One ice-clenched night in 1941, prisoners of Stalag VIII-A, a Nazi labour camp in Silesia, gathered in an unheated washroom to listen to a music performance. It was an unusual event, and not only because of the venue.
Written by French composer Olivier Messiaen, the quartet was scored for piano, clarinet, violin and cello, an unconventional combination that arose from necessity: those were the instruments Messiaen and his three fellow prisoners of war could play. The performance brought the experimental, modernist eight-movement Quartet for the End of Time into the world and is remembered as one of the most consequential musical premieres of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, in the US, the Novachord — the first commercial polyphonic synthesiser — had recently been unveiled. It was greeted, as new technology often is, by panic. Would this machine make humans obsolete in music composition?
Today, we know the answer: the synthesisers that followed the Novachord vastly expanded the sounds available to composers and DJs, spawned new genres of popular music and became an indispensable means of musical creation. We would not have hip-hop or seminal albums such as Radiohead’s Kid A without them. At the same time, today’s musicians are faced with a new encroaching technology: artificial intelligence, with its power to replace their voices, bypass education and remove human oversight.
The more new technology attempts to replicate qualities we identify as making us uniquely human — thinking, feeling, creating — that is to say, the more it pretends to act in our image, the more we tend to fear it. And yet, one need only glance at a piece of AI-generated art and then look at a Cy Twombly painting — or listen to Messiaen’s quartet — to be relieved of any such concerns. The distinction becomes clear as day. One artwork approaches human expression. The other is human expression.
How worried should we be about technological disruption? And will it one day make creatives obsolete in the making of art? These questions have circulated for as long as man has made machines, but what if they’re the wrong ones? The two new books considered here — The Uncanny Muse by David Hajdu and Quartet for the End of Time by Michael Symmons Roberts — offer distinctive approaches to exploring how human creativity responds to its changing environments. Can seemingly existential challenges become constitutive elements of the creative process?
In Quartet for the End of Time, Symmons Roberts’ meditation on his grief for his parents ebbs and flows with the story of Messiaen’s quartet — its creation, its historical resonance, its personal meaning to him — a subterranean river periodically coming to the surface. Symmons Roberts is a long-established British poet, novelist and librettist, making this book a neat confluence of his talents: it is a novelistic memoir, interspliced with his own poems, that always returns to Messiaen’s music. He discovered the quartet by chance while browsing a record shop in the 1980s as a student, becoming, from that moment, a “lifelong listener” of the piece.
Before he was interned in the camp in his early thirties, Messiaen’s musical reputation had been in the ascendant in Paris. Symmons Roberts describes him as a “mystic modernist composer”, a “Catholic visionary, an obsessive ornithologist”, who wrote music that was radically, inventively modern — of which this quartet is the crowning example.
Part of Symmons Roberts’ inquiry debunks some of the myths surrounding its genesis. For example, its premiere at the camp was said to have been performed on torn, battered instruments. Yet, according to eyewitness accounts, a new cello was bought in the nearby town of Görlitz for the performance. The spellbound audience of suffering prisoners wasn’t united in its appreciation; some hated the atonality of the work. And often framed as a response to war, the piece was in fact inspired by St John the Divine’s apocalyptic visions in the Book of Revelation — which promised, in Messiaen’s eyes, “a glorious world of love beyond this world, beyond the end of time”.
These clarifications are important. Above all, Messiaen didn’t consider his situation restrictive but claimed that among all the prisoners, he “was probably the only one who was free”. His constrained environment did not diminish his creative work, it enhanced it.
Opening at the first show of algorithmic art in New York in 2019, Hajdu’s lively The Uncanny Muse traces the relationship between human creativity and mechanical or technological innovations since the late 19th century. Hajdu, an American music critic and journalism professor, writes that “in the making of music, the human-machine dynamic has always been more than a philosophical conceit. It has been a practical consideration.”
From the advent of self-playing pianos in the early 20th century to Andy Warhol’s “automatic reproduction” — machine-based screen-printing to create multiple prints, one after another — Hajdu argues that much technology initially viewed with suspicion was eventually incorporated into artistic practice to enriching effect. He roots the cultural evolution of machines in the arts in a broader history that most will recognise, such as the development of B-3 electric organs in the 1950s, which became the sound of gospel music; Martin Luther King Jr preached with electric organs in the background.
But it’s increasingly hard in 2025 to view new technology without buckets of scepticism, knowing that we’re in uncharted territory when it comes to generative AI, the people who control it and the threat to artists’ livelihoods. On the one hand, restoration tools use AI to recover historical recordings, such as the isolation of John Lennon’s vocal on a demo of The Beatles’ “Now and Then” in 2023, or director Peter Jackson’s production company, WingNut Films, developing its own AI “de-mixing” software that could uncouple interlocked sounds. On the other, it risks devaluing musical labour as production studios increase their use of AI.
And yet, allaying our concerns isn’t Hajdu’s point. Neither dismissing technological innovation as a threat to authentic human expression nor uncritically celebrating it, he argues for us to see the human-machine binary as a “collaboration”. Inventions such as recording technology, which performers once feared would eliminate live performance, evolved into sophisticated art forms in themselves; he cites Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as “a totem to the recording studio as an instrument” and turntables as the primary instrument of “DJs in hip-hop . . . innovating an original sonic vocabulary”. If you like listening to electronic music or buying reproduction posters in museum gift shops, you’ll probably agree that technology has expanded rather than contracted artistic possibilities, as well as bringing music and other art forms to a wider audience.
Symmons Roberts argues that for Messiaen, his strange constellation of instruments forced him to blend the tones of the Quartet in entirely new ways. The layers of sound were unprecedented, but they worked, making the limited instrumental palette not an obstacle but essential to the work’s character. One need only listen to the first movement of the quartet, “Liturgie de cristal”, to hear the clarinet play birdsong-inspired figures that soar above the percussive piano and silky string; a multi-layered sonic plane. As Symmons Roberts writes, it’s “like sticking my head into a surreal aviary in which the birds sound like they’ve eaten too much fermented fruit. It’s not just one bird either, all the instruments are at it. There was no turning back.”
Symmons Roberts, striving for the connection that Messiaen, a “connoisseur of birdsong”, felt with the music of the natural world, uses a “bird ID app” to identify the individual sounds making up the dawn chorus outside his house. AI-developed technology brings him closer to, as Messiaen regarded birdsong, “the authentic music of Eden”.
After being released from the camp, Messiaen returned to Paris and became one of the most esteemed composers of the 20th century, living until he was 83. Yet Symmons Roberts doesn’t present a simplistic narrative of triumph over adversity, just as Hajdu offers no clear solutions to overcoming our potential adversary in AI. The latter’s whirlwind tour through nearly 150 years of cultural history is both pacy and brimming with detail. I had no idea, for example, that Switched-On Bach, a 1968 synthesiser recording of JS Bach by Wendy Carlos, was beloved by revered pianist Glenn Gould, who called the record “one of the great feats in the history of ‘keyboard’ performance” — leaving the reader with a sense of optimism of what might lie ahead.
Symmons Roberts’ prose, by contrast, is silky and emotive, with his success in weaving the personal strands with the musical partly owed to the deep connections wrought by his poems, each one seemingly chosen to heighten our understanding of what precedes it.
That creativity is in constant dialogue with both our expression and circumstances is the thread that connects the two books, and reading them brings to mind the Oulipo, the experimental French writers’ collective who artificially imposed constraints in order to expand creativity: with limits imposed, goes their theory, we can access new areas of creative freedom.
Neither book offers resolution as such, but reading them in parallel offers two ways into the idea that overcoming might not always be the most generative posture. Rather, that true generative artistic power is in cultivating the ingenuity to harness the challenges we find ourselves facing.
The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI by David Hajdu WW Norton £25/$32.99, 304 pages
Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong by Michael Symmons Roberts Jonathan Cape £20, 304 pages
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