Also this issue: Momma Drama David Wise channels his grandmas into a show with everything and the kitchen sink. -Debra Auspitz Jazz It Up -Juliet Fletcher Trio with Brio -David Shengold Get Lost -Toby Zinman Street Smart -David Anthony Fox Q&A with Merián Soto -Interview by Deni Kasrel Cry Havoc -Toby Zinman PROK -David Anthony Fox

January 23-29, 2003

books

Tied with Strings

Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim ponder music’s place in the world.

by Andrew Ervin

arallels and Paradoxes, a lyrical duet by two of our foremost cultural authorities, offers a rare look at the intersection of music and politics. Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said collaborate on a series of essays and conversations exploring the nature of performance and music's distinctive ability to bridge the traditional gaps that separate people of different ethnicities and backgrounds.

that is to say, primary conductor -- of both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Deutsche Staatsoper of Berlin. Said was raised as a Christian Arab in Cairo, and is best known for Orientalism, his 1978 study of the popular (and grossly distorted) Western conceptions of the Far East, and Culture and Imperialism, a volume of literary theory in which he valorizes the immigrant¹s unique ability to enact political change. A shared sense of geographical and emotional exile unites the two seemingly incompatible authors and shapes their discussions, reproduced here in six conversational chapters that are followed by two cadenza-like solo essays.

Some of the most interesting passages are those dealing with the Weimar workshop, a unique musical event in which Barenboim and Said participated in 1999. The two of them, with the help of the famed (and, to my ears, grossly overrated) cellist Yo Yo Ma, brought together a number of hugely talented Muslim and Jewish musicians for a festival.

At first, however, their experiment seemed like a mistake. During the course of lessons, master classes and concerts, however, the students began a remarkable exchange of musical ideas. As Said puts it, "[T]en days later, the same kid who had claimed that only Arabs can play Arabic music was teaching Yo Yo Ma how to tune his cello to the Arabic scale. Š And it was remarkable to witness the group, despite the tensions of the first week or ten days, turn themselves into a real orchestra.!

Barenboim and Said don¹t always agree, and many readers will be unable to see eye to eye with either of them. Particularly troubling is Barenboim¹s adherence to a nationalistic view of music-making. He tells Said and a public lecture audience, "there is something specifically German about some music in the same way there is something specifically in French. Š The fact that there is German art, a German style of playing, can be absolutely proven.!

Implicit in Barenboim¹s comments is a musical privilege based upon nationality that he never totally reconciles with his remarkable and respectable political agenda of bringing different cultures together via music, or even with his own championing of Wagner, the composer most associated with "German! music. Barenboim would be well advised to go back to his old LPs of the Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau or the Hungarian Annie Fischer performing Beethoven¹s sonatas and pinpoint those performers¹ stylistic shortcomings.

In a concluding essay, "Barenboim and the Wagner Taboo,! first published in Al-Hayat in August 2001, Said also points to a concrete example of how the preceding theoretical discussions are played out in the concert hall. Though an unrepentant anti-Semite and a favorite composer of Hitler, Wagner never found explicit expression for his racism in his operas. Nevertheless, his music remains effectively banned from public performance throughout Israel. After a July 2001 concert, Barenboim announced that he was going to lead the orchestra in a performance of a short selection from Tristan und Isolde and he welcomed those who would be offended to leave the auditorium. Shortly afterwards a furor broke out. Some Israeli governmental committees called for a boycott of future appearances by Barenboim.

As Said puts it, however, Barenboim¹s performance of Wagner, "although genuinely painful for many who still suffer the real traumas of anti-Semitic genocide, [had] the salutary effect of allowing mourning to move to another stage, i.e., toward the living of life itself, which must go on and cannot be frozen in the past.!

It¹s difficult to imagine a stronger argument for its inclusion in the public school curriculum. In Parallels and Paradoxes and elsewhere, Barenboim and Said have established an enormously important mandate for the future of classical music and its political implications.