, I’m curious to see where it leads us, but I doubt that something like the emotional weight of the Sixth Symphony can be conveyed that way.

——Translated with ChatGPT from original version—–