1Edward Said (1935-2003) has been hailed as one of the most important postcolonial theorists and literary critics of his time. His most widely known book Orientalism (1978) successfully examines how representations of the non-western Other within the western discourse of the Orient was (and is) used as a means to exercise colonial power and imperial domination over what was designated ‘the Orient’ and ‘Orientals’ by the West. After its publication, influential scholars like Gauri Viswanathan, Homi Bhbaha, Gayatri Spivak among many others took up Said’s perspectives, critiqued, amended and extended them to other histories, geographies and schools of representation and the ripples created by Orientalism and later texts can still be felt within the academic world. Said was also a lifelong commentator on the question of Palestine, linking his interest in colonial and imperial schemes of representation and domination with analyses of contemporary American interventionist politics in the Middle East and the justification for Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Controversially, he was quite vocal in his opposition to the Oslo accord of 1993, calling it a ‘Palestinian Versailles’, and this earned him not only the enmity of the Israeli lobby in the USA, but also the strong dislike of the Palestinian leaders, who had put themselves in power by signing the accord (Said 2005).

2But Said was not only a politically active academic—he was also a musician and a music critic. His list of publications includes three books on music (1991, 2002, 2006) and a collection of essays and reviews of classical music and opera (2008). He also collaborated with the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim in founding the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of young musicians from Israel, the Palestinian territories and adjacent Arab countries. This article will attempt to suggest the ways in which Edward Said’s life as a musician—in the extended sense of that word—was another, or perhaps parallel, life to the more well-known public lives he led as a professor of literature and political commentator. It will also examine how music was intrinsic to most of his writing—even the texts that are usually thought to have very little to do with it.

3Edward Wadie Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 to a protestant Palestinian family with a half-Lebanese mother and a father who had served in World War I and considered himself an American. They lived between Cairo and Jerusalem until 1948, when the family settled permanently in Egypt due to the annexation of Palestine by Israel. Three years later, Said was sent to the USA to study—partly because he rebelled against his colonial English schoolteachers at Victoria College in Cairo, partly because Said’s father wanted his son to have American citizenship (Said 1999).

4In his memoirs Out of Place (1999) as well as in Edward Said: The Last Interview, captured on video shortly before his death in 2003, Said writes and speaks candidly about how music has always been important to him. As a child, he played the piano and was, according to himself, blessed with ‘perfect pitch’ (22’35"), which means that one is able to determine the pitch of a single note, not only in relation to other notes, which is common, but in relation to an absolute system; an ability rare even among the most gifted of musicians (Deutsch 1999). When asked why he never became a musician, he says ‘... the piano was always a problem because I didn’t have the digital [fingering] capacity that matched my ear or my memory.’ (24’30"). Nevertheless, he continued to play seriously until as a student at Harvard University he ‘... realised [his] gifts, such as they were, could never be adequate to the professional trajectory [he] imagined for [him] self’ (Said 1999: 291).

5Reflecting on his childhood, Said associates a lot of his memories with music, but not just any music. Growing up in colonial Palestine and Egypt, Said was largely shielded from popular culture as he ‘grew up without television. Movies were banned, except for once a week’ and the rest of the time he was ‘... loosed upon the library...’ reading the English classics, and developed a feel for English ‘... which was entirely literary, and had very little to do with the demotic, everyday life, which was led in Arabic’ (Last Interview 20’20"-20’55"). In the same way, Said from an early age preferred western, classical music, rather than Arabic music and in the preface to Music at the Limits (xi), Said’s wife Mariam pictures him as a child listening to BBC’s ‘Nights at the Opera’ on Sundays in King Farouk’s colonial Cairo. In the Last Interview, however, Said describes his early choice of music in even stronger terms:

It was all western classical music. Arabic music was exclusively, as I recall, related to family events... The one time I had a big exposure to Arabic music—I was nine at the time—we went to hear Oum Kalthoum [a famous Egyptian singer] and I was revolted by it, it just struck me as horrible... there was no form to the music that I could identify, it was just repetition with tiny differences in each repetition... it contrasted terribly with the western music, you know Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, that I loved and could sometimes play. (Last Interview 23’35"-24’26")

6The picture that emerges of Edward Said as a child is a Palestinian boy with an English first name encouraged to interact with Western high— (as opposed to popular—) culture and gradually falling in love with it, whether in the library or spellbound by opera on the radio. Sitting in an Egyptian theatre listening to Arabic music, he yearned to be at home with the masters of western classical music. To readers of Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), such a picture might at first seem deeply ironic, as Said in these books critiques how western art, music and literature portray the non-western Other, yet the picture provides a context as to how Said was personally positioned in his analyses: simultaneously as a western and non-western scholar, who was able to articulate an intricate and complex critique of Western high culture, precisely because of his passion and understanding of the music, art and literature stemming from this high culture. The image also provides background to his more theoretical books such as The World the Text and the Critic (1983) and Representations of the Intellectual (1996), where Said elaborates on his methodology, explicitly choosing ‘affiliation’ over ‘filiation’, hybridity over cultural essences and defines ‘exile’ as mental state intrinsic to performing the role of the ‘intellectual’ (Said 1996: 47-65). Finally, the image of the young Said spreading his interests over many disciplines and art forms also serves as a comment to his often-stated lament that the contemporary intellectual— as opposed to intellectuals of bygone ages—does not as matter of course have an extensive knowledge of classical music (Said 2002), and it expresses his love of complexity and his almost scornful dismissal of what he takes to be simplistic expression (in music, literature or politics).

7That Edward Said played the piano and wrote about classical western music might be of marginal interest to readers preoccupied mainly with his literary and political analysis, but music actually influenced and shaped Said’s methodology within these fields to some degree. One of the most well-known examples of this is in Culture and Imperialism (1993) where we first come across his use of the musical term counterpoint, which, in his own words, would become ‘an obsession of mine’ (Last Interview 27’42"). Counterpoint in the musical sense involves the writing of musical lines that move independently of each other, but sound harmonious when played simultaneously. The example most often pointed to is Bach’s fugues and especially the pianist Glen Gould’s rendition of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’; a topic Said wrote about extensively throughout his life (Said 2008: 3, 68, 195, 220, 265). What Said stresses upon in his explanation of counterpoint are the ‘dialogue and inclusion in the coexistence of different voices’, with ‘... only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order...’ (Said 1993: 59). Even those without any formal musical training might instinctively perceive Said’s meaning, when listening to the intertwining melodies in Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’, as it almost seems like the two voices in the musical pieces are almost ‘discussing’ something: the right hand plays a theme in the high register, the left hand ‘answers’ in the low register by developing the theme, following which the left hand takes over again developing it further, and so forth until the piece comes to its end.

8In his literary adaptation of the term, Said forges an inter-linkage between music and text by inventing the notion of contrapuntal reading. Hence,

As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. (Said 1993: 59)

9The ‘cultural archive’ to which he refers is principally found within the canon of great literature and opera; Austen, Conrad, Kipling, Camus and Verdi, and as he begins to read their works ‘contrapuntally’, the ‘other histories’ he seeks to invoke is the presence or deliberate absence of the colonies; both in the ‘cultural archive’ itself, in the traditional reading of it, and in the re-writing of its representational practices performed by early anticolonial writers like Yeats, C.L.R. James and Fanon.

10In his reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Said examines the previously overlooked presence of the colonies in the novel, by pointing out that the upkeep of the manor, where the story takes place is paid for by slave plantations in Antigua. The protagonist, Fanny is the poor niece of the lady of Mansfield Park and she quietly and thoughtfully aspires to merit the hospitality bestowed upon her, when she is allowed to live in the manor. While Lord Bertram of Mansfield Park is away to tend to his possessions in the colonies, his children—Fanny’s cousins—and their friends act in a manner below their station by engaging in flirtation and amateur theatre and are only called to order when Lord Bertram returns. Said shows how Lord Bertram uses a similar spatial ordering in the plantations and in his own home and how this is later reproduced in Fanny, who becomes the ‘spiritual mistress of the house’ (Said 1993: 100-116). Said’s aim is thus not merely to charge Austen with her omission of the cruelty of the slave trade, though it is noticeable in its absence; rather his aim is to interpret what these omissions mean to the novel and the setting it portrays. In his reading, Mansfield Park is thus both a local, English story (about a girl acquiring intellect, morals, manners, property and finally marriage into an aristocracy to which she doesn’t strictly belong) and a narrative of how the cruelty that pays for this gentility is never mentioned in polite conversation—even though the intervention that protects the moral content of this gentility is perhaps itself a product of the colonial encounter. In Said’s contrapuntal reading of the novel, Austen’s text and its omitted context thus function like two voices in a fugue, commenting on each other and forming a larger whole than what both text and context could have formed alone.

11A similar point is made in Said’s reading of Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness (1899) (Said 1993: 20-30, 198-9). Marlow, the narrator of the novella, goes to Africa in search of Kurtz, a colonial officer who has lost his sanity and established himself as the despotic ruler of his own tribe. Kurtz is an embarrassment to ‘the company’ because he gathers ivory for consumption in Europe using precisely the barbaric measures often attributed to Africa and Africans and Conrad (through Marlow) thereby portrays colonialism in Africa as a cruel system of exploitation, which turns the white man into a travesty of himself. But neither Marlow, nor Conrad, can conceive of an Africa separate from the cruel system they portray. The African writer Chinua Achebe points to this fact by noting that every black man in the novella is either mute or inarticulate (Said 1993: 200) and Said agrees, but insists that the novella’s vision of European madness transplanted into the ‘dark continent’ should not be dismissed just because Conrad couldn’t envision an Africa emerging out of chaos and cruelty if left alone by the white man. Rather it is a poignant example of a eurocentric logic that flourishes even today: the logic that the ‘overseas possessions’ were a terra nullius (no-man’s land) before the advent of the white man. And from this erroneous assumption logically follows that this land continually needs governing—a white-man’s-burden-logic subscribed to even by writers like Conrad, who criticises how this governing is done, but can’t conceive of an alternative. To read Heart of Darkness therefore involves being aware of the Africa to which Marlow and Conrad are blind and to add it to the novella’s narrative, like a barely audible second melody that adds depth to the first one.

12Later in Culture and Imperialism, Said describes how he sees the same logic gaining near hegemony in the public space of the USA during the Gulf War of 1990-91 as a justification for the invasion of Iraq (341-49, 391). He analyses how the reductive orientalist discourse of ‘Islam’ vs. ‘The West’ creates a shorthand for talking about the Other, which deepens the constructed divide between ‘them’ and ‘us’ and simplifies the discussion to a point where brute force seems to be the only possible solution because it is all ‘they’ understand. Consequently, Said concludes that during the first Gulf War, even the American critics of the war were unable to create a discursive space committed to the logic that democracy and freedom might prevail in the Middle East without the military intervention of the USA. Once again, the formerly colonised world was constructed as a Terra Nullius inhabited by non-western Others, who had to be governed. Said sees classics like Heart of Darkness and Mansfield Park as significant contributions to a ‘cultural archive’ that validates the contemporary reductive discourses on the non-western Other, unless that archive is read contrapuntally, with attention to how it is inscribed within the logic of empire, and the fallacy of this logic is explicated.

13However, it seems equally important to Said that the texts that constitute this archive are not merely read and consequently dismissed, as their complexity and ability to hold contradictory viewpoints to Said still constitutes what Mathew Arnold has called ‘the best of what is thought and known’ (Said 1993: 52). He considers that ‘... stories matter a great deal. But it’s not the stories that begin at point A and end at point X that I care about, it’s the A to X and then the B to T and the C to P and so on, the coexistence of all of these things is really what I’m about’ (Last Interview 28’00"). But in order to envision the kind of complexity Said insists on in his contrapuntal reading, one needs to go beyond Culture and Imperialism. In her article on Said’s use of counterpoint, Bushnell (2010) borrows the concept of infratext from Culler, suggesting that infratext is the text generated by interpretation that ‘arises from an analysis of the language structures and elements: it is an interior metatext’ (Bushnell: 25) and Said’s production of infratext differs from other kinds of literary analysis in that it is contrapuntal. In the ‘Goldberg Variations, ’ which originally prompted Said’s interest in counterpoint, Bach begins the cycle with a relatively simple aria or ‘cantus firmus’ and then proceeds with 30 variations on that theme, embellishing the original theme which is then played again in the end of the cycle in an extended version. If we are to transpose this aspect of counterpoint onto Said’s literary adaptation of the term we find that a contrapuntal reading entails rather more than holding two complementary points of view in one frame. Nor is it only that the original text (i. e. Mansfield Park or Heart of Darkness) and Said’s prose of infratext runs like intertwining voices in a fugue. It is also that Said introduces Mansfield Park or Heart of Darkness as his cantus firmus, and then—like Bach, who composes variations that embellish the original theme—Said writes infratext that uncovers layers of meaning imbedded implicitly in the cantus firmus, so that when the reader re-reads Mansfield Park or Heart of Darkness, the words on the pages are suddenly laden with all the context of Said’s infratext. The different perspectives that lay dormant in the text, waiting for the contrapuntal reader’s infratext to let them proliferate into meaning, now function as context, enriching the experience of reading the texts.

14Importantly, Said does not try to reconcile the different ‘voices’ in his contrapuntal interpretation, and the inclusion and dialogue that is possible in the polyphony of counterpoint does not rule out antagonism. He envisions it as

...parallel lines... operating together without the necessity of being reconciled at any one moment. They could be quite antagonistic with each other. If you were to freeze a moment in time, let’s say in a fugue, you could hear, maybe, a terrible dissonance, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the flow and the flow together and the interweaving of lines or voices, if you prefer.
(Last Interview 33’00")

15It is, however, not only literature that is read contrapuntally in Culture and Imperialism. Said proceeds to perform a contrapuntal reading of Verdi’s ‘Egyptian’ opera Aida (1871) and in doing so, bases part of his argument on his earlier book Orientalism (1978). Here, he shows how Napoleon’s conquering forces in Egypt included a veritable army of scientists, artists and archaeologists, who were to uncover Egypt’s pre-Islamic past and set it down in the monumental Description de l’Egypte (The Description of Egypt), as an ‘object of knowledge’, readily available for European consumption. He takes up this lead again in Culture and Imperialism by showing how the sets and costumes of Verdi’s opera are in fact based on this Description of an Egypt cleansed of ‘... modern Egyptians, leaving only European spectators’ (Said 1993: 142) and how the setting is then inhabited by sexually subjugated odalisques, mystic high-priestesses and despotic oriental rulers from the catalogue of orientalism. Even the changes in the harmonic structure that give way to ‘oriental’ clichés ‘... much used in carnival hoochy-kooch’ (145-6) are based on western, scholarly works on ‘oriental music’.

16The sense of consciously reaching back to a pre-Islamic past is accentuated by the circumstances of the opera’s creation. Verdi was commissioned to create the opera by the then Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Khedive Ismail, to be performed in the newly built opera house of Cairo, which was by then an ‘... Arab and Islamic city’ though the viceroy was anxious to remake it as a European Gateway to Africa; a ‘Paris-on-the-Nile’ (153). According to Said, any opera as grand as Aida staged in Cairo around the time of the opening of the Suez Canal would have been recognised by everyday Egyptians as an intensely European, elitist spectacle, but an opera about Egypt that completely bypassed the existence of a contemporary Egyptian, Islamic society, while appropriating its pre-Islamic past— as Aida did—was a show of force so arrogant that in Said’s opinion it might actually have added to fermenting Egyptian nationalism. Either way, the performing of Aida was soon discontinued in Cairo and the opera was transported to European and American opera houses where it still plays today.

17As one might see from this analysis, Said pays equal attention to music and literature as artistic modes of expression worthy of analysis, but he also sees them as equally embedded in the political project of imperial domination, analysing them in much the same way. From this follows that playing music can be a political act and hence it is perhaps not surprising that Said began his collaboration with the Israeli-Argentinean conductor Daniel Barenboim founding the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999. The name of the orchestra is taken from the collection of poetry written by Goethe (1814-19) called West-östlicher Diwan, which reads like an attempt to fuse Goethe’s German Sturm und Drang poetry with the highly symbolic Persian Diwan-form, thereby poetically bringing together the two worlds. The orchestra includes members from many parts of the Middle East, and was deliberately founded as a site where dialogue might be attempted, especially between Arabs and Jews, and hence Goethe’s attempt to learn Arabic and his fascination with the Koran and Persian verse seems more in tune with the spirit of the orchestra, than for instance the spirit of imperial domination that pervaded the staging of Aida.

18The early rehearsals of the orchestra are chronicled in the book jointly written by Said and Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002) as well as in later interviews given by Barenboim, who has continued to conduct the orchestra after Said’s death. Here we find the story of an Albanian Jew living in Israel, who is first barred from improvising with a group of musicians because they play ‘Arabic’ music and he, by virtue of being Jewish, possesses the wrong ethnicity (Said & Barenboim 2002: 8). The following conversation in the group about whether non-Germans can then play Beethoven—which of course everyone agrees they can—not only partially resolves the conflict, but also exemplifies Said’s theoretical notion that intellectual pursuits of any kind transcend boundaries of difference, again tapping into his notion of being intellectually ‘out of place’ on purpose (see also Said 1996). Neither Said nor Barenboim are blind to the fact that the orchestra itself will not bring peace to the Middle East, though it might in a small way alleviate ignorance of the Other and teach the members of the orchestra to listen—in music as well as in conversation. This idea is developed by Barenboim, as he talks about a Syrian and an Israeli cellist, who are forced to share the same music stand:

They were trying to play the same note, to play with the same dynamic, with the same stroke of the bow, with the same sound, with the same expression. They were trying to do something together... having achieved that one note, they already can’t look at each other in the same way, because they have shared a common experience.
(10)

19However, the orchestra is not thought of as a way of laying to rest old enmities by entering an ahistorical space, where only the collaboration over music is present. Rather, from the invocation of Goethe’s genuine attempt to learn about the non-western Other, as well as the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s repertoire of western classical music, the very idea of the orchestra seems to be that the aforementioned ‘cultural archives’ have always been a contact zone between different cultures. By virtue of this fact, one should be able to invoke the instances of attempted dialogue they hold, without losing sight of the effects of the domination that followed. In the same vein, Said and Barenboim report that difference of opinion and even outright antagonism did prevail between some of the musicians, though this is not surprising considering that some of them were citizens of countries that were in fact at war, but at least within the space of the orchestra, they only fought verbally. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra might then be seen as a contrapuntal space, but it is not, as in Said’s books, a space wherein a single person attempts to create dialogue by invoking many voices; rather, it is a space where different people take heed of each other, with the help of music. And here the ‘parallel lines... operating together without the necessity of being reconciled at any one moment’ (Last Interview 33’00") might be heard in the voices of people who, despite their enmity, learn to coexist within this contrapuntal space.

20In his late writing Said develops counterpoint as an interpretative framework through which he can read not only the texts and music produced by others but also his personal narrative. His life has been marked by dislocations, but in the end, these are not interpreted as exclusively, or even predominantly, negative. In the last paragraphs of the memoir Out of Place, Said writes:

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of the solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the theme of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. (295)

21This image of ‘the self’ as interweaving currents that require no ‘harmonising’ is elaborated on in the Last Interview, where he states that his life consists of ‘unreconciled strains’ that one cannot ‘rationalise or explain’. He reiterates his ‘interest in literature and [his] very urgent interest in political advance, especially connected with the Palestinians’ and sees himself as a ‘common space’ where these strains reside as ‘experience’ (Last Interview 33’00"). This again connects with the need to allow for complexity:

... you can experience it all as a jumble... or you can filter out most of it and say ‘this is really important’ or you can say—as I do—that they are all there. And your role as a mind, as an intellectual, as an interpreter, in the end is creative, to the extent that you allow them to continue... you see them operating together and allow them to play off each other and you record that in some way.
(Last Interview 34’00", my emphasis)

22Just as Said has no interest in stories that ‘go from A to X’ he also tries to creatively distil his own experience of being human into something meaningful, without reducing it to what is ‘really important’: a contrapuntal writing of ‘the self’ in other words, which can then gradually be fashioned into scholarly, consistent arguments. To Said, counterpoint is thus not only a literary strategy of representation that attempts to do justice to the contradictory nature of complex texts and music, but also a method of recording what this complexity stems from: the nature of how the self contains human experience. He uses at least four different but similar words to describe what occupies this contrapuntal space: ‘intertwining voices’, ‘parallel lines’, ‘conflicting strains’ and ‘flowing currents’ and in the end he says, ’... they have to do with notions of coexistence, that the world is not an exclusive place, that there are different things occurring at the same time. Human agency and will. That it is up to you to try to hold them together’ (Last Interview 35’00").

23However, to ‘hold them together’ and thereby ‘record’ them is not only to recognise the potential of ourselves as humans, but also to recognise the ‘Other’ as human; capable of the same complexity as ourselves. This is visible in Said’s contrapuntal readings of the ‘cultural archive’, where the existence, complexity and human potential of the colonised Other is a barely audible voice invoked by Said’s infratext, as well as in the debate over wars like the first Gulf War, where he tries to discursively represent contemporary, living Arabs as something more than non-western Others in need of Western governance. In the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra the contrapuntal space is a social space, in which political, ethnic and national antagonists recognise each other as human beings, who can only create music by working together and if Said is right and the ‘self’ is not solid, the recognition of the Other might even be visible in our ability to contain ‘conflicting strains’ without necessarily ‘reconciling’ them in our selves. Thus it seems that music, understood as one form of expression of ‘human experience’, is central to understanding Said’s influential writings in many other fields, including perhaps the notion that pervades all his activities: peaceful co-existence of conflict, where solutions are sought in the realm of reason and communication, rather than aggression and war.