Enthusiastic Fear

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Originally written in German („Enthusiastische Angst").<br>While writing this, I listened to one piece, over and over: Mendelssohn's Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings in D minor, the second movement, the Adagio (Apple Music · Spotify). Take a moment, a small pause - if you feel like it: listen to it once before you read this, and then once more while you read.<br>I had actually meant to write about Claude for Legal. About legal AI, about large language models, and about what they are doing to our craft. But the longer I looked, the clearer it became: most of this picture is not technical. My wife, a psychologist and psychotherapist, pointed out to me that psychology has long had names for what I was seeing everywhere - a fear that flees forward into enthusiasm: counterphobia, the manic defense. And that this makes it deeply human. Human, all too human. This is less about models and benchmarks than about that fear - and about the confidence we should allow ourselves anyway, or precisely because of it.<br>So it turned into a different piece. One about technological upheavals, about the fear they drag along behind them, and about what remains once you finally set that fear down. It does not begin at the screen where I work today. It begins on the lower level of my childhood home.<br>"Are There Any Ralph Laurens Left?"<br>My father often called these words down to the lower level, to where the wardrobe with his work clothes stood. My father is an orchestral musician. "Ralph Lauren" meant the shirts - the white, immaculate, starched ones he wore under his tailcoat. And next to the shirts hung that very tailcoat: the musician's costume, the uniform of the concert evening.<br>As a child, that call always raised the same question in me: What for? Why does music need these clothes? Today I have plenty of answers ready. Tradition. The whole experience. The dignity of the occasion. And yet the childlike question remains more justified than I would like. Because none of it is necessary - at least not once it becomes an end in itself. Of course a concert hall is also about entertainment, and of course all the senses are in play. But they should be engaged, or left out, deliberately. The focus belongs elsewhere: on the core. On the touching of inner feeling through sound. Everything else is frame. A beautiful frame, sometimes. But frame.<br>I am not telling this out of nostalgia. I am telling it because that wardrobe downstairs taught me something early on that I only recognized again much later - this time not in the concert hall, but in my own profession, in the middle of all the excitement about artificial intelligence.<br>An Industry That Fears Its Own Death<br>The world of classical music has long been shaped by a fear that today, in the age of AI, is pushing into almost every line of work more broadly than ever before: Will what I produce become obsolete? Will there come a day when no one needs me to make classical music, to draft a document, to drive a taxi, to write a legal complaint?<br>In classical music this fear is, in a sense, built in - and it has a measurable core. The audience is aging, and markedly so. In the United States, the average age of concertgoers was 40 in 1982, 45 in 1992, and 49 in 2002. In France, the median age of classical concert audiences has climbed from 36 in 1981 to around 61 today; in 2022, nearly 60 percent of the audience there was older than 65. Anyone sitting inside those numbers hears the same quiet refrain running along for decades: It is dying out. Soon my work will no longer be needed.<br>And yet the numbers tell something else, something consoling that tends to get lost in the noise of fear. Overall attendance has stayed remarkably stable for decades - from 1979 to 2022, a fairly constant 15 to 20 percent of those surveyed attended such concerts. So the audience is not aging because it is dying out, but in good part because one particular generation is especially loyal to the music. It is change, not collapse. But fear does not hear that. Fear does not do the math. Fear extrapolates the worst line and calls it realism.<br>Fleeing Into Exuberance<br>What does an industry do when it fears its own death? More often than not, it flees into an almost embarrassing over-enthusiasm. The worry of being overlooked turns into hard selling. You get manufactured starlets and talent-show storylines, an endless machinery of competitions, crossover covers, the turning of everything into an event. The concert hall becomes a stage for anything and everything - only the core, the music itself, slips further and further out of view.<br>Don't get me wrong. Commerce is not a bad thing. We need beautiful covers, smart marketing, and sometimes it is precisely the crossover piece that becomes the door through which someone first walks in. The tailcoat can be the perfect garment. The point is not purity, not asceticism. The point is simply that the core must not be lost beneath the exuberance....