by Darius Kazemi, Aug 29, 2025
In Seattle, WA USA on September 17th 2025 I'll be attending Hildegard25, a DIY festival celebrating the work of 12th century composer Hildegard von Bingen. So I've been thinking about her work, but also about how the modern capitalist machine ingests and tries to make sense of her work.
In particular I've been thinking of a funny-but-sad incident from 2019 when Apple Music censored song titles of Hildegard's containing the Latin word "cum".
We'll probably never know exactly what happened, but my best guess as someone who has worked in and around big social media platforms:
Platforms require their content to be legible to the platform itself. That's true of social media platforms like Facebook, and also true of music platforms like Apple Music. One of the tools of protocological control used by these platforms is metadata. In the case of music we are talking structured data around things like artist, title, date, and so on. Music metadata is its own obscure industry with a host of well-known problems.
In fact it is well-known in the classical music scene that the metadata regime overwhelmingly favors pop music over all other forms. There's a fascinating argument at that link, but the basic point is: if your music is not legible to algorithm machine, it is not going to get promoted by the machine. If things are bad for classical music, I would argue they are even worse for pre-modern and ancient music. Not all songs have identifiable authors. Not all songs have identifiable performers. Not all songs are sung in a living language.
People sometimes ask how I got into a career of building alternative social media platforms. The answer is art. I spent a decade building art projects that interrogated and existed entirely on the social media platform once called Twitter. In 2016 their lawyers made decisions that, through a game of telephone, resulted in an environment where those (entirely innocuous) art projects were too much of a liability to host on Twitter anymore. Fine. If your social media platform won't have my art on it, I will build my own fucking (sorry, f*cking) social media platform.
Something happens to art when it's on Apple Music and YouTube and Spotify and so on. It gets churned through the metadata and legal compliance machine. It becomes flattened and de-vitalized. This was also happening in the bad old days of record label and radio monopolies, but consider: in 1994 there was a zero percent chance that a Hildegard von Bingen record would be put out with a track titled "C*m Processit Factura Digiti Dei". This is because an actual human being would have been working at the distributor and handling the record.
These platforms do not exist as a place for art to live and flourish. They exist as a place to flatten art into commodity. There is no context here. Instead there are small armies of lawyers trying to make sure a rich person doesn't get fined for letting a 13-year old medieval music nerd see the Latin prepositional word for "with".
I don't have a major conclusion here other than to encourage you to support off-the-radar art that is illegible to the corporate machine. Attending Hildegard25 would be a nice start!