I’ve tried for a few days to find something true to say about Peter Ablinger. Words don’t encompass a life’s work. To me he was one of the genuinely significant composers of our time — and this precisely because he preserved a seriousness of attitude not taken in by the conventions of professionalized contemporary music, its contest-logic, its ossified faux-orchestral norms, its exhibitionism. Instead he was one of few composers on either side of the Atlantic who recognized that something irreparable happened to music in the 1960s (say) and questioned unceasingly where to go next.

For him this place was nowhere demonstrably SPECIAL: in a large body of concert pieces, performance art work, conceptual and media art work, and uncategorizable installations he showed that what is interesting about objects is not in the objects themselves but in perception (Agnes Martin wrote: “Beauty is not in the eye it is in the mind”). In so doing he reminded music and musicians of a possible path (which has always been there, little-used) away from the habitual purchasing of indulgences (out of the dead-ends of impressiveness, craftiness, trickiness, self-display). In Peter’s work we do not (only) find that music is already in noise (that would still be Cage), rather: that desire is always already in our listening (singing — also the siren-song — is already in speech).

Encountering his work as a young teenager was one of the important artistic disturbances in my life; experiencing it in person for the first time in Chicago in 2020 and participating in performances, lectures, and lessons with him in Ostrava in 2023 have been among my most generatively irritating encounters with an older artist. I consider Voices and Piano to be one of the great works of our century and his book Now!: Writings 1982–2021 to be among the major written statements by any composer. I hope people will continue to perform and install his work and that it will continue to provoke and inspire others in his absence.

(note April 25, 2025)