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If I took my
Jewish-American identity off the rack more, I was supposed to dislike or even
hate Edward Said. His ceaseless advocacy for a just, rational and peaceful
Middle East was so blunt, candid, honest and strident, and was so critical of
the way the government of Israel and the world Jewish community handles its side
of this mess, that he became the whipping boy, practically with a wanted poster,
for those in the Jewish community who fight the Religious Wars in the fanciest
magazines with big words. For those unfamiliar with Said's political presence at
the center of the cyclone, and the bitter hatred it has engendered, a Google
search of the Internet is instructive and even frightening.
Actually I quickly came to admire him
as an astonishingly original and thoughtful beacon toward a reasonable human
future in the Middle East. Clearly he believed that for educated, cultured
people, dialogue must somehow offer a path to a peace of mutual respect. Imagine
the farthest is possible to go from Fox News and CNN, and you get the level at
which Said insisted on describing The Big Violent Mess and finding solutions for
it.
Perhaps his greatest life triumph was
to have done so much to turn swords into word processors in this historic
multi-faith collapse of leadership and vision, but to have still insisted that a
large part of his life be devoted to aesthetic beauty and music, as if these
pretty tunes on antique music boxes were of equal importance.
More likely, he perceived no
distinction or compartmentalization between any of his passions; what he
believed all must know, feel and share about Glenn Gould was part and parcel of
how he believed human beings must stop murdering each other in the Middle East
and all over the world for disputes that claim and seem to be largely about God.
Possibly he was an intellectual synaesthetic, who heard the chord progressions
of peace, the music of community, and in listening to Gould play keyboards,
could perceive truths about brotherhood, humanity and rational
cooperation.
The worst people I know are rejoicing
tonight; they were restrained from using helicopter missiles to reply to Said's
books and essays, but now he is just as dead as the Hamas official and his eight
nearest passersby.
And yet we should not confuse today's
Great Loss with hopelessness, or imagine that the World has fallen back three
squares and will not soon recover and go forward again. Perhaps Glenn Gould and
his ilk -- I am particularly thinking of the loud, obsessive and radical
German-Israeli-Argentine peacenik Daniel Barenboim -- are the glue that connects
the highest creative and artistic realms with the most important ideas and
efforts toward peace in the world. There will always spontaneously be great
souls who share and ceaselessly promulgate this connection.
The following is from a biographical
sketch of Barenboim at
This must have been quite the
accidental conversation in a hotel lobby; I would have loved to have been
sitting in a nearby chair.
In the early 1990’s, a chance meeting between Mr. Barenboim and the
Palestinian-born writer and Columbia University professor Edward Saïd in a
London hotel lobby led to an intensive friendship that has had both political
and musical repercussions. These two men, who should have been poles apart
politically, discovered in that first meeting, which lasted for hours, that they
had similar visions of Israeli/Palestinian possible future co-operation.
They decided to continue their dialogue and to collaborate on musical
events to further their shared vision of peaceful co-existence in the Middle
East. This led to Mr. Barenboim’s first concert on the West Bank, a piano
recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University in February 1999, and to a
workshop for young musicians from the Middle East that took place in Weimar,
Germany, in August 1999.
The West-Eastern Divan Weimar ‘99 Workshop took two years to organise
and involved talented young musicians between the ages of 14 and 25 from Egypt,
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia and Israel. The idea was that they would come
together to make music on neutral ground with the guidance of some of the
world’s best musicians. Weimar was chosen as the site for the workshop
because of its rich cultural tradition of writers, poets, musicians and creative
artists and because it is the 1999 European cultural capital. Mr. Barenboim
wisely chose two concertmasters for the orchestra, an Israeli and a Lebanese.
There were some tense moments among the young players at first but, coached by
members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the
Staatskapelle Berlin, and following master classes with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and
nightly cultural discussions with Saïd and Barenboim, the young musicians
worked and played in increasing harmony.
A year ago here I complained that a
particular Beethoven symphony seemed to be about nothing, to contain or gift us
with no perceivable ideas or human concepts. I was surprised by the harsh
replies; I was taken to task for even suggesting or believing that great music
is or must be "about" things. The respondents all stated flatly that
great instrumental music is about nothing but itself; it has no necessary links
to great themes or ideas or ideals or visions; those who believe great music is
the vessel of great ideas are romantically hallucinating, and have been the
victims of bad music teachers. Great music is about the notes, and playing them
particularly well.
Clearly to Said and Barenboim, great
music is about great things, and this is always clear to great interpreters like
Gould, and even to insightful amateur lovers of great music. To Said and
Barenboim, a gathering of enemies to share great music was an obvious gathering
of enemies to understand one another's shared humanity and to make peace; the
two pursuits were practically identical and simultaneous.
Strangely and ironically, a week ago a
very gifted amateur interpreter of classical keyboard music, particularly of
Bach, died: Edward Teller, popularly nicknamed "the Father of the
H-Bomb," also popularly believed to have been the real-life model for
Stanley Kubrick's "Doctor Strangelove." No single American did more
not merely to invent "the Super," but to make it the centerpiece of
America's Cold War military posture. Frustrated that Los Alamos was not moving
America toward thermonuclear Armageddon fast enough, Teller founded the Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory in California to accelerate the world's race to radioactive
oblivion. In more recent years he was the most influential champion of the
Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly called "Star Wars," the
space-based foolproof umbrella to protect America and a few of its close allies
from all missile threats.
I would argue that where Said and
Barenboim are musical and political synesthetics, Teller had a fundamental
intellectual disconnect, firewall, caesura between great music and fundamentally
important human ideas; or else it is possible for two gifted musicians to listen
to or play the Goldbergs, and one dreams of peace, while the other dreams of
improving throw weights and multiple warheads. (Teller would have argued that
world peace was effectively and demonstrably maintained by his balance of
thermonuclear terror. That plan didn't seem to assure peace very well in the
Middle East, where Israel possesses numerous atomic weapons, and its neighbors
dream of acquiring their own.)
All three -- Said, Barenboim, Teller --
had intimate personal and family experiences with holocausts, genocides,
religious and ideological wars of the fiercest kind the 20th Century knew how to
produce. Bach, at the highest levels of knowledge and interpretation, sang to
each of them and coursed through all their hands.
I don't know if Teller and Gould had
any noticeable intersection or much familiarity. But it seems so clear to me
that for Said and Barenboim, Glenn Gould hovered over their yearnings and great
efforts for peace, brotherhood and understanding in the Middle East. People like
this who have ideas and gifts like this don't really ever die. They irradiate
the rest of us with their gifts and their passions and their intellectual
synaesthesia.
Bob
Edward Said, pianist, scholar, Palestinian advocate has died of leukemia. He spoke and wrote of Gould often. I always wondered if it was a coincidence that his book The World, The Text, and The Critic bears the initials WTC. Obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/obituaries/25CND-SAID.html A Said/GG Bibliography: "TORONTO HAS BEEN in Edward Said's consciousness since 1956 when as a student at Harvard he found himself transfixed by a Glenn Gould record. Later he would rush to Gould's performances in Boston; buy all his records; follow his career until his death in 1982; and, being an accomplished pianist himself, write knowledgeably about the genius, including an erudite piece last fall, The Virtuoso as Intellectual..." http://www.commondreams.org/views/062200-102.htm"Glenn Gould, the Virtuoso as Intellectual." Raritan (Summer 2000), 20(1):1-16. Musical Elaborations by Edward Said "Music: Glenn Gould at the Metropolitan Museum." Nation (November 7, 1987), 245 (15):533-535. "The Music Itself: Glenn Gould's Contrapuntal Vision." Vanity Fair (May 1983), 46(3):97-101, 127-128. Also In John McGreevy, ed., Glenn Gould: By Himself and His Friends, pp. 45-54. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1983. Remembrance of Things Played: Presence and Memory in the Pianist's Art: On Glenn Gould:216-229 "In the Chair." Review of Peter Ostwald's Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and the Tragedy of Genius and Norman Lebrecht's When the Music Stops: Managers, maestros and the Corporate Murder of Classical Music. London Review of Books (July 17, 1997), 19(14):3, 5-6. |