The Paradox of the Canon: Edward W. Said and musical transgression

Abstract

Said's chief claim to fame as a scholar is the contribution he made to understanding the power and knowledge behind European colonialism. Less well known is his contribution to music, specifically classical music, which formed a prominent focus of his intellectual energies during the latter years of his life. For Said, who was a proficient pianist who had trained at Julliard, music formed an important backdrop to his overall intellectual project, providing methodological insights such as a “contrapuntal reading” of literature and history. Yet, this aspect of Said's work has not received the critical attention it deserves, something this paper endeavours to redress. It provides a genealogy of Said's musical interests from his days in Cairo through to his collaborations with the conductor Daniel Barenboim and argues that music, more than any of the other cultural phenomena in which Said took an avid interest, was paradigmatic, providing a model political universe, at once utopian and revolutionary.

But you're not separating it (professional life): you're just leading it in different ways. It's like the voices of a fugue. A fugue can contain two, three, four or five voices: they're all part of the same composition, but they're each distinct. They operate together, and it's a question of how you conceive of the togetherness: if you think that it's got to be this or that, then you're paralysed; then you're either Mallarmé or Bakunin, which is an absurd opposition. (Edward Said, quoted in Salusinszky, 1987, p. 147)

Notes

1. The conductor Daniel Barenboim, a friend of Said, noted how a dejected Said asked him to play one of the piano works for four hands by Schubert “because I need it to survive” (Barenboim, 2005, p. 164).

2. In this period Said became increasingly interested in the “late style” of other artists, which he argued can be more private and introspective, as well as iconoclastic. See his enthusiastic review of Maynard Solomon's Late Beethoven, which would have been one of his last pieces of writing (Said, 2003b).

3. In addition to having his position at Columbia threatened (Fisk, 2003), Said was regularly subject to death threats, accused of being terrorist and anti-Jewish (Said & Rose, 1988, p.79). Further, when the BBC invited him to present its 1993 Reith Lectures the invitation evinced negative press commentary, that he was rampantly anti-Western (Said, 1994, p. x).

4. This included university “think tanks,” such as London University's Centre of Oriental Studies, that specialized in “knowing” Eastern societies and cultures and, eventually, African ones and which, in the words of Lord Curzon, were parts of the “necessary furniture of Empire” (cited in Said, 1993, p. 214). It also included what Mackenzie has called the centripetal effects of Empire, which were expressed in the iconography and narratives of popular culture, which were shot through with discourses of inferiority, thereby helping to “trash” any “home” opposition to colonialism (see Mackenzie, 1984, pp. 23–28).

5. It was not that Cairo was a musical desert during the 1930s and 1940s, when Said was growing up. On the contrary it was an oasis: there was an Opera House at which Said heard Lohengrin, Andrea Chénier, and the Barber of Seville (Said, 2000a, p. 96). The Berlin Philharmonic, under its then conductor Wolfgang Furtwängler, whom he regarded as an “emanation,” also made regular visits. These experiences gave Said a “taste for the actuality of performance” (Barenboim & Said, 2003, p. 17).

6. In relation to some problems that string players were encountering with one of his quartets, Beethoven is said to have quipped that it was not written for them but a later generation of players (McCallum, 2005).

7. This is one of the reasons why Boulez, after enjoying a productive relationship with Cage in the late 1940s and 1950s (see their correspondence, Nettiez, 1993), finally broke with him.

8. Western composers have not been circumspect in embracing Orientalism and it is ironic that Said, given his deep passion for music, did not undertake an analysis of its features. Musical orientalism begins with Mozart's Seraglio and continues through to Saint-Saëns’ compositional flirtation with Gamelan and Puccini's two eastern operas, Turandot (interesting in terms of its portrayal of despotism) and Madame Butterfly, and on into the 20th century with Béla Bartók's searing depiction of Eastern salacity in his ballet The Miraculous Mandarin. English composers such as Holst (who wrote a Sanskrit opera), Bantock (who read Persian and Arabic), and Foulds (who spent the latter years of his life in India composing music for ensembles of traditional Indian instruments) were particularly interested in forging a syncretism between Eastern and Western modes of music (see Mackenzie, 1995), as were a number of American composers, e.g. Lou Harrison (Cage's one time collaborator) and Colin MacPhee (interested in Balinese music).

9. Even in milder political climates, such as that of England, composers have suffered for espousing non-mainstream ideologies, e.g. the Christian socialist Rutland Boughton (see Stradling & Hughes, 1993, p. 207) and the communist Alan Bush.

10. I have not been able to trace this remark, which was allegedly made during an interview with a “record executive.” It is not included in Tim Page's collection of Glenn Gould's writings (Page, 1987).

11. As was his wont, Said overstated his argument. Although he paid heed to those not guilty of epistemological tunnel vision, e.g. Richard Leppert (1988) and Susan McClary (1991), there is now a large body of literature examining the context of music, admittedly not always written by musicologists, e.g. Stradling and Hughes (1993), which is of course Said's point.

12. It was not their only musical initiative in this regard. Daniel Barenboim (described as the Bob Geldof of classical music) (Quinn, 2005, p. 21) and Edward Said held a recital on the West Bank, at the settlement of Bir Zeit, which Israeli soldiers had occupied. In 2005 the orchestra that they founded, now called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, with Barenboim conducting, released its first CD and DVD, of Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and Verdi (Warner Classics, 2564 62190-2).