I pick up a musical instrument and produce a sequence of tones. These tones enchant my surroundings and me as I produce them. At some point I grow tired, the tones cease, and the enchantment passes. My favorite quotation about this phenomenon can be heard on the Radio Hilversum recording of Eric Dolphy’s last concert, which took place in 1964, just before he died because no one could treat his particular type of diabetes, one that occurs only in people of African descent. Dolphy said: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air; you can never recapture it again.” What I produced has vanished without a trace; it created no value—nor, however, did it depend on a providential nature and the miracles of the land of milk and honey. It was me.

I myself, using my talents and abilities—that which belongs to me as a human being and sets me apart from the animals—gave expression to something; that is, I lent inner states, which are also exclusively mine, and yet whose form is familiar to all other human beings from their own internal, subjective states, a form that was understandable to others and may thus have been beautiful. I realized myself as a human being in the dialectic between my nature as a unique individual and my nature as a social and collective being, and I did so entirely without economy, without reification, without the creation of value, without storage, costs, or profits, without the calculation of future time and hence without speculation, without interest or the creation of secondary value, and without valorization.

This is how utterly utopian music is, or rather how utopian it would be if it could exist in this way, as music in itself.

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So while we see that the notion of an absolutely valueless music—a music free of all value, valorization, or fixation—has often been projected into the past, its actual place would have to be in the present and in the future, and not just because we are speaking about utopia. Except in Arcadia, such a music has never existed as a social practice. On the other hand, it may have existed innumerable times as a mode of communication detached from society, as the song one sings to oneself, the whimsy with which one rhythmically structures one’s steps, the drone that one produces with one’s own body as a resonating chamber. And out of those countless individual moments that never solidified into objects, when individuals or little groups had musical experiences that had nothing to do with musical objects or any social purpose, music and music-like behavior have gained the reputation of being able to touch one’s most intimate subjectivity.