Music_at_the_limits_-_Edward_Said's_musical_elaborat

MUSIC AT THE LIMITS: EDWARD SAID’S MUSICAL ELABORATIONS

Rokus de Groot

Music at the Limits

More than anywhere else, it was in his involvement with music that Ed-ward Said showed himself to be a man of rationality and passion. Music occupied a privileged place in his life and work, not comparable even to literature. music was the most inward, most private of the arts, and at the same time, Music was a highly ambiguous art to him. He observed that as from the social world,performance, a highly public event. While seemingly “autonomous ic society.1” he emphasized music also as an elaboration of civ-

quires a highly specialist training,–in Said’s own words “a discipline rather To him music was also an ambiguous art in the sense that it re-like that of a Jesuit”–, which turns it into a hardly accessible, even mysteri-ous and esoteric endeavor, while on the other hand, it makes a very pow-erful immediate effect.2

tice and life. First of all it was European classical music which greatly at-For Said, music was an experience at the limits of thought, social prac-tracted has a rather small number of dedicated listeners worldwide. It is moreo-him, a tradition of composing, performing and listening which ver a tradition which, much to Said’s regret, has lost its former authority among intellectuals and a more general public alike.3

compositions of resistance and intransigence, like ‘late works’Even within that rarified tradition, Said was enchanted by exceptional positions almost at the edge of social context. He viewed these kinds of , and com-music speaks of a “relatively rare number of works [...] making their claims en-as constituting an emancipatory act. In Musical Elaborations he tirely as music, free of many of the harassing, intrusive, and socially ty-1

2002), 121.2 E.W D. Barenboim . Said, Musical Elaborationsand E.W. Said, (New YParallels ork: Columbia University Press, 1991), xiv.and Paradoxes (New York: Vintage Books, 3 Said, Musical Elaborations, 15-6.

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rannical pressures that have limited musicians to their customary role as upholders of things as they are.” These works express

a very eccentric kind of transgression, that is, music being reclaimed by un-common, and perhaps even excessive, displays of technique whose net effect is not only to render the music socially superfluous and useless–to it completely–but to recuperate the craft entirely for the musician as an act discharge of freedom.4

Apart from Mozart’s Bach’s Canonic Variations on ‘Von Himmel hoch.Così fan tutte, he mentions as a phenomenal example extreme occasion, concentrated, rarified, often conspicuously discontinu-Furthermore, Edward Said was fascinated by music performance as an ’

ous with ordinary life, in which the highest standards, utter specialization and complex production processes lead to a single event. Again, here too he noted an elusive inaccessibility to the routine demands of human life as was attracted by exceptional figures, like Glenn Gould, in whom he lived by other human beings.5

manism Said placed himself firmly within the secular tradition of rational hu-aspirations to universality. This made him greatly appreciative of the ra-of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, with its tionality of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. Ythe edge of rationality. Once Said observed about Bach that, while there et music also brought him to must be some rational law that explains his music, it was always drawing away at the moment when he actually felt getting closer to it.6

was fascinated by the music of Beethoven, who, though an Enlightenment Similarly he man, was inspired by rapturous states of mystical experience.7

Said was enchanted by Glenn Gould, who with all his fervor for control And again, was standing outside time and within an integral artistic structure.given to ecstasy which Gould himself characterized as “the

positively confessed to be highly intrigued by works of art and religion, ”8 Said even state of such as by Bach and Messiaen, by Ibn Arabi and Juan de la Cruz, which seem to testify to the powerful conviction to embody the pine.9

ligious. All this is quite striking for a man who claimed to be totally not re-His secular stance prevented him from really accepting the no- 4 5 Ibid., 71.

6 Ibid., 21-34.

7 Barenboim and Said,

8 Ibid., 164.Parallels and Paradoxes, 123.

9 Said, Barenboim and Said, Musical ElaborationsParallels and Paradoxes, 31., 123.

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tion of the pine on earth, since reference to such an extra-human force would bring the experience down a notch.10

experiences at the limits led Said at least to acknowledge meta-rationality. Nevertheless, these musical And it seduced him into entertaining utopian ideas.

gether with Daniel Barenboim, he took the initiative to organize in 1999 To him, music played a role at the limits also in the political sense. To-the musicians, inspired by Goethe for whom art West-Eastern Divan Workshop, bringing

the ‘other’, and not concentrating on oneself.”11“was together all about Arab a and voyage to Jewish

Barenboim chose as the center of attention of this workshop has already The music which Said and been characterized above as being situated at the limits: European classi-cal music.12

when faced with death in the life of others as well as in his own life, lan-Music was also at the limits of life to Said. His wife Mariam relates that, guage stopped being a significant mode of communication. It was music which he needed here most, music about the ‘muteness’ of which he had expressed resistance as well as surrender to silence.his wonder time and again, music, 13which itself is a

Said and music, it is music in a heightened sense, musical composition, So when we speak of Edward constant performan …… 此处隐藏：38422字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……