Some people believe that a photograph captures the soul and fend-off a camera as if the essence of their being is about to be abducted at the imminence of a click. Ablinger atonal works operate along the same capturing principle, extracting the music of celebrities’ speeches, concomitantly to the celebrities uttering that speech. The phantasmatic Other of the utterance acquire shape, inasmuch as the meaning that fulfilled the utterance is discarded on behalf of a structure that dispenses with inner meaning, given that it is a derived musical form. And then some.

In 1968 Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes pronounced the author dead. The two Latino poststructuralist thinkers demonstrated that it was about time to stop considering authors as almighty producer of meanings and unique sources of signification. Along these lines authors should not bear the ultimate interpretations of works of art in general, not even of their own artistic productions. The death of the author proclaimed by Foucault and Barthes became a cornerstone for a radical understanding of modern aesthetical production and consumption of art.

I could see this radical des-authorisation coming in music. If one takes a close glimpse into the recent history of serialisms, one can perceive that the trend had been pulsating in-between the lines and as palimpsests in outrageously insightful works, e.g., Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio and Salvatore Sciarrino, these illustrious offspring of Anton Webern. However, no one had stared in the eyes of the issue as Ablinger is hereby doing.

The matter was not to aestheticise the death of the author in the best ‘middle-class tradition’ of celebrating losses with phoney messes, but rather to take the death of the author as a template for aesthetic practice and criticism. The word of order would be, therefore, to extract music from the supply of meanings that in modernity had been monopolised by the Author through spoken and written narratives. The point is that there is music in that monopoly; words in sequence can only come to being meaningfully in music. So, how this music would sound like if played side by side with the narrative, seemed to be an exciting working programme, which Ablinger takes up while killing the author, akin to Foucault agenda. The latter is radical: by killing the author playing music without a composer it displays, by the same token, the ontological limits of improvisation in music.

Come to think of it, how can music derived from spoken discourses be considered improvised if its structure is given by the author’s eagerness to make sense (to ‘make meaning’)? Furthermore, how can music derived from eagerness to make sense not be improvised, given that the authors of those discourses had no intentions to make music while talking sense? Improvisation in music, proves Ablinger, is the worshiping of an unsung god, or counting on help from an unknown, invisible hero. There will always be a hidden structure somewhere in the unconscious making sure that that which was deemed improvised is pure symptom. And what is a symptom but a field- marshal of desire, and what is desire but the ontological grammar of a subjectivity, and what is a discourse but an attempt to rationalise that symptom, and what is Ablinger’s aesthetics but the sound of the symptom?

Ablinger says that “actually the piano part is the analysis of the voice. Music analyses reality”. I beg to differ, and will hereby engage the same principle he, unbeknownst to himself, used, which is the one of the death of the author. Ablinger shall not have the ultimate interpretation claim over his achievement. He appears to be perfectly aware of what he did, but not at all of what he did does. The music is not analysing reality. The music at stake is the Real or, in other words, the unconscious non-symbolised counterpart of the reality of the discourses. Therefore, music could not analyse reality. What it does instead is to promise that without music ideas can neither be produced nor conveyed in spoken form. Consequently, the fear of this kind of music is the fear of making sense, and to stop making sense is the inability to perceive music.

Foucault asserts that once the death of the author is properly carried out “all discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of murmur”. Ablinger brings up this funeral murmur to irreverent, mesmerising music. Let us rejoice, finally a modern requiem was composed to mourn the death of the Author and celebrate the re-birth of meaning. The requiem, alas, is atonal.