Escaping the Transaction – Music, and the Lost Art of Contemplation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode of The Distraction Therapy, we return to an idea that’s both ancient and urgently needed—art as a space for transcendence. Drawing on Arthur Schopenhauer’s radical notion that music is not just entertainment but a portal to something beyond the grinding machinery of life, we ask: what would it mean to take music seriously again—not as a tool, a service, or a box to tick—but as a doorway to a different mode of being?

Schopenhauer saw existence as dominated by what he called the Will: a blind, insatiable force behind all striving, all desire, all suffering. For him, art—especially music—offers a rare and fleeting reprieve from this torment. When we truly engage with music, we do not consume it. We do not demand anything of it. We do not ask it to justify itself in terms of metrics or outcomes. We simply enter it. We become, momentarily, “will-less subjects of knowing.” That is, we stop wanting, and we start perceiving.

This feels alien now. In the social arts sector, much of our creative effort is shaped by process management and transactional expectations. Funding forms, KPIs, logic models, and outcome frameworks dominate the conversation. Even where we speak of “engagement” and “inclusion,” we often mean participation that serves a measurable goal. Artistic experience is not seen as valuable for its own sake but only in relation to the metrics it supports—behaviour change, community cohesion, employability, mental health. These are all important, yes. But when art is subsumed into this model, its ability to disrupt, to transport, to transcend is quietly dismantled.

Art becomes a service. Music becomes background. The artist becomes a facilitator. And the audience becomes a dataset.

Schopenhauer would have found this industrialisation of aesthetic life grimly ironic. The very thing he believed could lift us out of suffering is now caught in the same cycle of instrumental reasoning that he believed caused that suffering in the first place. The Will reasserts itself—only now with a spreadsheet.

But there is still a way out, even if temporary. And that’s what this episode aims to offer. Not a solution. Not an argument. Just an experience. A moment of sonic contemplation that doesn’t need to be explained, justified, or monetised. Music that simply is.

So as you listen—wherever you are, whatever you’re doing—try to step outside the stream of expectation. Let the music hold you, not as a tool of recovery or development, but as an experience of being without need. Not a distraction from the world, but a reconnection to something deeper than utility or function. A space where you are no longer an agent of output, but a subject of wonder.

In that moment, Schopenhauer believed, we cease to suffer. Not because the world changes, but because we do.