Requiem for a year that failed its own claims

January is already through, yet the New Year arrives burdened by the unfinished violence of the last. I think of the many who lost their loved ones in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, and now civilians killed for daring to protest in Iran. To speak of Gaza or Ukraine today is to risk being framed in ways that delegitimise moral insistence, recoding it as sentimentality or partisanship. And yet insistence is precisely what this moment cries out for.

I listen to the Venetian Baroque composer Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio, a requiem moving slowly through ruins, carrying grief in silence and offering an ethical lesson that “grief hurried is grief denied”. The music does not offer any consolation, but strikingly bears witness. In its refusal to rush past sorrow lies its devastating honesty, allowing grief to unfold at its own pace, to be felt rather than buried. It lingers, refusing the world’s impatience with mourning. Gaza, above all, demands this refusal to not simply pass by its terrible destruction where the reduction of lives to numbers is submerged in the bureaucratic language of “collateral damage”.

Moving, enduring

I find the music moving because it does not plead or persuade, but simply endures, an endurance that has defined the human condition over the past year and now spills into the new one. Its power lies in restraint, in the refusal of becoming a part of the spectacle. In a time when suffering is endlessly televised and yet curiously emptied of meaning, such restraint feels almost subversive.

Another composition returns imperceptibly at the threshold of the New Year. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, written in the shadow of a world sliding toward catastrophe, has deeply accompanied moments of collective mourning for over a century. It ascends slowly, almost pleadingly, before breaking into silence. That silence matters. It acknowledges what language cannot carry. It is the pause that politics refuses to sanction.

Modern politics indeed is allergic to silence. It demands immediacy, alignment, certainty. It has little patience for mourning that does not quickly convert into justification or revenge. The tragedies that now bleed from one year into the next, Gaza foremost, but also Ukraine, Sudan, Iran, the disasters of death, displacement and hunger are processed not as moral failures but as strategic necessities, as expedient calculations of power that leave no space for ethics or pity.

And yet art remembers what politics erases. In Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, sound itself becomes anguish, shrill, fractured, almost unbearable. It is sound as pain, not sound about pain. It is not beautiful in any conventional sense, and that is precisely its honesty. Some wounds never heal into narratives.

What unites these compositions, as the New Year stumbles forward, is not despair but seriousness. They do not pretend that catastrophe can be resolved through rhetoric or managerial competence. They resist the cheerful cynicism of a world that labels devastation an inescapable complexity and moves on. In doing so, such music gives form to the historical and emotional textures of our time. The year gone by, and the one now unfolding, has been full of speech where opinions keep multiplying even as moral clarity thins. With colonisation returning in naked, unapologetic form, with empire shedding even the pretence of restraint, and fact and fiction becoming all the more indistinguishable, the future already feels bleak. In such a climate, to mourn openly, to insist on grief without qualification, itself becomes a political act. More than a requiem for the dead, this insistence draws attention to the collapse of a shared moral horizon in a world that once claimed to defend human dignity. For me, the music I hear on this cold January morning does not resolve anything. It does not tell me what comes next. But it refuses erasure. It insists on remembrance in a time organised around forgetting. Art, here, becomes not consolation but survival, a way of staying human while history repeats its worst instincts. To listen, to imagine, to remain open to grief is not withdrawal from the world but a form of ethical resistance. In staying with loss, it teaches us how not to become complicit in forgetting.

​ shelleywalia@gmail.com