The Parallax Worlds of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra

Abstract

The West–Eastern Divan Orchestra – founded in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim with the support of Edward W. Said in response to the Israel–Palestine conflict – brings together young Arabs, Jews and Spaniards for a workshop and concert tour every year. It displays a tension between repertoire (exclusively the Western classical tradition) and marketing (as an expression of inter-cultural dialogue). Drawing on fieldwork from 2006, the article analyses this tension as it evolves for players who shift repeatedly between the demands of Western orchestral playing and political discussion. It exposes the way the hierarchy of musical roles and the discourse elaborated around them create an environment that erases the political identities of players; and discusses the ways in which this environment is punctured at certain moments by a discursive or practical intervention, causing political allegiances to rise back to the surface explosively (only to be subsumed once again into music). Although the orchestra is set up to oppose the violence of war in the Middle East, it can be seen to contain its own disconcertingly coercive regime, one emerging from its hierarchical constitution with Barenboim as omnipotent leader, the professional ambitions of players, and the power that music can have in confounding the conceptual sphere.

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to Daniel Barenboim and Mariam Said for allowing me to be present at the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra's workshop and tour in 2006, and to organizers Tabaré Perlas and Nicole Foster, who were very helpful in introducing me to instrumental teachers and players. I am also grateful to all former and current participants who spoke with me; and to staff at the Barenboim–Said Foundation who sent me archived reviews of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra's tours of 2005 and 2006. I also offer thanks to Avi Shlaim for showing me his private archive of minutes of meetings and correspondence (2004–5), to Jason Stanyek for a somewhat heated discussion, and to Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Abigail Wood and Paula Higgins, whose advice enabled me to improve earlier forms of this article substantially. Errors remaining are my own. Research for the article was made possible by a Small Grant from the British Academy and a Small Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. An earlier version was presented in February 2007 at the Institute for Musical Research in London, during a Study Day entitled ‘Music and (Dis)placement’.

Notes

¹The opening sentence reads: ‘Suddenly, classical music has become sexy.’ See ‘Barenboim's Harmonious Message Goes Beyond Classical Music’, Observer, 30 April 2006, 28.

²The Pacific Music Festival, established in 1990 by Leonard Bernstein, aspires to symbolize and enact a utopia of peace: ‘The letter “P” in PMF [Pacific Music Festival] stands for “Peace”. Bernstein's passionate wish to contribute to world peace through music is carried on every year through PMF’ (<http://www.pmf.or.jp/en/about/whats/index.html>, accessed 30 March 2008). The ‘World Orchestra for Peace’, founded by Georg Solti in 1995 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the United Nations, is a contrasting example.

³Ghada Karmi, ‘Can Jews and Arabs Use the Arts and Work Together for Peace?’, first published in Arabic in Al-Hayat in August 2003, reproduced in English by the Levantine Cultural Centre (<http://www.levantinecenter.org/pages/ghada_karmi_page.html>, accessed 2 December 2005).

⁴Daniel Barenboim (2002), quoted in an information pack distributed to the press in Seville, August 2006.

⁵See ‘Prominent Arab Musician Doubts the Value of Music as Tool to Promote Peace’, reproducing extracts from Ha'aretz, 2 April 2002 (<http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=16491>, accessed 15 April 2006).

⁶See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993), 59, where the author writes that Western cultural forms should be read ‘contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominant discourse acts’. I engage with Said's work in more detail in an additional article about the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra. See ‘Whose Utopia?’, Music and Politics, 3 (2009), <http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics/archive/2009-2/beckles_willson.html>.

⁷Quoted in Rod Usher, ‘Hearts and Minds’, Time Europe Magazine, 25 August 2002 (<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901020902-340702,00.html>, accessed 15 February 2006).

⁸Ben Etherington, ‘Instrumentalising Musical Ethics: Said and the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra’, Australasian Music Research, 9 (2007), 121–9. Etherington (pp. 127–8) points out that there is a tension between Said's ideals of irreconcilable counterpoint and Barenboim's emphasis on settlement and resolution. As he further points out, Said conjoined ‘atonality’ with ‘counterpoint’ in the final chapter of Culture and Imperialism, whereas the Divan's repertoire has been stoutly tonal. Nevertheless, Barenboim introduced Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra, op. 31, into the Divan's repertoire in 2007, which refutes Etherington's charge.

⁹My preliminary interviewees were: on the administrative side, Mariam C. Said (New York, 2 February 2006) and Yaron Ezrahi (Jerusalem, 2 January 2006, and Chicago, 18 April 2006) from the Board of Trustees, and Matias Tarnopolsky, who set up the Chicago workshop in 2001 (New York, 14 January 2006); and, on the musical side: Clifford Colnot, who trains the orchestra before Barenboim arrives at workshops (Chicago, 9 April 2006), HG (Syria; New York, 9 February 2006), QW (Israel; by telephone, 9 April 2006), FV (a German living in Israel who played at the concert in Ramallah in 2005, standing in for an absent orchestral member; by telephone, 22 December 2005) and SD (USA), who was invited to play at the Chicago workshop in 2001 when the Egyptians did not arrive as planned (Chicago, 25 April 2006). Players who provided me with information and commentary are referred to here by invented initials, because a large number of them wished to preserve their anonymity; I provide the country of their citizenship in brackets following the initials. Where I quote statements made by players to the press in which they identified themselves, I give their names.

¹⁰Although I had prepared to attend the entire workshop, beginning in the last week of July, the organizers requested that I should allow the musicians to have a few days to settle down without my questioning them. Telephone conversation with Tabaré Perlas, 24 July 2006.

¹¹According to Matias Tarnopolsky (see note 9), although the Ministry of Culture had given permission for the Egyptian players to attend in 2001, the head of the Cairo Conservatory instructed them not to; even interventions by the Egyptian Ambassador to the USA, the US Ambassador to Egypt and the US State Department were ineffective. According to Barenboim (speaking at a symposium gathered at the workshop in 2004), the orchestra voted unanimously to go ahead with the concert in 2003 despite the suicide bombing. Minutes taken at the symposium of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra by Avi Shlaim (Avi Shlaim's personal archive), p. 1. (I discuss the symposium in more detail below.)

¹²James Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1997), 188–219. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN, and London, 1985); Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (London, 1973), 458–60.

¹³Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

¹⁴Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, 192. Clifford quotes, here, from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation (London, 1992), 6–7, to explore her concern with the ‘conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ that characterized relations between colonial collectors and the local people from whom they collected.

¹⁵Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, 196, 193.

¹⁶See Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, ed. Ara Guzelimian (London, 2002), 6–10.

¹⁷The work of the Foundation is primarily educational: it runs three other major projects, namely the Academy for Orchestral Studies and the Early Childhood Education Project in Andalucia, and the Musical Education Project in Palestine (see <http://www.barenboim-said.org>). The Free International Music School (see <http://www.free-international-music-school.de>) is also financed by the Foundation.

¹⁸Alan Riding, ‘Harmony Across a Divide’, New York Times, 20 August 2006.

¹⁹For an introduction to Andalusian nationalism, see Khalid Duran, ‘Andalusia's Nostalgia for Progress and Harmonious Heresy’, Middle East Report, 178 (September–October 1992), 20–3.

²⁰Conversation between the author and HG (Syria), New York, 9 February 2006. When I asked four Spanish players about negative perceptions of the Barenboim–Said Foundation in Spain (SA, FD, TR and JN), they were not comfortable discussing it at all. Some were charmingly evasive, and FD admitted only after I asked him about it several times that he knew there was resentment in schools in Cordoba, but asked me not to tell anyone else he had told me this.

²¹When Barenboim conducted Parsifal in Seville during the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra's workshop there in 2005, about 25 students from local music schools demonstrated outside the theatre, holding placards protesting about the Divan. ‘La ciudad de los mangazos’ (‘The City of Mangazos’), ABC Sevilla, 1 September 2006; ‘El músico mimado por la Junta’ (‘The Musician Spoilt by the Junta’), Diario de Jerez, 3 September 2006; ‘Proyectos de lujo’ (‘Luxury Projects’), El Mundo, 6 September 2006. The broader context for these articles is the corruption associated with the Spanish Socialist Party since the 1980s, and a strong trend of localism in the region. Thanks to Eva Moreda-Rodríguez for translating these articles, and for some very helpful conversations.

²²For a portrayal of discussions leading up to the event, as well as the concert itself, see Paul Smaczny with the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra/Daniel Barenboim, Knowledge is the Beginning: The Ramallah Concert (EuroArts Music International and WarnerClassics, DVD 2564 62792-2, 2005), disc 1, track 8, and disc 2.

²³The entire episode, including a response from the Minister of Education and Barenboim's reply to that, can be see on Smaczny, Knowledge is the Beginning, disc 1, track 2. The text can also be read at <http://www.danielbarenboim.com/journal_wolfprizespeech.htm>.

²⁴Avi Shlaim's private archive has enabled me to reconstruct the political ambitions of the symposium members, and some of Barenboim's subsequent attempts to shift EU policy in the Middle East. For the declaration text, see <http://www.danielbarenboim.com/journal_symposium2004.htm>, accessed 6 August 2006.

²⁵See Felipe González, ‘Palestine: Un nuevo relato’ (‘Palestine: A New Story’), El Pais, 3 September 2004, and Avi Shlaim, ‘Cuatro días en Sevilla’ (‘Four Days in Seville’), El Pais, 9 September 2004. An article by Mustafa Barghouti, ‘In Search of a New Vision’, seems not to have been published in El Pais, but is preserved in English in Avi Shlaim's personal archive. Shlaim also wrote Barenboim a briefing paper for the meeting with Schroeder. On the death of Arafat in November of the same year, Barenboim wrote an article about the political landscape and promoted Barghouti within it. See ‘¡El autócrata ha muerto! ¡Viva el pueblo!’ (‘The Autocrat is Dead! Long Live the People!’), El Pais, 16 November 2004.

²⁶Text by Daniel Barenboim, <http://west-easterndivan.artists.warner.de>, accessed 16 September 2006.

²⁷See Barenboim and Said, Parallels and Paradoxes, 6–10.

²⁸Etherington, ‘Instrumentalising Musical Ethics’, 127. Etherington is referring to Smaczny, Knowledge is the Beginning.

²⁹SD (USA), reporting on the Chicago workshop of 2001 (conversation with the author, Chicago, 25 April 2006; see also note 9), and QW (Israel). QW thought that some kind of mediation or pastoral support – with professionals equipped to deal with social conflict, rather than literature and politics – would have been more beneficial to the young people attending. Conversation with the author, by telephone, 9 April 2006.

³⁰They included three film showings, visits to a range of museums in Weimar when the orchestra played there, and a trip to the former concentration camp at Buchenwald. The films were It's Not a Gun, a documentary about a music-education venture in Palestine led by one of the Divan players, Ramzi Abouredwan; Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said by Makoto Sato; and the West–Eastern Divan's documentary of workshops from earlier years. It's Not a Gun, a film by Pierre-Nicolas Durand and Helena Cotinier, was made by IDEO Productions, France, in 2006. See <http://www.alkamandjati.com>; Smaczny, Knowledge is the Beginning.

³¹This film offers a critical presentation of the new Israeli security wall by documenting its impact on Palestinian quality of life. Wall, Simone Bitton, 2004 (now available from Artificial Eye, 2006).

³²Minutes taken by Avi Shlaim, 27 July 2005. Avi Shlaim's personal archive.

³³ Minutes taken by Avi Shlaim, 26 July 2005.

³⁴Pilas, 5 August 2006; Berlin, 26 August 2006. There is a sense in which Barenboim had invited speakers to prove the legitimacy of his own view to players; similarly, players themselves attempted to use the speakers to come to their own position. This was particularly apparent in the case of Joschka Fischer, who disagreed with Barenboim on certain points and thereby brought considerable pleasure to some of the Israeli players.

³⁵HG (Syria), interview, New York, 9 February 2006. During the symposium discussion Nicole Foster said that Arabs and Israelis were getting on well with one another at the workshop, but the film had portrayed Israelis as monsters – this was the problem. Minutes taken by Avi Shlaim, 27 July 2005. Avi Shlaim's personal archive.

³⁶GB (Israel), interview, Weimar, 28 August 2006.

³⁷DC (Israel) said to me in conversation on 4 August that she thought they were ‘important’; she also told me that she herself came from a ‘mixed-race school’. BN (Egypt) told me in conversation on 3 August that he liked the discussions in 2005, and found them balanced. He missed them in 2006, regretting that the days were passing with no comment from Barenboim about the situation, aside from a short speech he made at the beginning to the effect that everyone should be aware that it was difficult for some people to be there.

³⁸Towards the end of the 2006 tour, discussions emerged that certain players initiated and then led themselves. These addressed the function of the orchestra, the difficulty of maintaining contact with one another during the rest of the year, and the political situation more broadly. In a sense, then, players were working towards creating a ‘contact zone’ themselves, and attempting to set an agenda that would benefit them – and perhaps even Israel and Palestine – more satisfactorily. Barenboim and Mariam Said were in response mode at this point, and noted the ideas that the players had. In the following year, when I visited the orchestra for three days during its Salzburg-based workshop, it was clear that the players’ request for language tuition had been taken fully on board: both Hebrew and Arabic lessons were available daily at the workshop. However, very few players were taking advantage of this.

³⁹RB, of Palestinian parentage, 6 August 2006. Another Arab player born outside the region was similarly aligned, remarking with wry amusement that not only was he playing under Barenboim now, but that ‘another Jew’ had given him his first significant professional appointment in an orchestra in the USA.

⁴⁰JM (Israel), 2 August 2006. He also said that it was very hard for Israelis to accept what he referred to as Barenboim's ‘one-sided, pro-Arab position’.

⁴¹Smaczny, Knowledge is the Beginning, disc 1, track 2.

⁴²GH (Arab player now resident elsewhere), 4 August 2006. When I contacted this player in 2008, he nevertheless took a very different position, namely that as a musician he did raise awareness of the situation, and participated in several fund-raising events – ‘more than many politicians back home’. Email exchange, 19 July 2008.

⁴³Mariam Said, conversation with the author, New York, 2 February 2006.

⁴⁴An orchestral workshop for younger Palestinians, conducted by Anna Bruenning, was underway parallel with the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra. There were 16 players from Beit Jala, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth and Ramallah; they were selected by their teachers, who are employed by the Barenboim–Said Foundation.

⁴⁵Barenboim and Said, Parallels and Paradoxes, 7–9.

⁴⁶‘Regulatory Requirements for Entering the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra’, <http://www.barenboim-said.org/index.php?id=320#A>, accessed 27 February 2008 (emphasis added).

⁴⁷In 2006 there was a player from the USA who had Sudanese parents.

⁴⁸From the way in which players grouped themselves socially, this was clearly true of smaller sections such as individual woodwind, percussion and brass, even during the fraught workshop of 2006. One brass player told me that ‘brass players are always great […] we're brothers’. RB (USA/Palestine), 6 August 2006.

⁴⁹Mariam Said, conversation with the author, New York, 2 February 2006.

⁵⁰Informal musical exchanges may have suffered similarly. During my time at the workshop and on the tour there were three sessions of informal playing and dancing after dinners, during which only certain Arabs and the Turkish player played drums. See also notes 53, 56.

⁵¹Barenboim, Reith Lectures 2006, no. 4, ‘Meeting in Music’. All Barenboim's Reith Lectures can be accessed at <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006>.

⁵²RF (Palestine), conversation with the author, 3 August 2006; AS (Israel), conversation with the author, 1 August 2006. In previous years, according to several individuals, the groups intermingled of their own accord more rapidly (and this occurred towards the end of the 2006 tour, some weeks later, when the war was over). During the workshop it was easy to identify Arab tables, Israeli tables and Spanish tables during mealtimes, and Barenboim, apparently angered by the self-segregation, regularly threatened to organize the seating of orchestral desks to force players to intermingle while making music.

⁵³These more sceptical players were generally those who played Arabic music, or who chose for other reasons to set themselves apart from the orchestra's seductive career-facilitating potential (of which more below). In 2006, of the 24 players with Arab backgrounds only five claimed competence in the performance of Arabic music. There was no public sign of any Jewish Israeli playing Arabic music at the workshop. It might be expected that those with Sephardic backgrounds would be more interested in such music, and the Jewish players in 2006 were almost exclusively of Ashkenazi genealogy. See also notes 50, 56.

⁵⁴Interview with HG (Syria), New York, 9 February 2006.

⁵⁵This conversation can be heard and seen on Paul Smaczny's film Daniel Barenboim: 50 Years of Stage (EuroArts Music International, 2-DVD set, B007DA4G0, 2000). See disc 2, ‘Multiple Identities: Encounters with Daniel Barenboim’, track 11. An edited version of the same story is present in a conversation published in Barenboim and Said, Parallels and Paradoxes, 10.

⁵⁶QW (Israel) expressed concern about this matter, in addition to unhappiness about the fact that the Arabic music jam sessions tended to trigger belly-dancing and a general debasement in behaviour, which contributed to the stereotype of its lack of seriousness (and a lack of value in Arabs). Thanks to this player for sharing a relevant essay that was submitted as part of university studies, and for discussing the orchestra with me in interview on the telephone, 9 April 2006. Belly-dancing in Israel is a fairly recent fashion, absorbed from the USA. See Einav Galit-Nissinbaum, ‘Belly Dancing in Israel’, The Performance of Jewish and Arab Music in Israel Today, ed. Amnon Shiloah (Musical Performance: An International Journal, 1 (1997), Special Issue), 55–67. It is worth noting that the orchestra's promotional double DVD set draws on Arabic music as background and to set atmospheres, but does not acknowledge the sources of the music in its credits. Smaczny, Knowledge is the Beginning.

⁵⁷Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992). As a measure of its impact, see also The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, ed. Michael Talbot (Liverpool, 2000), and Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge, 2003).

⁵⁸Goehr, The Imaginary Museum, 286.

⁵⁹Attali, Noise, 65–7.

⁶⁰Canetti, Crowds and Power, 460.

⁶¹Edward T. Cone, The Composer's Voice (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1974). For an enlightening discussion of Cone's notion of musical domination, see Fred Everett Maus, ‘The Disciplined Subject of Musical Analysis’, Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’ Antonio (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2004), 13–43.

⁶²Cone, The Composer's Voice, 126–35.

⁶³Smaczny, Knowledge is the Beginning, disc 1, track 1.

⁶⁴Daniel Cohen (Israel). Cohen's commentary was included on the website accompanying CNN's film Barenboim Revealed, broadcast on 14, 15 and 16 October 2006. See ‘Bio: What Others Say’, <http://edition.cnn.com/CNNI/Programs/revealed/barenboim>, accessed 19 October 2006. I am grateful to Stefanie Kasriel for sending me a DVD recording of the film.

⁶⁵GB (Israel), comment made to a journalist directly following the concert in Madrid, 10 August 2006.

⁶⁶‘Bio: What Others Say’ (see note 64).

⁶⁷See note 61.

⁶⁸One complained that he was very harsh (DC (Israel)), and another said humorously: ‘it's not his fault, there's a smaller man standing behind him and he feels the pressu re’ (MN (Spain)). Pilas, 2 August 2006, conversation in a group with the author.

⁶⁹CV (Israel), Pilas, 2 August 2006. Although this was the main view at the 2006 workshop, it is worth noting that QW (Israel) claimed the opposite, namely that Colnot's training was what made the orchestra what it was: he built it up. Interview with the author, by telephone, 9 April 2006. Colnot's own perspective on the situation is that ‘there is no point in anyone else conducting the concerts. Nobody else has Barenboim's musical presence. It would downgrade the whole thing.’ Interview with the author, Chicago, 9 April 2006.

⁷⁰A large number of players have won scholarships from the Barenboim–Said Foundation to study with teachers in Germany. Israeli QW expressed a sense of having ‘used’ the West–Eastern Divan to facilitate further studies, and now considered the connection regrettable. This seemed to be linked to a primarily negative perception of the orchestra that had developed over the years of participation. Interview, by telephone, 9 April 2006.

⁷¹AS (Israel) said that the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra was one of the best orchestral festivals, but that Verbier was better from the perspective that players were paid to be there. Conversation with the author, 4 August 2006. Although none of the players affected voiced it to me directly, I was told by others that it has become a burden to those who are not students (since they have to turn down other work to be there), who nonetheless feel they cannot avoid attending.

⁷²HG (Syria), interview with the author, New York, 9 February 2006.

⁷³Since James George Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London, 1980), anthropologists have grappled with the concept of ‘sympathy’, whereby someone imitating something else gains power over the original by becoming similar to it. For a more recent exploration, see Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (London and New York, 1993).

⁷⁴This cigar trademark itself has a noble mimetic history: it was Artur Rubinstein who gave Barenboim his first cigar when he was 14 years old, according to Rubinstein's daughter. Alina Rubinstein on Barenboim Revealed. Rubinstein's recollection was also included on a website accompanying the programme; ‘Bio: What Others Say’ (see note 64).

⁷⁵In the ensuing year ER fared better, because he was asked to prepare the orchestra for Pierre Boulez's visit, and received from Barenboim both general feedback and constructive criticism during rehearsal. Email communication from ER, 12 May 2008.

⁷⁶The following list is based on information on <http://www.danielbarenboim.com>, accessed 27 June 2008. 2002: Federal Cross of Merit (Germany), Prince of Asturias Award for Concord (Spain), Tolerance Prize, Evangelische Akademie Tutzing (Germany); 2004: Wolf Prize (Israel), Buber-Rosenzweig-Medal (Germany), Haviva Reik Peace Award (Israel); 2005: Special Ambassador of Music Prize of Echo Klassik (Germany); 2006: Kulturgroschen Award, Peace Prize from the Korn and Gerstenmann Foundation and the Music Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (all Germany); 2007: Goethe Medal (Germany), Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal (UK), honorary doctorate, University of Oxford (UK); 2008: honorary doctorate, School of Oriental and African Studies (UK), Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur (France), Ambassador for Peace (United Nations), Praemium Imperiale (Japan).

⁷⁷See note 13.

⁷⁸ See note 13, 334.

⁷⁹AS (Israel), 8 August 2006, and DY (Israel), 29 August 2006. Conversations with the author.

⁸⁰There was one other player who mingled a lot, namely WS (Egypt).

⁸¹The main focus of my fieldwork was not to discover precisely what players thought about the war; I was more interested in what players thought about playing in the Divan while the war was going on. Nevertheless, and partly because some did not wish to talk about it so categorically, it emerged clearly that some Egyptians did not criticize Israel as uniformly as the Jordanians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians.

⁸²This was a Jordanian, ED. RF (Palestine) expressed his ambivalence about attending by saying that his journey from the West Bank to the airport in Amman was the first time he had approached each of the three checkpoints hoping to be stopped. Both he and ED (who decided to come to the workshop only five hours prior to leaving home) said that another player (DF, Jordan) had encouraged them to come, telling them not to think about the politics but to benefit from Barenboim as a musician. Individual conversations with the author, Pilas, 3 August 2006. DF, meanwhile, told me that Mariam Said had persuaded him to come. Conversation with the author, Istanbul, 16 August 2006.

⁸³TG, Weimar, 27 August 2006. TG suggested to the organizers by telephone a change of programme and a minute's silence at concerts, but these suggestions were not taken up.

⁸⁴Pilas, 7 August 2008. I attended the interview, and later that day checked the recorded footage (for which thanks to Stefanie Kasriel). This extract was not finally included in the CNN website or the television film Barenboim Revealed (see note 64).

⁸⁵ Barenboim Revealed.

⁸⁶At the time of writing, the website is still in existence with the tour dates from 2006 and a text about ‘the new “West–Eastern Divan” website’. See <http://west-easterndivan.artists.warner.de>.

⁸⁷Pilas, 7 August 2008 (see note 84).

⁸⁸The film showing and discussion was on the evening of 2 August 2008.

⁸⁹It is worth noting that this rhetorical position coexisted with political statements. Two of these were presented on the website launched at the end of July 2006 (and apparently unaltered since then): ‘There is no military solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict’ and ‘The destinies of the Israeli and Palestinian people are inextricably linked and the land that some call Greater Israel and others Palestine is a land for two people’ (<http://west-easterndivan.artists.warner.de>, accessed 16 September 2006).

⁹⁰The presence of Avi Shlaim and Raja Shehadeh was the only trace of any of the former years’ symposia. They were invited to the workshop to lead discussion with players, but in fact neither was called upon in this capacity.

⁹¹BN, group conversation, Pilas, 8 August 2006.

⁹²Mina Zikri, quoted in Riding, ‘Harmony Across a Divide’, 2.

⁹³LK (Israel), conversation with the author, Istanbul, 16 August 2006.

⁹⁴These players did not attempt to obstruct or prevent the declaration. Rather, and very much in line with the Divan's habitually mimetic activities as discussed above, they attempted to produce a declaration to rival that of Barenboim. One of the group approached him and proposed a rewording, but came away from the meeting thwarted. I entered the room unwittingly during their (very heated) conversation, and Barenboim physically propelled me from it; the player left the room shortly after that. Barenboim had told him that he was currently ashamed to be Israeli; the player shouted to an observer on exiting that Barenboim ‘doesn't feel like an Israeli, he isn't an Israeli’. GB, 8 August 2006.

⁹⁵AS, 8 August 2006. Conversation with the author.

⁹⁶ Barenboim Revealed.

⁹⁷Žižek, The Parallax View, 337. See also his critique of liberal democracy in ‘Welcome to the Desert of the American Subculture’, Barenboim Revealed, 367–75.

⁹⁸For an account of how this affected some players, see Daniel Jaffé, ‘Eastern Harmony’, BBC Music Magazine, 14 (September 2005), 32–6 (pp. 35–6). Barenboim's action needs to be seen in the context of his outspoken position on the question of Wagner in Israel and of his conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's performance of the ‘Prelude and Liebestod’ from Tristan und Isolde as an encore to a concert in Jerusalem in July 2001 , which proved to be extremely inflammatory. See Smaczny, Daniel Barenboim: 50 Years of Stage, disc 2, track 14.

⁹⁹I use the word with care, intending to refer to Barenboim's ambition. As he puts it, ‘the real dimension of the West–Eastern Divan will be achieved when the orchestra is able to play in all the countries that are represented in the orchestra’. Smaczny, Knowledge is the Beginning, disc 1, track 10.

¹⁰⁰Palestinian pianist Saleem Abboud-Ashkar (Israel), who attended the workshop, speaking on Smaczny, Knowledge is the Beginning, disc 1, track 10.

¹⁰¹GB (Israel), interview in Weimar, 28 August 2008. The vocabulary of the conflict is a part of the discourse in general: players talk about ‘needing a visa’ or having to ‘cross a checkpoint’ to get from one key to another in a piece of music, for instance.

¹⁰²See, for instance, Barenboim's speech on being presented the Wolf Prize, which is set to a background of him playing the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 27 no. 2 in Cminor, the ‘Moonlight’, in a recital. Indeed scenes of the recital are interspersed between shots of him delivering the speech. Smaczny, Knowledge is the Beginning, disc 1, track 2.

¹⁰³Barenboim toyed with the sense of danger associated with the first of the 2006 tour's concert venues, the Seville bull-ring, by saying to CNN journalists that he was curious to see whether he was ‘going to feel like the bull or the bull fighter’. Barenboim Revealed.

¹⁰⁴As a backcloth, here, one statement Barenboim made is particularly pertinent: ‘none of this would be possible’, he said, waving his arm to indicate the workshop, ‘without the physical impact of sound’. He said this during a piano master-class that was running concurrent with the orchestral workshop. Pilas, 31 July 2006.

¹⁰⁵Attali, Noise, 67.

¹⁰⁶In the unlikely event that players understood the words that she was singing, they would have heard her envisioning (the deceased) Tristan – a poignant correlate for her potential resuscitation of Barenboim-as-leader.

¹⁰⁷Meier as singing woman was like a ‘gift’ to the orchestra, the enactment of a process that has deep social roots and extremely powerful consequences. The foundational work in this area is Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don (Paris, 1924), but the question of the gift, and the pressures it places on receivers, has been discussed ever since. For a recent discussion see Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Cambridge, 1999).

¹⁰⁸For accounts of music's uses as torture in interrogation and military action, see Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘Music as Torture/Music as Weapon’, Revista transcultural de música, 10 (2006), <http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/cusick_eng.htm>, accessed 3 April 2008, and ‘“You are in a place that is out of the world…”: Music in the Detention Camps of the “Global War on Terror”’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 2 (2008), 1–26. For aesthetic ‘violence’, see Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA, 2004), 96–116, esp. p. 115.

¹⁰⁹A further context for this particular interpolation is that Wagner's Tristan forms the basis for Barenboim's discussion of musical ambiguity and ineffability in his Third Reith Lecture, ‘The Magic of Music’, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/lecture3.shtml>, accessed 9 December 2006.