Musical Elaborations

by Edward W. Said

Filling a significant gap in contemporary cultural studies, Musical Elaborations examines the intersection of the public and private meaning of music. Incorporating the music criticism of Adorno, musical ideas from literary works by Proust, and criticism by Benjamin and de Man into his work, noted critic Edward W. Said discusses performers such as Glenn Gould, Arturo Toscanini, and Alfred Brendel and such composers as Beethoven, Wagner, and Strauss.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Philosophy

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

(Arabic Profile إدوارد سعيد)
Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.

Educated in the Western canon, at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.

As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. Said’s model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among the scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.

As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, because he publicly criticized Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional relation with the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has “to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual” man and woman.

In 1999, with his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, which comprises young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. Besides being an academic, Said also was an accomplished pianist, and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), a compilation of their conversations about music. Edward Said died of leukemia on 25 September 2003.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edward Said’s insights on music are always interesting, but sometimes a little fuzzy, with that tendency of academics to produce, if not a word salad, at least a sentence salad. This is a collection of three lectures given at the University of California, Irvine (the Wellek Library Lectures) and as with most of Said’s music writings they are interdisciplinary, dipping into the ideas of Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man, Thomas Mann, Michel Foucault, Richard Poirier, Proust, and others. In the first lecture, "Performance as an Extreme Occasion," he laments the distance between the amateur and the professional musician; up until some point in the early 20th century lots of people played instruments, and played music at home at a high level for their own enjoyment, but few people do so today and thus audiences at classical music concerts feel alienated from the absurd levels of proficiency and spectacle they see and hear onstage. When he describes Maurizio Pollini's rendition of the Chopin Etude Op. 10 No. 1, perfect both technically and aesthetically, it almost sounds like a complaint. (“…the grandeur of Pollini’s technique, its scale, and its dominating display and reach completely dispatch any remnant of Chopin’s original intention for the music, which was to afford the pianist, any pianist, an entry into the relative seclusion and reflectiveness of problems of technique.”) The “extreme” concert performance is “a cultural occasion staked upon specialized eccentric skills, upon the performer’s interpretive and histrionic personality fenced in by his or her obligatory muteness, upon the audience’s receptivity, subordination, and paying patience.” As another example of the prototypical extreme occasion he gives Arturo Toscanini’s 1938 presentation of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony – “so highly wrought…that it feels like a clear aesthetic alternative to the travails of ordinary human experience.” In contrast, a Furtwängler performance of “the Bruckner or Schubert Ninth symphonies was felt to derive from his private, intuitive interpretation brought out and displayed, as if by the sheerest coincidence, on a public concert platform.”

In a denser chapter, "On the Transgressive Elements in Music," Said explores the “nomadic” (transgressive) quality of music: how it can cross boundaries within society, between institutions and audiences, and sustain a variety of interpretations. (I know I sound like I’m bullshitting here, but trust me, I’m dumbing this way down just so I can understand what I’m talking about.) As examples he uses Bach, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Mozart, and many others. He doesn’t bring up the composer who first pops into my head when I think about this transgressive quality, Shostakovich, who, from what I know, was pretty much forced to write with at least two audiences in mind: the Soviet power structure, which was always sniffing for betrayals and crimes, and the true music lovers. Or Prokofiev, whose works elicit labels of toady or dissident depending on the listener or the agenda.

Here’s a mysterious thought: "Some of the excesses of romantic music are clear attempts to play with this astringent pattern [the sonata form], although quite often (in Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, and Mendelssohn) the pattern seems either to ensnare or to haunt the incautious and unconsciously programmed romantic explorer who has internalized the sonata script as part of his musical literacy," Said writes in the final essay, "Melody, Solitude, and Affirmation." (Said really loved words like astringent and exfoliative. I think deep inside him was a skincare consultant, yearning to be free.) In passages like this I can’t help thinking Said is trying too hard to be a wordsmith, and possibly misdescribing the aesthetic truths of the works he’s referring to. It’s hard to imagine a really good musicologist, for instance Joseph Kerman or Richard Taruskin, writing that sentence.

Said's Glenn Gould fetish continues unabated here, although I was relieved to learn that as a writer, the polymathic Gould "was neither intellectually disciplined nor a fully cultivated man, and his learning, for all the exuberance with which he deployed it, often reveals the trying awkwardness of the naive village philosopher." Gould's writings are "often overwritten and underargued. There are garrulous displays of wit and parody that are...both forced and insufferably tedious." When someone comes as close to perfection as Gould did in nearly all of his piano playing, it's refreshing to hear that he blunders in other areas.

[jq · Rating 4 out of 5]

thinking about madeleine thien... "from his writing it seems quite clear that gould saw nothing at all exceptional about playing the piano well. what he wanted was an escape from everything that determined or conditioned his reality as a human being. consider, for example, that his favorite state was 'ecstasy', his favorite music was music ideally not written for specific instruments and hence 'essentially incorporeal,' and his highest words of praise were repose, detachment, isolation. to this, friedrich's biography contributes the notion of control, which is the motif of much of gould's life." (29)

[Barış Yıldırım · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maalesef çeviri akıcı bir okumaya izin vermiyor, yine de Said'in derin düşünme biçimine erişmek mümkün oluyor. En azından ele aldığı müzik eserlerini dinlemek bile iyi geliyor. Şu an Rzewski'nin El Pueblo Unido... üzerine yazdığı dört el piyano çeşitlemelerini dinliyorum misal https://open.spotify.com/album/3ZtMIc...

[Steven Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poignant attempt by this respected post-colonial,literary and music critic to elicit a sense of Proustian emotional intimacy from within music (as performer and analyst); the aporia is he uses intellectual means to try to enter this ineffable, emotional (primarily) realm of music; never quite capturing its transcendence; but labouring through (useful, in other contexts) Adorno-esque critical theory terms like "elaborations".

Much more perceptive on how music as "public performance" has, itself, become yet another capitalist commodity: selling concert tickets, the highly paid virtuoso, etc etc, a sort of reflection of the economic infrastructure of capital. He, interestingly, counterpoints the idiosyncratic Glen Gould with this (who made RECORDINGS not performance his world). There is only one mention of another significant (related) hegemony: the canon of "the greats", many of whom deserve that place; but some of whose placement in the high canon is more a manifestation of a (Foucauldian) power structure( he mentions Hummel, for instance; but better examples would be women composers-knowingly/intentionally sidelined by the patriarchal hydra-headed systems);- and those great composers who have been relegated to the second (or even lower) division because of, again, the power of the (male, white) academy or changes in fashion (re: style, ie "too sentimental" etc etc). No mention, either of gay composers, who inhabit a complex hinterland between male privilege (the ones who "pass" as straight) and the psychological self/societal-decimation of the closet.

So, a mixed bag; but readable and thought-provoking:)

[Thomas Feng · Rating 4 out of 5]

really smart with occasional moments of dazzling insight, but not particularly cutting nor precise overall. musicology before and after have covered similar ground more adroitly i think. i think as well his musings don’t always make sense if you’re not familiar with the examples he describes, for all that it seems aimed at a general “well-read” public. but i appreciate Said’s personal touch as he speaks from the perspective of a “fully committed amateur”.

[Helen Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this with a student who is going to the Peabody Conservatory at John’s Hopkins and most of it went over my head. However, I did learn about classical music, its societal context, and its overlaps with canonical literature. So, if you’re interested in the intersection of music, literature, life, art, and society this is a good choice. However, is this not easy or fun reading 😉📖

[Morabito · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the way Said thinks, I like the way he writes. I mean, this a really good book if you know some Adorno and quite a lot of classical music. But for people trying to get into this kind of music I find the language he uses quite sterile. Either he just enters the realm of affirmation by the means of poetic language which in the end doesn't explain much but his subjective point of view, or he enters the realm of theoretical musical concepts which, for non musicians, is quite hard to understand. I mean, I repeat myself, it's a really good book if you already have much knowledge. But what I'm still looking for is someone who can write about music in just a way everyone can understand it without being superficial.

[Abby Ang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a neat little book, if I didn't find it as satisfying as some of the musical essays in On Late Style or in Exile. I admire Said's musical mind while expecting his thought to be densely constructed and rather hard to understand.