While listening to music, I found myself waiting for a note that had not yet arrived. It was a very brief moment. The music kept flowing, but my mind had moved a little ahead, lingering where the next note would be.
I was listening to Seong-Jin Cho play the second movement, Larghetto, of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2. Cho compared this concerto to opera. He said the middle section of the especially beautiful second movement sounded like a recitative, singing as if speaking. If painting is an art of space, he said, music to him is an art of timing.
After reading those words, I had a clearer sense of what I had been waiting for. Perhaps it was not the next note, but the time before it arrived.
I spent many years studying classical music as a child. I won prizes in piano competitions, and on the violin I practiced Mendelssohn's concerto. In the end, I did not pursue music as my major. There must have been several reasons, but I think one was a sense of being lost. The feeling that somewhere in music lay a truth of absolute beauty, and that no amount of practice would get me there.
Correcting wrong notes was different from playing beautifully. I could find the technical mistakes. But I did not know what more I needed to do to make the music beautiful. It was also impossible to explain why a performance I already found beautiful was beautiful. What was hard was not even knowing exactly what I did not know.
Math and science, on the other hand, were clear. Even when I could not understand a problem, I could find where I was stuck, and there was a way to check whether a solution was right. That was how it seemed to me as a child. I chose the science track.
Listening to Chopin again, I return to the same place and ask. Why is this note beautiful only when it comes a little late?
Keeping time precisely is one of the first things we do when learning music. But what holds our hearts are the moments that stray a little from the beat. Rushing, waiting, returning. Some of what I vaguely thought of as being off the beat as a child was rubato, moving the timing of a melody forward or back. Delaying notes at random makes for clumsy playing, but a good performer stretches time just enough to keep the listener waiting, then offers the next note.
The musicologist Leonard Meyer found a clue to emotion in the expectations music creates and the delay in fulfilling them. As we hear one sound, we anticipate the next. Later studies suggest that greater surprise does not always mean greater pleasure. When we feel sure of what comes next, an unexpected chord can be pleasing. When we have lost our way, a familiar chord can be welcome.
There is an order to beauty, too, that we can discover. When I read explanations like these, I feel I have come to understand a little of the truth I did not know as a child. But the moment I listen to music again, something beyond the explanation still moves me.
We sometimes return for decades to a piece whose every next note we know. There is nothing left to surprise us, yet the emotion remains. As I listen to familiar notes, I sometimes remember who I was when I listened to this piece before.
These days, I make music with AI myself. So I am not simply watching the meeting of AI and music from a distance. Even as I use it myself, listening to Cho's Chopin stirs feelings I cannot easily sort out.
But will AI someday know why it should wait here?
Is identifying features that often appear in great performances the same as understanding why that hesitation is beautiful? It is hard to say that something is not understanding simply because it was learned through statistics. People, too, learn by listening and imitating over a long time. Can we draw an exact line where imitation becomes interpretation?
What if AI answers the question I never managed to solve?
What if it figures out not just how long to delay a note, but how to build the time leading up to it so that the delay touches the heart?
What if a moment comes when I feel that AI plays Chopin more beautifully than Seong-Jin Cho?
What was it that I found so difficult? Musical beauty itself? Or myself, who felt I would never be able to understand it?
I have always believed that when I listen to music, I hear more than sound. That in that hesitation is the time of someone who has hesitated. That in that sadness is something words could not fully express. Though I did not know what the performer had actually lived through, I never doubted that on the other side of the keys was a person much like me.
Schopenhauer believed that music reveals the desires and suffering of life without describing specific events. I am drawn to that thought. Some music tells me no story at all, yet sounds as though it knows the circumstances I could not explain.
But what if those sounds come from a being whose experience of loss we cannot even be sure of?
I thought I had come close to someone's inner life, but had I in fact encountered the way my own heart responds? I thought I was comforted because someone understood me, but was sound that made me feel understood enough on its own?
Still, even if we discover the principles behind a beautiful performance, the time a person spent arriving at that performance will not disappear. The hours of practicing the same passage over and over, of placing their hands on the keys again because a sound they liked yesterday no longer feels right today. I cannot hear all that time in the sound alone, but I listen to music knowing that time was there.
As a child, I think I imagined beauty as a correct answer somewhere out there. As though those gifted enough could reach it, while those who were not could only listen from afar.
Now I can think about it a little differently. Even if beauty has absolute rules, the moment a musician's soul chooses to wait a little will always be stirring and beautiful.
I still love that time.
