Round Table: Edward Said and Musicology Today

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Notes

1 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1978; repr. 1995).

2 Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975), 8–9.

3 António Guterres, ‘Foreword by the High Commissioner’, UNHCR Report for 2013, <http://www.unhcr.org/gr13/index.xml> (accessed 29 December 2014).

4 At the April 2013 Edward Said Memorial Conference in Utrecht, Paul Gilroy compared Said to Du Bois, arguing that they shared a humanistic impulse not defined by universal abstract rhetoric, but bearing the negative imprint of racist and colonial systems of power. This argument relates to Houston Baker, Jr’s identification of Du Bois’s ‘deformation of mastery’, a representational strategy that masters elements of an ‘obscene situation’ by appropriating and transforming them into a ‘signal self/cultural expression, [refusing] a master’s nonsense’. Houston A. Baker, Jr, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago, IL, 1986), 56.

5 See above, note 1.

6 Said, Orientalism, 201–25.

7 Key texts reflecting on Said and Orientalism and dealing with musical exoticism include The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston, MA, 1998); W. Anthony Sheppard, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater (Berkeley, CA, 2001); Matthew Head, ‘Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory’, Music Analysis, 22 (2003), 211–30; Timothy Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, NC, 2007); and Ralph Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge, 2009).

8 Among many other examples, see Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (New York, 1991), and idem, ‘The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida’, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1994), 111–32.

9 ‘L’histoire de la musique, à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, a fait de notables progrès. Elle ne sera pourtant point achevée avant que, étendant son champ d’action, elle ait compris dans son domaine l’étude des musiques extra-européennes. Bien différentes de celles aux formes desquelles nos races sont accoutumées depuis des siècles, celles-ci n’en sont pas moins dignes d’être écoutées par nous. Que ces arts soient inférieurs au nôtre, concédons-le, ou plutôt affirmons – le tout d’abord. Rien n’est plus naturel que cette vérité: l’Europe ayant toujours été le foyer principal de la civilisation humaine, il est tout simple que la musique qu’on y pratique ait acquis une supériorité à laquelle n’ont pu atteindre les peuples des autre parties du monde.’ Julien Tiersot, Notes d’ethnographie musicale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1905), i, 1 (my translation).

10 Matthew Head makes a similar point about the study of musical exoticism more generally when he writes: ‘Musicology domesticates orientalism as an area of research by folding it back into established frameworks of enquiry that ultimately render orientalism decorative’ (‘Musicology on Safari’, 218).

11 Said, Orientalism, 3.

12 The New (Ethno)musicologies, ed. Henry Stobart (Lanham, ND, 2008); Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, ed. Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley (Oxford, 2008).

13 Kofi Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (New York, 2003).

14 Thomas Solomon, ‘Where is the Postcolonial in Ethnomusicology?’, Ethnomusicology in East Africa: Perspectives from Uganda and Beyond, ed. Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Thomas Solomon (Kampala, 2012), 216–51.

15 Edward W. Said, ‘Homage to a Belly-Dancer’, London Review of Books, 12 (1990), 6–7.

16 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (London, 1973); Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam (London, 1983). Slightly later, but formative in my own first efforts to think through postcolonialism in Middle East music studies, was Aziz al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London, 1993).

17 John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle, 1974).

18 Patrick Deer, Gyan Prakash and Ella Shohat, ‘Introduction: Edward Said: A Memorial Issue’, Social Text, 24 (2006), 1–9.

19 Ibid., 4.

20 Deer, Prakash and Shohat, ‘Introduction’, 4.

21 Blacking, How Musical Is Man?

22 Rachel Beckles Willson, Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West (Cambridge, 2013).

23 Geoff Baker, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (Oxford, 2014).

24 Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York, 1986), 52.

25 Ibid., 52–3.

26 Edward W. Said, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community’, Critical Inquiry, 9 (1982), 1–26 (p. 9).

27 See Edward W. Said, ‘Introduction: Secular Criticism’, The World, the Text, and the Critic (New York, 1991), 1–30. For further discussion of interpretative dilemmas around Said’s secular criticism, see Bruce Robbins, ‘Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said’s “Voyage In”’, Social Text, 40 (1994), 25–37 (esp. pp. 26–9); Aamir R. Mufti, ‘Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times’, Boundary 2, 31 (2004), 1–9 (esp. pp. 2–3); Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London, 2013), esp. pp. 214–16; and Stathis Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism (New York, 2013), esp. pp. 12–13.

28 Said, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community’, 17, 19.

29 Mufti, ‘Critical Secularism’, 2.

30 I have addressed this historiographical question in more depth elsewhere. See Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge, 2012); eadem, ‘Limits of National History: Yoko Ono, Stefan Wolpe, and Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism’, Musical Quarterly, 97 (2014), 181–237.

31 Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge, 2007), 236. Although invested in divergent methods, metaphors and disciplinary relationships, scholarship on popular and vernacular musics has also contended with the long shadow of national culture as a primary framework through which musical meaning is made intelligible. Mark Slobin’s work represented an early intervention on this front; see his Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Middletown, CT, 1993).

32 Divergent critical moves in this direction appear outside musicology in Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2005); Peggy Levitt, ‘What’s Wrong with Migration Scholarship: A Critique and a Way Forward’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 19 (2012), 1–8; and Roger Waldinger, The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and their Homelands (Cambridge, MA, 2015).

33 Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London, 1999; repr. 2001).

34 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. Harry Zohn, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1996–2003), iv: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–400.

35 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), 24–6.

36 Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 173–86 (p. 148).

37 Said, After the Last Sky, 33.

38 Ibid., 129.

39 ‘Internal colonialism’ is a flexible concept that has been adapted from varied theoretical perspectives to describe situations ranging from settler colonialism to class oppression to apartheid to genocide. For a historical overview, see Robert J. Hind, ‘The Internal Colonial Concept’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26 (1984), 543–68. For a capsule discussion within postcolonial studies, see Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001), 9.

40 Said, Orientalism, 27.

41 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 2004), 160, 210–384.

42 Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 13.

43 Ibid.

44 See, for example, Edward W. Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, The Edward Said Reader, ed. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (New York, 2000), 291–316 (p. 307).

45 Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, 267–74. See also Lydia Goehr’s discussion of Said in ‘Music and Musicians in Exile: The Romantic Legacy of a Double Life’, Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 66–91 (pp. 86–8).

46 Said, Musical Elaborations, 51.

47 Ibid., 55.

48 Ibid., 70. Stathis Gourgouris presented related ideas on Said’s musical nomadism at the Edward Said Conference in Utrecht in 2013.

49 For Said, the Orientalist was ‘principally a kind of agent of [ … ] comprehensive visions’, working through a system that ‘presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically’. Said, Orientalism, 239–40.

50 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN, 1972; repr. 1983); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (London, 1993). For an overview of such work, see Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford, 2004).

51 Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia, PA, 1982); Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia, PA, 1989). Numerous works situate sound in broader discussions: see, for instance, Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London, 1985; repr. 2008); Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington, IN, 1990); and Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC, 2002).

52 Edward Said: The Last Interview (DVD, Extended Version, dir. Mike Dibb, prod. D. D. Guttenplan; ICA Projects, 2004), at 20:27.

53 Edward Said: The Last Interview, at 21:21.

54 Ibid., at 22:03.

55 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: Towards a Politics of the Performative (London, 1997).

56 See above, note 33.

57 Said, Out of Place, 27–8.

58 The Latin root of ‘evidence’ is ‘videre’, to see. Yannis Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (Cambridge, 2013), 5–6.

59 Said does not mention it, but recordings of Umm Kulthum’s concerts allow us to hear the active and noisy audience participation that was typical of the time. Calling out in appreciation is part of Arab music traditions, and could have contributed to Said’s feelings of discomfort, because he was not himself able to take part. For discussion of historical and contemporary aspects of this ‘creative listening’, see Ali Jihad Racy, Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab (Cambridge, 2004), 131–3.

60 I would not myself use the term ‘network’ for Said’s situation here, because of its association with Actor Network Theory. To me, an approach with more sensitivity to living organisms, and a focus on flows rather than actors/objects, seems more appropriate. Useful theorizations include Tim Ingold’s ‘Towards an Ecology of Materials’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 41 (2012), 427–42, which draws together his thinking on the distinction as developed over some years, and the positing of a ‘sensorial assemblage’ in Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses, 126ff.

61 For one influential theorization of this educational process in the explicitly sensorial realm, see Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2004), 116ff.

62 Hala Sakakini, Jerusalem and I: A Personal Record (Amman, 1990), 7–9, 13–16, 18, 37, 68, 72–3. Hala was a daughter of Khalil Sakakini (1878–1953), essayist, poet, scholar and founder of three schools (1909, 1925 and 1938), who also served as Education Inspector under the Ottoman and the British regimes in Palestine. I present Hala’s memoirs in a broader context in Orientalism and Musical Mission, 116–212.

63 Sakakini, Jerusalem and I, 80.

64 Ibid., 78.

65 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregg and Seigworth (Durham, NC, 2010), 1–25 (p. 1).

66 In an expanded version of this paper I address Said’s sensing in the piano recital as well, and suggest it affords us insights into a broader range of musical experience as well as a return to the political. See Rachel Beckles Willson, ‘Value and Abjection: Listening to Music with Edward W. Said’, Against Value in the Arts and Education, ed. Emile Bojesen, Sam Ladkin and Robert McKay (forthcoming).

67 Edward Said: The Last Interview, at 54:59.

68 See above, note 2.

69 Edward Said: The Last Interview, at 55:25.

70 Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, MA, 1966).

71 See for example, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Fauré et l’inexprimable (Paris, 1974).

72 See Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago, IL, 1993); Carolyn Abbate, ‘Jankélévitch’s Singularity’, in Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Abbate (Princeton, NJ, 2003), xii–xx; and Stephen Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics (Berkeley, CA, 2012).

73 Michael Wood, ‘On Edward Said’, London Review of Books, 25 (2003), 5.

74 See my review of Musical Elaborations in ‘Wrong Notes’, Transition, 55 (1992), 162–6.

75 For a contrasting appraisal, see Rose Rosengard Subotnik’s review of Musical Elaborations in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 46 (1993), 476–85.

76 Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, A Said Dictionary (Oxford, 2012).

77 F. Abiola Irele, ‘Editorial: The Landscape of African Music’, Research in African Literatures, 32 (2001), 1–2 (p. 1).

78 Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘The Sound of Anticolonialism’, Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, ed. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham, NC, 2016), 269–91.

79 See, for example, Marius Schneider, Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1934–5), i: Die Naturvölker.

80 See, for example, John Blacking, Venda Children’s Songs: A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis (Johannesburg, 1967).

81 Notable examples include Jay Rahn, A Theory for All Music: Problems and Solutions in the Analysis of Non-Western Forms (Toronto, 1983); Analytical Studies in World Music, ed. Michael Tenzer (New York, 2006); and Mark Hiljeh, Towards a Global Music Theory: Practical Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of Music across Human Cultures (Farnham, 2012).

82 See above, note 2.

83 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. Thomas Malcolm Knox (Oxford, 1942), 12–13.

84 Ibid., 11.

85 Tony Judt, ‘Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitan’, The Nation, 19 July 2004. The quotation is taken from the reprint of the essay in Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York, 2008), 163–78 (p. 168). Judt’s essay was originally written as an introduction to Said’s posthumous collection of essays From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (New York, 2007).

86 Edward Said, ‘Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights’, given in February 2003 at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California Berkeley. This quotation is my own transcription from the video footage, taken from <www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb2pYStv8×8> (accessed 3 December 2014). A version of the talk also appears in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 24 (2004), 15–33.

87 I have argued elsewhere that in his later work Said allowed his normative modes of knowledge-making, and the ethics and politics attendant upon them, to become infected by what I have termed (with a distinctive nod towards Nietzsche) forgetting. See James R. Currie, Music and the Politics of Negation (Bloomington, IN, 2012), Chapter 5, ‘Forgetting (Edward Said)’, 139–77; and idem, ‘Another Music, a Time to Forget: Reflections on Edward Said’s Late Style’, Contemporary Music Review, 31 (2012), 507–19, repr. in Music in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Martin Scherzinger (London and New York, 2015), 163–76. This piece supplements my earlier work on Said’s late style with the following proposition: that one of the possibilities made available by the forms of forgetting activated by art and, in particular, musical performance is the ability to predict the future.

88 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zhon (New York, 1968), 253–64 (p. 255).

89 The essay (‘On Jean Genet’s Late Works’) first appeared in the New York literary magazine Grand Street in 1990, and was later included in the posthumously published On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York, 2006), 73–89, three years after Said’s death.

90 Ibid., 74.

91 Ibid., 76.

92 ‘Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York, 1978), 222.

93 Said would quickly break an association with a thinker if he thought (as in the case of his early employment of the work of Michel Foucault) it was starting to turn into a form of identification by which he would be recognized by others. However, as many commentators have noted, Said’s relationship with Adorno in the last 15 years was flagrantly (even performatively) identificatory. Famously, in an interview published in Ha-aretz in 2000, for example, Said claimed that he was ‘the only true follower of Adorno’. Edward W. Said, ‘My Right of Return’, repr. in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York, 2002), 443–58 (p. 458). For a sensitive introduction to the question of Adorno’s import to Said’s later intellectual projects, see Moustafa Bayoumi, ‘Reconciliation without Duress: Said, Adorno, and the Autonomous Intellectual’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 25 (2005), 46–64.

94 Said, On Late Style, 77.

95 See above, note 87.