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Information and program for future editions of the Edward W. Said Days will be added to this page in due course.
The Edward W. Said Days, held since 2018, open the Pierre Boulez Saal season, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the passing of the Palestinian literary scholar. The program is centered around keynote lectures by philosopher Dag Nikolaus Hasse and musicologist Kofi Agawu as well as two panel discussions exploring subjects at the intersection of music and postcolonialism—both central aspects of Said’s work. Daniel Barenboim conducts two concerts of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he co-founded with Said.
Keynote by Prof. Dr. Dag Nikolaus Hasse
© Peter Adamik
Prof. Dr. Dag Nikolaus Hasse & Mariam Said
© Peter Adamik
© Peter Adamik
© Peter Adamik
Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
© Peter Adamik
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
© Peter Adamik
Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
© Peter Adamik
Prof. Dr. James Helgeson
© Peter Adamik
Keynote by Dr. Kofi Agawu
© Peter Adamik
Dr. Makoto Harris Takao
© Peter Adamik
Dr. Clara Wenz
© Peter Adamik
Dr. Scheherezade Hassan
© Peter Adamik
Dr. Martin Scherzinger
© Peter Adamik
A new edition of the Edward W. Said Days, a yearly tradition since 2018, opens the Pierre Boulez Saal’s 2023–24 season. We celebrate the primary intellectual inspiration of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, whose writings on culture and imperialism, in particular concerning the cultural forms of literature, music, and philosophy, have dominated the international debate for two generations. This year’s colloquium marks the 20th year of Said’s passing. In commemoration, we have assembled scholars working in musicology and philosophy. Evenings during the Edward W. Said Days are given over to keynote talks and an all-Mozart program performed by the Western-Eastern Divan Orchestra under the direction of Daniel Barenboim, the academy’s primary musical inspiration.
The Barenboim-Said Akademie is the fruition of a deep friendship between Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, whose dream of a conservatory combining musical training with a profound engagement with a curriculum in the Humanities, including philosophy, was made actual with its foundation. This friendship, at the root of our daily practice, was partly nourished by Edward Said’s musical interests. He was not only a prominent critical voice of the closing decades of the 20th century and the beginning of our own but also an accomplished, Julliard-trained pianist and skilled commentator on music. But “music” here means the music of a particular tradition: what we call, for better or worse, “Western” classical music. Indeed, Said wryly points out that his musical interests did not coincide with his children’s (claiming that popular music for him remained a closed book). His relationship to the music of the Arabic-speaking world––one otherwise so central to his critical and political concerns––was also, by his own admission, conflicted.
There is a danger, perhaps more acute today, when “identity” has become an unavoidable critical category, in fixating on Said’s musical tastes. More often than not, the students in our academy are fluent in the cultural practices of music-making, not just in the “Western” tradition but also in those of the regions from which they have come. Many, but not all, combine various musical passions in their creative practice. Musical preferences can be political, but they remain free; they are not obligations, and they do not necessarily follow from presumed and perhaps fantasized identities.
Our concern is not to take Said’s thought to task for engaging more with certain types of music and less with others. Instead, the guiding idea of this instalment of the Edward W. Said Days at the Barenboim-Said Akademie is to assay the vast richness of his critical work, particularly his reflections on colonialism and post-colonialism, on a body of cultural phenomena that were mostly outside his practice. This year’s Edward W. Said Days are therefore focused on music outside of the “West,” looking at how colonialism’s effects and the after-effects of the colonial encounter have shaped “Western” views of musical practices originating in other parts of the world.
Prof. Dr. Regula Rapp
Prof. Dr. James S. Helgeson
Edward had a particular and fervent attraction to music.
Counterpoint is a word my husband used often. He knew it well, its flexibilities, inflections, and origin. And I would like to concentrate on the meaning of this word. In music, counterpoint is the combination of two or more voices—voices that are harmonically interdependent, yet melodically and rhythmically independent.
Edward was the first to realize the applications of this word outside of music—in his book Culture and Imperialism, he suggested that we read not “univocally, but contrapuntally,” that we be aware of the narrative of a work of literature and the historical context of that narrative. By using the word counterpoint, Edward also underlines that what is not said in a work may be as important as what is said.
But he also employed this word to describe the life of an exile, writing that “most people are principally aware of at least one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal.”
With Edward’s new meanings attached to the idea of counterpoint, we realize that the word is really about meeting the other. When a jagged clarinet line shoots up and is met and combined with the burnished, supple sound of a cello, we have in music what so fascinated Edward: the meeting, the mingling, the play of it all. In Music at the Limits, he writes, “Counterpoint is the total ordering of sound, the complete management of time, the minute subdivision of musical space, and absolute absorption for the intellect.”
Counterpoint is not just dull musical exercise: Edward described his childhood musical impressions as “on the one hand, a dissatisfying boring drill of piano exercises … and, on the other hand, an enormously rich and haphazardly organized world of magnificent sounds and sites.” Counterpoint is the chance that we have to interact, to tear down the walls and barriers that divide us, to question, to answer, and to listen.
I believe that the Barenboim-Said Akadamie in Berlin is this house of counterpoint, where we can actively demonstrate the word’s new meanings, where students can play counterpoint in their chamber music, discourse counterpoint in their philosophy classes, and live counterpoint through their personal interactions with each other.
Mariam C. Said
Edward Said and I shared a strong belief that making music should be an essential part of social life, and that music plays a major role in influencing and shaping who we are as human beings. It was in this common spirit that, after years of friendship, we embarked on the adventure that became the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. As many of you know, we founded the orchestra together in 1999 and I have been proud to see it grow into a world-renowned ensemble. So it fills me with great joy that we are opening the Barenboim-Said Akademie academic year and the Pierre Boulez Saal season with a tribute to Edward Said, commemorating the 20th anniversary of his death and bringing together the music he loved with new perspectives on some of the ideas that were central to his work.
In fact, perhaps the first thing one remembers about Edward Said is the breadth of interest that he had. He was not only at home in music, literature, philosophy, or politics, but he was also one of those special people who see the connections and the parallels between different disciplines, because he had an unusual understanding of the human spirit, and he recognized that parallels and paradoxes are not contradictions. This very curious mind allowed him privileged glimpses into the subconscious of people, of creators. And added to that he had a very unrestrained courage of utterance, which is what earned him not only the admiration, but also the jealousy and the enmity of so many people.
His groundbreaking book Orientalism, published in 1978, changed the way we think about the world and all but established the field of postcolonialism, one of the two main themes running through the lectures and panels of this symposium.
The other, of course, is music. Edward Said saw in it not just a combination of sounds, but he understood the fact that every musical masterpiece is, as it were, a conception of the world. And the difficulty lies in the fact that this conception of the world cannot be described in words—because were it possible to do so, the music would be unnecessary.
I can’t think of a more fitting way to honor Edward Said’s memory than by keeping his work alive and continuing the discourse he was so passionate about.
Daniel Barenboim
See the full article by Qantara here.
See the full article by NMZ here.
Curator James Helgeson talks about the program of the 2023 Edward W. Said Days.
Learn more about the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and how its founding inspired other projects, including the Barenboim-Said Akademie.