Storytelling and Catastrophe: World Rebuilding, World Reimagining

To call something a catastrophe, then, is not only a first-order observation about the way the world is but also a second-order judgment about the way the world should be. Catastrophes are not simply events causing death and destruction (like accidents, disasters, or calamities), but moments of “overturning” or “a subversion of the order or system of things” (Oxford English Dictionary). Catastrophe happens when concepts fail, when the trauma of history overwhelms taken-for-granted powers of experience, thought, and language.
—Jonathon Catlin, “Toward an Interdisciplinary Conceptual History of Catastrophe”

We are storytellers. We compose the narrative of our existence to share with others, sometimes to invite them in and sometimes to shut them out—every story is shaped by our relation with others. However, the shock of violence, of catastrophe, sudden or slow, renders language useless. At the limits of history, our usual stories fall apart. And yet, words are also sound, utterances carried on breath. Music, built from those same vibrations, can continue the work of storytelling when language can no longer bear its weight.

What, then, can music communicate? What can it remember, imagine, or repair? Music quietly structures our daily experience, our perspectives, helping us to make sense of ourselves and one another. The shape of music becomes the shape of our lives. The ritual practices (both ordinary and transcendent) that order our existence take on the emotional rhythm of vibration and frequency. In the grain of our voices, the contours of our narratives, and the recursive but ever-changing stages of our personal and communal growth, our lives take on the form of song. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote, “Music is the melody to which the world is the text.”¹

A story, a narrative, may imply a single, linear thread. Musical stories, however, can be impressions, fragments, atmospheres that resist easy signification. The sounds that compose these stories become modes of relation: between performers, audiences, listeners, non-human entities; between sounds and experience, gesture and sight; between history, the present, and possible futures.

The most flexible instrument of storytelling is, of course, the voice. In TOPOS 2026, one recurring theme is the presence (or absence) of the voice: spoken, sung, sampled, silenced. Edward George’s podcast The Strangeness of Jazz and his film Black Atlas are vehicles for rediscovering lost histories and narrating forgotten stories. Together, they assemble a plurality of voices that weave contrapuntally through a timeline neglected by history’s hegemony of whiteness. By mining the Warburg Institute’s Image of the Black archive in London, George gives voice to those silenced in the margins of Euro-American history.

IMA’s evocative use of Japanese poetry invites us into their musical world. The poetry’s ghostly presence (and eventual disappearance) serves as a Dantean guide through subterranean terrain. The voice also features prominently in Miho Hatori’s Paris Syndrome, where Hatori herself becomes a guide, narrator, and chanteuse, sliding in and out of popular music genres while circumscribing an allegorical realm inflected by science fiction and eco-futurism. In Paris Syndrome, we become tourists, but what we are meant to see—and feel—remains open, ultimately subjective. The work shifts and reshapes perception like water rolling downstream.

The Silent Light, as the group’s name implies, lends voice to the characters of Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1927 silent film A Page of Madness. Heavy metal collides with expressionist depictions of violence and mental illness as the overwhelming, frantic, and at times introspective soundtrack becomes an articulation of the unspeakable.

Within the chorus of these voices, we ultimately find our own, telling stories to ourselves and to one another, narrating possibilities, crafting hope.

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When we gather to experience music, our individual stories collide, creating an electric moment of vitality, excitement, inquiry, bafflement, the full ambit of reaction and relation. Even when we listen alone, through our earbuds, headphones, or speakers, the presence of others endures. The sound of collectivity—of someone or some people making music—flows into our ears and through our bodies.

Music—that is, sound in all its permutations—is a flow state. Time and history fold into a shared moment wherein everyone and every place coexist in a common tempo. Rhythmic grids (backbeats, strong and weak beats, bar lines, pulses, measures), the very containers that organize musical time, blur and melt; we slip out of regularity and fall into the in-between. Here, new possibilities emerge as the boundaries between ourselves and others become permeable. In this space, we can reshape or transmute our experience, and perhaps even our relationships with each other and to the worlds we inhabit.

As Edward George remarks in his liner notes to Paul Abbott’s album Slip, “to slip, in a heartbeat, is to descend not into the grid of the even meter accorded to the heartbeat, whose rhythmic correlate is the drummer’s task of conserving in music an imaginary solid state, but into a play of mutability and modality. To change is the condition of the heart.”²

Indeed, change is the very substance of music. A breath shifts, a finger glides, the throat tightens: the smallest gesture can alter an entire sonic landscape. Sound is never still. From one utterance to the next, tone to tone, even silence moves—an undercurrent of felt time carrying us toward the next sonic event.

Victor Zuckerkandl describes tones not as fixed objects but as fluctuating singularities: “The dynamic quality of a tone ... is a statement of its incompleteness, its will to completion. To hear a tone as dynamic quality, as a direction, a pointing, means hearing at the same time beyond it ... [w]e are ... always between the tones, on the way ....”³ He suggests that every tone generates a field of instability, a vector reaching beyond itself. Within this precarity lies possibility. For what? Possibility for new ways of sensing, for ugliness or beauty, and perhaps, most generously, for imagining a world otherwise.

In the same way that we author and tell our stories, we build worlds. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, “After all, storytelling, in its sensory aspect, is by no means a job for the voice alone. Rather, in genuine storytelling the hand plays a part which supports what is expressed in a hundred ways with its gestures trained by work.”⁴ If storytelling is made not only through language but through gesture, then so too are what I have called musical stories. Music can provide the site—the topos—where our lives take shape. Sometimes abstract, sometimes instantly physical, it is always a space for us to create meaning together.

Another thread through TOPOS 2026 is the creation of music in the present moment: the composition of sound through the immediacy of breath, the tips of the fingers, and attentive listening. The music of Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith, of IMA (Amma Ateria, electronics; Nava Dunkelman, percussion); Edward George and Paul Abbott; and the artists of ImprovSpaces (Rock City Falls Trio and Sun Dogs) does not emerge from spontaneity alone, or from arbitrary sonic gesture. Rather, it emerges from years of inquiry and experience, springing from the manifold threads that have fashioned each artist’s life. In performance, those accumulated histories become newly present, opening worlds that are at once deeply personal and profoundly shared.

For instance, Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith’s Defiant Life inhabits a landscape of sorrow, beneath which currents of grief and anger carry the music toward an immediate but unknowable future. Like a bridge being built as it is crossed, its trajectory remains unresolved. The music performs its own disappearance. Its world is spare; the spaces between gestures are often overwhelming. Throughout the elegiac work, Iyer’s recurring piano octaves (particularly at the start of the final movement, “Procession”) advance with what at first feels like despair. Yet their insistence gradually gathers into something else: a quiet, dogged hope. By reinforcing a single pitch, the octave lends it weight and resolve, fortifying fragility without erasing it.

Meanwhile, Smith’s plaintive trumpet lines float weightlessly above the web of Iyer’s emotive arabesques. Each phrase carried on a breath, sustained, then released: each exhalation an ending, each inhalation a sanguine beginning. Though the work may seem like a reaction or meditation on the artists’ “ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties” (Defiant Life was composed in 2025), Iyer and Smith maintain that it is also a testament to their “faith in human possibility.”⁵ This possibility is the foundation for world rebuilding and reimagining. Hope, like music, is fragile, existing only as long as it is continually renewed. In times of ongoing catastrophe, its perpetual remaking becomes not simply an artistic act, but an ethical one.

It feels as though the world we inhabit, the futures once promised to us, is fraying at the edges, our political present unfolding as a series of continuous catastrophe—catastrophic precisely in its ordinariness. Upward mobility, the fulfillment of basic needs (food, clothing, shelter, meaningful work), as well as financial security, political freedom, and collective care remain under constant threat. We view our world from positions of precarity, of insecurity.

Our contemporary moment is marked by an enduring and enigmatic present. We dither, lingering in suspension, neither fully arriving nor moving beyond. Lauren Berlant names this historical condition an impasse, a “middle without boundaries, edges, a shape. It is experienced in transitions and transactions. It is the name for the space where the urgencies of livelihood are worked out all over again, without the assurances of futurity, but nevertheless proceeding via durable norms of adaptation.”⁶ Yet the unceasing catastrophe of history, piling wreckage upon wreckage toward the sky, borne relentlessly forward as Walter Benjamin describes in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, need not be accepted as inevitable. For Benjamin, history is not a fatal march toward an ordained end but a constellation that can arrest the flow of time when we attend to the present with sufficient care. It is in this pause, one which Benjamin suffuses with the mystery of divinity, that “the old regime is overthrown and the new order composed.”⁷

How, then, might we imagine this new order? If stories are among the ways we remake the world, and if art and music help shape these stories, then perhaps we can turn to them not for certainty but for possibility. As Zuckerkandl reminds us, “we are always between the tones, on the way ....”⁸

The artists gathered for TOPOS 2026 shepherd time and create spaces in ways unique to their voices. They open sites for storytelling and world-shaping, rituals of contemplation and transformation, moments of encounter, vulnerability, and release. To make music is to enter into relation with others. The struggle contained within the historical present, like the instability carried within every sounding tone, is something we engage together. Here, perhaps, lie the stakes of music-making. Tossed amid a sea of catastrophe, music offers practices of mutual attention and collective care. Gathering intentionally, making music together, listening intently, all become ways not only of enduring precarity, but of keeping one another afloat.

NOTES
Epigraph
Jonathon Catlin, “Toward an Interdisciplinary Conceptual History of Catastrophe,” EuropeNow Journal, Campus Spotlight on Princeton University (January 30, 2022), https://www.europenowjournal.org .
1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 286.
2. Edward George, liner notes for Paul Abbott, Slip, Otoroku ROKU041LP, 2025, double LP.
3. Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1956), 136–7.
4. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1968), 108.
5. Vijay Iyer, liner notes for Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith, Defiant Life, ECM Records ECM 2835, 2025, LP.
6. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), 200.
7. Gregory Marks, "Apocalypse Never: Walter Benjamin, the Anthropocene, and the Deferral of the End," SFRA Review 51, no. 2 (August 2021): 184–90, https://doi.org/10.26181/24586512.v1 .
8. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 136–7.