A musicological reading of ties, absences and what remains
by Marialuisa Veneziano
8 September 2026
There are friendships ending with a banged door.
They're almost lucky.
They have a date, a cause, maybe even a guilty one. We can tell you: "this happened," "that said," "we haven't spoken since then."
Then there are others.
The ones that don't end at all.
They decrease.
First call every day. Then once a week. Then a distracted message, some birthdays, a promise to see itself formulated with the same conviction that certain governments announce epochal reforms.
Finally silence.
No fights.
No death.
And yet something is dead.
Perhaps this is one of the most unique forms of adult pain: losing someone who quietly continues to exist.
Music knows this kind of disappearance.
Because in music not everything that is silent is over.
Aristotle had already understood the problem
Much before social networks, Aristotle had distinguished three fundamental forms of friendship: the one founded on utility, the one founded on pleasure and that, much more rare, based on mutual recognition of good.
The first two last as long as it lasts.
If the interest changes, the utility ends.
If you change your pleasure, you end up dating.
The third is more difficult because it does not use the other for something: see the other.
Two thousand years later we have sophisticated tools to keep in touch and continue to have exactly the same problem.
It's not hard to have relationships.
It is difficult to meet someone in front of whom it is not necessary to be continually interesting, useful, efficient, cheerful.
The contemporary society rewards the performance.
Even in relationships.
We must be available but not too needy, sensitive but not heavy, present but not intrusive, fragile but preferably in times compatible with the commitments of others.
The pain, above all, has very little networking skills.
When life begins to hit seriously — disease, loss, failure, separation, fear — We discover that some people were fond of our version in greater shades.
At the first modulation towards the minor ask politely the account.
And right here music begins to become interesting.
The counterpoint of friendship
A good friendship does not look like unison.
The unison is reassuring: two voices follow the same note.
But two human beings who always thought the same way would probably be unbearable after twenty minutes.
True friendship rather resembles the counterpoint.
In the counterpoint the voices remain autonomous.
They don't have to coincide.
They have different directions, profiles and rhythms, and yet they build together an intelligible form.
This is one of the deepest insights that the history of music can offer to the philosophy of relationships.
The second voice is not important because it repeats the first.
Maybe because we don't always look for someone who eliminates pain.
It's important because he answers them without cancelling.
Bach knew that perfectly.
In one escape the subject is pronounced by one voice and then delivered to another. While one speaks, others do not cease to exist. They continue, comment, support, contradict.
No good escape works if all parties claim to be the soprano at the same time.
Social life, too.
It's just that the problem is called a meeting.
Friendship requires this counterpoint ability: continue to be oneself while leaving room for the existence of the other.
Not fusion.
Report.
Dissonance is not the opposite of harmony
We have done a serious wrong to the word "harmony".
We use it as a synonym for lack of conflict.
A harmonious family.
A harmonious couple.
A harmonious friendship.
As if musical harmony consisted of an endless succession of consonances.
It would be unbearable.
The history of Western music is a history of tension management.
Sustainability.
Ritardi.
Passage notes.
Prepared dissonances.
Changed agreements.
Chromatisms.
Dominants who promise resolutions and then, with some perfidy, go elsewhere.
Music does not eliminate tension.
It gives you a sense.
It's a huge difference.
A seventh dominant is not beautiful despite its instability.
It is beautiful also thanks to it.
A delay acquires strength just because a voice remains momentarily where it should no longer be.
Curious definition, if we think about it, even some people in our lives.
The musical maturity consists in understanding that dissonance is not necessarily error.
The emotional maturity should probably learn the same thing.
A friend is not the one who never contradicts us.
He is the one with whom even dissent keeps a relationship.
And then the deception cadences arrive
Who studies harmony knows well that small cruelty called cadence of deception.
Everything seems to prepare the conclusion.
The dominant tends clearly towards tonic.
Our ear already knows where it's going.
But not.
The agreement deviates.
Waiting resolution is denied and music takes another path.
If there is a musical process that describes adult life well, here it is.
We prepare for a conclusion.
There's a deviation coming.
We thought he was that person.
That work, that house, that future, that friendship.
Dominant.
Then life puts another deal.
We have no wrong theory.
A deception cadence has simply arrived.
The extraordinary thing is that in music a cadence of deceit does not necessarily destroy the composition.
Prolong it.
It compels the phrase to seek another solution.
How many times does the same happen to us?
The bat doesn't make life beautiful. It would be foolish to support him.
But it can change the shape.
Schubert and the art of changing light without changing room
Few composers know the feeling of precariousness as Schubert.
In his music something mysterious happens frequently: we have not yet come out of a sentence and already the harmonious landscape has changed.
A modulation, a third relationship, an improvised far-off tonal region, and what until an instant seemed familiar acquires another light.
It is a music that knows how little it is because what we know becomes foreign.
People do that, too.
Someone who knew our way of laughing, our fears, details that no one else could understand, one day speaks to us with the courtesy reserved to an acquaintance.
And maybe that's what hurts.
Not the distance.
The transformation of intimacy into extraneity.
An old friendship does not become painful because we have forgotten.
It becomes painful because we remember very well.
Music has memory
Philosophy has discussed the relationship between time, identity and memory for centuries.
Music offers a concrete demonstration.
We cannot understand a melody by listening only to the present note.
Each note acquires meaning because we remember the previous one and imagine the next one.
Without memory there is no musical phrase.
There are only later sounds.
When Beethoven presents a theme and much later makes it back transformed, emotion also arises from recognition.
We've heard it before.
But it's not the same anymore.
Just like us.
Maybe that's why a song associated with a person possesses almost brutal power.
It's not just autobiographical memory.
The very structure of music forces us to live at the same time present and past.
A photograph says:
You were there.
A music can say:
For a few minutes, you're still there.
And it's an almost metaphysical difference.
Why do we listen to music when we're sick?
Not necessarily because we want to be comforted.
Sometimes we do something seemingly absurd.
We are sad and choose sad music.
We're alone and listen to Schubert.
We have the cheerfully devastated heart and decide it is the ideal time for Mahler.
From the point of view of emotional efficiency would seem a questionable strategy.
And yet it works.
Why?
We're looking for something I know.
Schopenhauer attributed the music a very unique position between the arts, because it felt that it reached the deep structure of our will, without passing through the representation of objects.
We can discuss his metaphysics.
But intuition remains very powerful.
Music doesn't need to tell us:
"I know you're sad."
It can simply build a form in which sadness becomes habitable.
This makes some great works.
They don't eliminate pain.
They give it walls.
Music doesn't say: "You must react"
Here it has a remarkable advantage over many human beings.
A sonata doesn't ask us when we finally decide to move on.
A quartet doesn't suggest that "time fixes everything."
Mahler does not send very good motivational days.
Music does not claim that our pain has a socially acceptable deadline.
It stays.
And perhaps his ability to remain explains why, in the most difficult times, we can perceive it almost as a presence.
Be careful, though.
Music does not replace friendship. You can't take us to the hospital. He can't help us. You can't tell us we're wrong. He cannot do that terrible and wonderful thing that makes a real friend: to contradict us when it would be much easier to indulge.
But he can teach us something about the quality of the presence.
The string quartet as a small political theory of friendship
Let's get a quartet.
Two violins, purple, cello.
Four stamp identity.
No one is self-sufficient.
The first violin can lead, but without viola and cello would lose harmonic depth; without the second violin, much of the internal structure would become unthinkable.
In the great quartetistic tradition — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bartók — the four parts become interlocutors.
Goethe defined the quartet as a conversation between four reasonable people: the image is famous because it catches something essential.
In chamber music it is not enough to play your part well.
You have to listen to what others do while playing your own.
This could be one of the best definitions of friendship.
Do not stop to exist to listen to each other.
Do not stop listening to each other while we exist.
Mozart and Haydn: the greatness of recognizing the greatness of others
There is then a kind of friendship particularly rare in the artistic world: the one capable of surviving the talent of the other.
Mozart dedicated six quartets to Haydn after a very long and severe compositional work.
Haydn, listening to Mozart, openly recognized the extraordinary greatness of the young colleague.
It's less trivial than it looks.
Recognising the superiority or talent of the other without feeling diminished is one of the most mature forms of friendship.
Envy says:
If you shine, I disappear.
Friendship says:
I can see your light without losing mine.
This is also polyphony.
Schumann and Brahms: When believing in the other comes first of itself
In 1853 Robert Schumann welcomed the young Brahms and dedicated him an article destined to change his career, presenting him as a new great voice of German music.
Then life rushed.
Schumann's psychic crisis, attempted suicide, shelter.
Brahms remained close to Clara and the family.
Here the history of music stops being a catalog of works and returns to be history of human beings.
Behind the scores we find people who were afraid, who protected, betrayed, supported, admired.
Genius does not immune from fragility.
In fact, sometimes it amplifies it.
Lennon and McCartney: friendship is not always consonance
And we can get out of concert halls quietly.
Lennon and McCartney show another kind of creative relationship.
Collaboration.
Competition.
Compliance.
Irritation.
Move away.
Their relationship shows that a fruitful bond must not necessarily be peaceful.
Sometimes we need someone who doesn't say "brave."
We need someone who can say:
You can do better.
The other becomes the limit against which we measure ourselves.
This is also friendship.
Not the most comfortable.
Sometimes the most fertile.
When does friendship end?
Here music has an amazing answer.
In a composition, a voice can disappear long before the last line and however have changed everything that comes after.
It doesn't have to come to the conclusion to make sense.
Perhaps we should give the same dignity to some relationships.
Not all people encountered in life are destined to remain until the end.
Some belong to a movement.
A few more jokes.
Some enter only to change shades.
Pain arises when we confuse importance and duration.
One short thing can be decisive.
A very long thing can be irrelevant.
Music always knows.
The problem of contemporary loneliness
Our age has an impressive amount of media and an amazing difficulty in the relationship.
It is not necessarily a contradiction.
Communication requires connection.
Intimacy requires exposure.
It's different.
We can talk to dozens of people every day without being really known by anyone.
We can continually produce a presentable version of ourselves.
Then comes a bullshit of life.
And that construction becomes too tiring to maintain.
That's when we discover the difference between public and friendship.
The public may want a good performance.
The true friend can also witness the evidence.
Breaks.
The wrong jokes.
The days when we don't even know which piece we're playing.
Perhaps the true friend is this:
someone in front of whom we can stop performing.
Silence is part of music
Don't forget it.
A break is not lack of music.
It has duration.
Position.
Function.
It can prepare an attack, suspend a sentence, create wait, make huge what comes after.
There are also different silences in friendship.
The respectful one.
The embarrassed one.
The punitive one.
The distance.
The one where two people don't need to talk.
The quality of a relationship is perhaps also measured in the quality of its silences.
There are people with whom twenty seconds of silence seem a diplomatic catastrophe.
With others we can cross an entire evening without feeling the need to fill anything.
It's a rare privilege.
Music would be called breathing.
What music can teach us about friends
Maybe we don't have to look for people who always play our same note.
We have to look for those capable of entering our hue without claiming to possess it.
People who know how to accompany without submerge.
That they can take the theme when we have no more breath.
That they can even leave us alone for a few jokes without leaving the piece.
People with whom dissonance does not immediately mean breaking.
And especially people who are not afraid of our minor hues.
Because the true proof of friendship rarely arrives on bright days.
It comes when we get less easy.
Less fun.
Less helpful.
When we don't have a brilliant solution.
When we can't return.
When the only thing we can offer is our tired presence.
That's where you find out who was listening to music and who only expected their turn to sing.
Coda
Life is not a well-built symphony.
It does not necessarily have exposure, development and recapitulation.
Sometimes it even forgets the main theme.
He lets people in without explanation and lets them out without cadence.
Promises resolutions and offers modulations.
It suddenly gives us shades that we would not have chosen.
And yet we continue.
Perhaps because, as in music, the sense does not reside only in the final agreement.
It resides in relations between what happened.
Growing up we find that some friendships were only easy consonances.
Others were necessary dissonances.
Some people accompanied us.
Others taught us to walk without accompaniment.
Some have become silent.
But silence, music taught us, does not always coincide with nothing.
Sometimes that's what remains after a voice stopped singing.
And perhaps true friendship does not consist in promising:
"I'll always be here."
The lives are too fragile for such absolute promises.
Perhaps it consists of something more humble and much more difficult:
"When I'm here, I'll really listen to you. "
Because music doesn't teach us that all dissonances will solve.
He does not teach us that every theme will return.
It does not guarantee that what we love will arrive with us at the last line.
He teaches us something more serious:
that even a voice destined to silence may have changed harmony definitively.
And that certain people, when they were really listened to and really loved, do not necessarily keep walking next to us.
But they keep ringing.
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