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Until
his death last year, the Palestinian intellectual
Edward W. Said had been internationally recognised
as an extraordinary influential and innovative thinker,
an astute commentator on literature and culture, an
accomplished pianist and a passionate defender of
the Palestinian cause. Since the early 1990s, Said
had been a staunch critic of the “Peace Process”
in Palestine. Daniel Barenboim is one of the central
figures of the musical world today, director of the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Deutsche Staatsoper
in Berlin. One of the most recorded artist in history,
he was the first and most pro eminent Israeli musician
ever to perform in the Palestinian West Bank. This
book brings together those two individuals from opposite
sides of the Arab Israeli conflict is a series of
dialogues about various aspects of music. The book
is accessible to the general reader and does not require
technical knowledge. “These are conversations
not treatises, and it is the nature of the conversation
at its best to be engrossing for everyone involved,
as well as from time to time to take even the speaker
by surprise,” explains Said.
Music
belongs to the world of sound, more specifically to
that of sound relations (both relations between sounds,
and relations between sound and silence as the absolute
limit of music). This is what differentiates making
music from just the production of unrelated sound.
When we talk about music, we more often talk about
how we are affected by it (that it is poetic, sensual,
spiritual and so on), than about it in itself. But
as Barenboim points out, music is far less about ‘emotion’
than about “structure as emotional means of
expression”. Those means are the contrasting
elements of music (like harmony, dissonance, notes,
tempo etc) and their form (sonata, symphony and so
on). To properly appreciate a piece of music, it is
necessary to understand the technique displayed by
the musician. Said asks: “The musician is
very much wrapped up in a tonal world … is it
possible to talk of the world of the musician as a
social one at all?” The point is, as the
most abstract of arts, has music anything relevant
to say about society, history and political conflict?
As a critical thinker, what Said is interested in
“is always to challenge what is given”,
and Barenboim can find such a process at work in music
and performance: “You have to ask yourself:
does music have a purpose, a social purpose, and what
is it? Is it to provide comfort and entertainment,
or is it to ask disturbing questions of the performer
and of the listener?”
For
Said and Barenboim, through understanding the nature
of music it can become possible to challenge one’s
certainties and understand the ‘other view’,
or at least make place for it. After all, music made
possible an occasion for a Palestinian and an Israeli
to have this fascinating dialogue. By learning about
music, you can learn about the other. Barenboim’s
musical doctrine “comes out of the nature
of a paradox: that you have to have the extremes;
that you have to find a way to put the extremes together,
not necessarily by diminishing the extremity of each
on, but to form the art of transition.” It
is not necessary to reconcile or somewhat diminish
and take the edge of extremes. “You have to
keep the extremes, but find the link, always find
the link so that there is an organic whole.”
This “art of transition” will sound familiar
to The Other View.
The
book is dedicated to the West-Eastern Divan Workshop
in Weimar, where musicians from Israel and the Arab
countries have in recent years worked together and
shown that rapprochements and friendships, hitherto
thought impossible, may be achieved through music.
“But this does not mean that music will solve
the problems of the Middle East. Music can be the
best school for life, and at the same time the most
effective way to escape from it.” (Barenboim)
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