Absolute music has yet to die. The problem is, it only talks about dying. And if it is talking, it is obviously not dead. In fact, absolute music probably sustains its eternal existence by endlessly nattering on about its own demise. This performative contradiction is a typical tactic of late modernity: first, announce your own death, then try and conjure up a rebirth, which can always be re-phrased as an abortion if the ‘new’ fails to live up to the progress of history. So music constantly dies to resurrect itself as a new language that overcomes the past. Of course, if music fails to overcome the past, then music is just terminally ill forever. But at least the spectre of death gives music something meaningful to moan about: heroic deaths, ironic self-annihilation, apocalyptic destruction, structural calcification, suicide, entropy, hell – you name it, music has been there, done it and has survived to tell the tale. If only music would stop talking like a hypochondriac and get on with the silence that it threatens to fall into, then perhaps it would really die. At least one would think so, but, in fact, having acquired a certain existential charm, even its silence would be too eloquent a testimony of its own destruction.

Absolute music is doomed – whatever it says. It is consigned to talk itself to death, which is to say that it lives in the meaning of its own catastrophic statements.