On July 25th, 2014, eighty-one musicians spread out across the outdoor Hearst Plaza in Lincoln Center — over the sloping lawn, across the concrete patio, among the audience, and in the shallow central pool — to debut John Luther Adams’s tribute to the air, Sila: The Breath of the World. Written for five ensembles (strings, brass, percussion, voices, and woodwinds), the piece unfolds over the course of an hour, and every aspect of the performance reflects upon air’s invisible, indispensable presence. The performers’ instruments interact with air to produce tones; these mingle with the sounds of the world (one hears the occasional airplane or police siren blending into the sonic fabric); listeners are invited to wander around and hear how the music changes at different locations, as if to mime a process of diffusion. “In my imagination, there is no definitive performance of a piece like Sila,” Adams says in a pre-performance interview. “Each performance, and each performance site, with each different configuration of ensemble or ensembles, is going to be a different experience, and in some real way a different piece.”¹

Adams is known for exploring the relationship between music and the environment. His 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, Become Ocean, is nothing less than the depiction of vast oceanic rhythms ebbing and flowing over the span of forty-five minutes. Divided into three groups of instruments, the orchestra replaces such musical fundamentals as melody, discrete harmonic progression, and predictable phrasing with long-sustained and gradually changing harmonic textures, as if the ocean were taking long, protracted breaths. Become Ocean and Sila, according to Dianna Chisholm, “redirect our attention outside ourselves, which is to say outside our ubiquitous, Muzak-saturated commercial environments and our global-local webs of news and social media that tend to be self-enclosing and all-absorbing.”² By evoking the slow, complex rhythms of our world, Adams’s music acts as a kind of translation of ecological time into musical form.

In Sila, each musician plays or sings notes lasting the length of a breath. As with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, or the yogic practice of Prānāyāma (“rhythmic control of the breath”), or Allan Kaprow’s script for a musico-poetic piece about breathing, “Performing Life (1979),” Sila raises up a consciousness around breath itself, including the kinds of utterances that fit within, and are shaped by, the span of a breath.³ Yet, instead of focusing on breathing as an individual act, Adams creates a musical fabric out of the overlapping ‘breaths’ of each performer, whether sung by a vocalist, played through a reed instrument, or rolled on a bass drum. The result is a never-repeatable, communal music whose harmonies fade one into the next. The piece’s gradual movement through tonal clusters indexes the long temporality that exists beneath seemingly identical cycles. What we often take to be the mechanical and solitary act of breathing is, in fact, always already part of a communal and constantly changing system — an exchange in which we all play a role.

Sila resonates differently in the era of COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and climate change. The piece attunes listeners to their surroundings, but it also making audible the ubiquity and democracy of breathing which most of us take for granted — the shared-ness of air, the sociality of air, and the right to breathe. COVID-19 has forced us to become hyper-conscious of how we comport ourselves in public. On the sidewalks, we play nervous chess games to avoid other pedestrians; we avoid shaking hands and embracing; we rightfully scorn those who barge, mask-less, into supermarkets, endangering others while insisting on their own freedom. But this hyper-awareness has always been a condition of survival for people of color living in the United States. “I can’t breathe,” George Floyd pleaded with the police officers who knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes outside a grocery store in Minneapolis on May 25th, 2020. These words sparked protests among tens of millions of Americans who have grown tired of hearing the same words over and over.⁴ “I can’t breathe” signifies a reality that, like the air itself, exists all around us even as we scarcely acknowledge it: air has never been equal.⁵

“In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema,” writes Frantz Fanon. “A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world – such seems to be the schema.”⁶ In the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, Sila — a slow composition in another sense — calls out the privileged assumption that everyone has free and equal access to air. It does this by defamiliarizing the act of breathing itself. Our individual relationship to air, Sila shows us, is part of a global system upon which we have placed arbitrary and discriminatory boundaries. A world in which air is actually free: what would this world sound like?

Do you remember the news from the first two months of 2020? The drone killing of Qasem Soleimani leads to fear of World War III; more than one billion animals are killed in Australian wildfires; Trump is acquitted in impeachment round one — already these seem like the events, not just of another year, but of another timeline. The pandemic engulfs our time and our consciousness around time. Isolated and mostly at home, we have little choice but to do away with novel social interactions and instead rely upon routines (as well as on the meta-routine of making, breaking, and re-forming routines). Time feels at once distended and compressed: days and weeks trudge by, yet every now and then you step back and realize how many have passed. Time resembles breathing, regulated by habit and survival while passing into and out of notice.

Music offers another way of thinking about time, and about air, in and beyond lockdown. In this essay, I focus on “air music” — music about air or breathing, and by extension, music that calls attention to air as a medium of exchange, both personal (breathing in and out) and communal (sharing the air we breathe). Although comprising very different traditions, from the classical and romantic periods to contemporary instrumental to electronic, the pieces and genres I discuss, when taken together, offer alternative ways of understanding our relationship to air. They remind us that, even at a time when air seems toxic, we are not in a war against air itself. Confronted by images and maps of disease, air’s invisible and sustaining presence, ordinarily residing outside our consciousness, has obtained a threatening aura. Air music raises up a different kind of consciousness, an effort to attend to air’s fundamental function as a medium of connection rather than separation.

Aside from the fact that air is music’s medium, composers have long sought to represent air in musical form. The Italian word Aria, derived from the Latin aer (air, atmosphere), dates back to the early sixteenth century and has come to refer to a number of different kinds of composition foregrounding a solo voice.⁷ Beginning in the seventeenth century, English writers used the word air to signify a piece’s “inevitable rightness – perfection, even,” thus connecting it with “air” in the sense of a person’s “general bearing” or “aura.”⁸ Later, air becomes a subject of music’s representational repertoire. In Ralph Vaughn Williams’s Sinfonia Antarctica, a wind machine (aeliophone) — a lottery wheel wrapped in canvas and spun at different speeds — creates the blustery sound of an arctic gale. Wolfgang Rihm’s En Plein Air, for string quartet, flute, harp, and clarinet, is a kind of loose fugue that turns the wax and wane of summer breezes into chromatic lines over a constantly shifting melodic texture.⁹ Then there are pieces meant to be performed en plein air. On July 17, 1717, King George I “took Water at Whitehall in an open Barge” to hear Handel’s Water Music debuted on the Thames, along with “so great a number of Boats, that the whole river in a manner was cover’d.”¹⁰ In each of these cases, music is playing with its own physical medium. This play is not the same as M.C. Escher’s two hands drawing each other, or Hamlet’s staging of The Murder of Gonzago, or Marianne Moore saying of poetry, in “Poetry,” “I, too, dislike it” — not music about music, but music about that which fundamentally makes music possible.

Taken a step further, music can serve not only as a translation or transposition of air, but also as a means of representing how other living things and natural phenomena engage with air. Music representing bird calls, as Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques or Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, suggest an intimacy between human music and the music of the natural world.¹¹ The thunder sheets in Richard Strauss’s tone-poem, An Alpine Symphony — huge pieces of sheet metal shaken by hand to warp the air into snappy, echoing booms like slowed-down whip cracks — thrust the concert-hall audience into an outdoor storm. In George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening, familiar, creaturely night-sounds mingle with the cosmic and otherworldly as we ascend from troposphere to exosphere.

Musical depictions of air, and of creatures using air, vary widely in their imitative accuracy. Yet, more of than not, exact imitation is not the point. These musical phenomena defamiliarize that which, because it always surrounds us, we take for granted. They remind us of our own insular understanding of air as part of a mechanical process — the kind of understanding that quickly slides into a notion of air as a consumable product, a resource that exists in such abundance that we need not think twice about it. What if, instead of seeing air principally as ours, or as part of an automatic process, we thought about it as the connective medium for a radical empathy?

Third in Olivier Messiaen’s catalogue of Oiseuax Exotiques is the “Grive de bois, d’Amérique,” the American Wood Thrush, whose call has been described as a “flute-like ee-oh-lay.”¹² Messiaen represents this song through a rubato sequence of rapid, haunting piano chords, for which the pianist is directed, “laissez longuement vibrer” (“let resonate at length”).¹³ This song has a more melodic character than those that precede and follow — true of the wood thrush’s call. Yet, what makes Messiaen’s thrush so haunting is how it resides perfectly between piano and bird. The nectar of imitation, Messiaen shows, lies in the gap between the instrument and the thrush’s sonorities and between human performance and the unscripted performance of the thrush. In this liminal zone we find a particular kind of empathy — more precisely, a genuine effort to empathize beyond our limits. Jacques Derrida writes that “[t]he gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human, the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself.”¹⁴ Messiaen’s wood thrush is a sonic gaze that allows us to peek over the border between human and non-human animal.

Why would want to peek over that border? What value is there, really, in art imitating nature? The value resides in how this kind of art raises up an awareness of our anthropocentrism by forcing us, as with Derrida’s animal gaze, to confront the porous boundary between human nature and nature beyond the human. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the difficulties we face in attempting to counteract global warming is that blaming capitalism does not free us from the anthropocentrism that keeps us trapped in cycles of consumption. “[R]educing the problem of climate change to that of capitalism (folded into the histories of modern European expansion and empires) only blinds us to the nature of our present, a present defined by the coming together of the relatively short-term processes of human history and other much longer-term processes that belong to earth-systems history and the history of life on the planet.”¹⁵ Capitalism’s blind imperative toward production and profit at any cost is an engine of our current climate crisis, but to blame capitalism alone — i.e., to reduce the current crisis to the split-second moment (geologically speaking) of the past few hundred years — is, ironically, to impose a capitalist logic on a problem that involves the interaction between human and natural processes. The problem is our limited sense of history. Even within the fractional scope of human existence, Walter Benjamin’s angel of history reminds us, we fail to see the debris that we cause to pile up in the name of progress. “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”¹⁶ To see beyond, not just our limited conception of history, but into long processes of time, requires a different kind of seeing and listening.

As with Sila, Messiaen’s wood thrush redirects musical value from imitation to perception, allowing us to glimpse beyond our narrow, image-centric notion of history. Instead of evaluating the piece according to a rubric of imitative accuracy, Messiaen teaches us to play around with the possibility of listening beyond our limits — beyond our individual subjectivities and beyond the instants that expose the short-sightedness of our ordinary sense of history. Can music teach us to listen, not just beyond our individual selves, but beyond our exclusively human concerns?

I’m 47. Going from young to old sucks. Your youth suddenly vanishes... I looked back one day and was like ‘what the hell happened? Where did it all go? Why am I not married to my childhood crush? Why are all the good women taken?’ You realize you’re physically and emotionally tired, you have too many responsibilities, you’re alone, and the door is closing... You blame video games. You blame your idiot friends. You blame your parents, (who don’t have the answers either). You blame everyone but yourself. And then, one day, you realize there’s no such thing as blame. We’re all imperfect, and It’s just a game to control. The blame game.

—User “I9IIEIIYIIEIIS,” top comment on “Vaporwave / Chillwave – Ultimate Mix”¹⁷

On the internet, our extruded thoughts vanish into the digital air. Listener and commenter I9IIEIIYIIEIIS‘s self-reflection on nostalgia and the passage of time appears on one of many similar YouTube pages dedicated to vaporwave, an audiovisual genre of electronic/trance music accompanied by nostalgic screenshots of 90s video games or early computer graphics in customary neon blues and pinks. People visit these pages and reflect on how this “moment” — this particular mashup of sounds and graphics — informed who they are today. So powerfully does this music transport its listeners that even those born in the twenty-first century describe themselves as nostalgic for a time they never actually knew. As other top commenters note, “Vaporwave is insane, It really puts you in a different dimension”; “i realized that this was my time - this music, this graphic - this was part of the formula that made me who and what i am today”; “Brings back memories I haven’t even had before” (sic).¹⁸

If Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques is about melody, vaporwave is about groove — getting lost in a time-space made up of a referential cluster of ideas. Although “attempts to understand precisely what constitutes vaporwave are notoriously slippery,”¹⁹ it is often “defined” via lengthy descriptive catalogues — which is to say, by its own fuzzy boundaries. “Musically,” writes Ross Cole, “vaporwave is defined by a haunting, wraith-like soundworld of smooth synth pop, ersatz elevator schmaltz, unsettling shifts and repetitions, looping, reverb, glitches, distortion, and melodies warped not quite beyond recognition — sluggish fusions mashing together the detritus of corporate motivational soundtracks with snippets of songs that stir memories of a Golden Age.”²⁰ The term vaporwave “is thought to be derived from the ‘vaporware,’ a term in the computer industry for hardware or software that is announced to the general public but never actually manufactured.”²¹ But, as Cole notes, its name evokes something more liminal. “Vapor — by definition, it’s something that tends to resist being pinned down. Vapor trails linger as faint hexagrams in the sky, but they soon diffuse, melting into air. […] Similar things could be said about waves — by the time you notice one it’s already passing you by.”²²

Cole argues that vaporwave is not just about recuperating the nostalgic sounds of the 80s and 90s but of defamiliarizing those sounds in a way that calls into question the kind of blind, destructive progress that Benjamin has in mind. Citing Svetlana Boym’s notion of nostalgia as rebellion against progress-obsessed thinking, Cole writes, “Vaporwave is a classic instance of this off-modern nostalgia, refusing time’s arrow and the eviscerated highways of progress to dwell instead in ‘sideshadows and back alleys.’”²³ Cole’s framing of the genre in terms of affective spaces speaks to an important aspect of vaporwave’s aesthetic aims. Refusing to conform to a stable definition or set of criteria, vaporwave resists efforts to classify it within a schema of musical progress and development. Vaporwave isn’t about top 40 hits or sold-out concerts; it’s a countercultural blip, by many estimates already dead or at very least vanishing into further obscurity.²⁴

Yet, I9IIEIIYIIEIIS‘s comment reveals a kind of real-world consequence of vaporwave’s nostalgic freedom: a regretful awareness of premature aging and lost time. Vaporwave may be all about defamiliarizing the notion of time as an arrow pointing ever forward, yet in so doing, it also creates the impression that at any age of adulthood one is past one’s prime. As one user wrote in reply to I9IIEIIYIIEIIS, “I’ve just turned 23, I’ve finished my studies and now I’m getting a job (in video games lol) And I’m very often thinking about when i’m getting old.. Always telling myself ‘Damn.. 23.. That’s the youngest I’ll ever be, years are passing faster and faster I can feel it... Feels like I’ll be almost 30 in 3 years..’”²⁵ People hear this music and think about how much they wish they had done this or that before it was too late.

We might think of that nostalgia for lost time, however, as a feature (albeit a painful one) rather than a bug. Vaporwave exposes the anxiety and sadness of living in a time that suppresses time itself — what Fredric Jameson calls “the end of temporality,” referring to the ways in which twenty-first-century media have replaced “habits of clock time” with “some new nonchronological and nontemporal pattern of immediacies,”²⁶ a sense of living in a “perpetual present with a diminishing sense of temporal or indeed phenomenological continuities.”²⁷ Vaporwave not only wakes us up to this hijacking of time, but it also offers a different way of seeing time, and by extension, a different way connecting to the world around us. We are used to thinking about time as narrative, in terms of beginning, middle, and end. This temporal scheme tracks with the ways in which music has historically been performed and consumed: at concerts, on records, or in discrete units on the radio. Music today thinks differently about time and progression. Having moved well into what Lawrence Lessig calls “remix” culture, which is all about creating something new by sampling from existing cultural products, music comes to resemble air — an organic exchange of ideas.²⁸ The contemporary musical zeitgeist, of which vaporwave is a product, is intentionally ill-defined, multimedia, and concerned with the relationship between sound, space, and reference (that is, how sounds remind us of other artists or places or times). Because sampling and allusion are its primary drives, it cuts across almost every genre of produced music, from pop and hip hop and EDM to contemporary classical music to film music.²⁹

While many of these genres undoubtedly play into Jameson’s “perpetual present,” the larger referential chains that run through them create an interesting possibility. Could we understand sampling and remix culture as the basis for an historiography, a citational archive that makes webs of musical fragments? Sampling often gets accused of being a form of intellectual property theft, yet it is arguably a lot less pernicious to history and creativity than our own forgetfulness or our tendency toward exclusionary canon-making. Sampling acknowledges that whatever we are, in the present, is informed, not by straightforward narratives of beginning, middle, and end, but by an ongoing sedimentary process of (not necessarily anxious) influence. We are, ourselves, the compilation of so many remixed impressions and fragments of memory: how might such an understanding of ourselves inform a novel communal ecology?

In a lot of new music, sampling is about borrowing and paying homage to the ways in which others have shaped the air. By extension, musical pieces and genres become so many time capsules — sonic atmospheres capable of transporting us to other times and places. Air music has a similar effect. Messiaen pays homage to the natural world; vaporwave, to a lost cultural moment; Sila, to the air itself. Through these pieces, we can understand air not as a commodity but as something we share and through which we connect with one another. Music about the air also seems preoccupied with imagining alternative temporalities to our current, self-destructive path of progress-driven proliferation and consumption. The “vapor” in vaporwave implies clusters of musical and visual fragments passing through the digital air, confronting our culturally inscribed impulse to latch onto the latest version of this or that (iPhone, smart home system, TV show before it’s cancelled on Netflix). Messiaen turns the wood thrush’s call into an occasion for cross-species empathy — air as the medium for an ecological model. And for Adams, air is always already communal, a constant and unpredictable overlapping of breaths that, if we actually listened, could help us focus less on our own breathing and more on the world around us.

We need such a refocus now more than ever. When George Floyd was murdered, the theft of one person’s air became the rallying cry for change. That this rallying cry must keep happening seems part and parcel of a U.S. culture suffering, per Jameson’s description, from an increasingly myopic sense of history as well as an insidious strain of racism according to which change comes only to those who wait (what Martin Luther King, Jr. once called “the myth of time”). COVID-19 and global climate change have led to similar conflicts between individual freedom and communal safety. As we have seen all too often in the COVID era, one cannot counter the argument “It’s not my responsibility” with “Actually, it is” and hope to change anyone’s mind. I am not suggesting that everyone should go out and listen to air music, not least because I am dealing here with esoteric and bygone genres. Rather, I see this music as a model for how we might fashion a new relationship to the air and to each other, one founded not on individual consumption but on communality. That model extends to protecting the most vulnerable lives in our communities who, after all, have every right to the same air.

Which takes us back to Adams. “Sila is a continuing exploration of what it means to make music outdoors—what might constitute an authentic outdoor music,” Adams says in an interview leading up to the piece’s debut. “There is no ‘best seat in the house’. You will be able to wander around and make your own mix actively as the music is unfolding.”³⁰ At time when going outdoors feels threatening, when the best seat (the only seat) is in our houses, Sila offers a hopeful vision for the future, one in which we might understand music, and air, as models for radical forms of empathy. Now we just have to practice listening.