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Issue No.17 Summer 2004
This book brings together those two individuals from opposite sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 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) Daniel
Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in
Music and Society (London: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2004) 190pp. £7.99 |
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