James R. Currie

Round table : Edward Said and musicology today

The present round table emerged from a panel held in remembrance of Edward Said (1935– 2003) at the 2013 American Musicological Society conference in Pittsburgh. More than ten years after his death and 35 years after the first publication of Orientalism,1 the core dilemmas that animated Said’s projects remain as vexed as ever: concerning war and peace in the Middle East; cultural displacement and ‘in-betweenness’;2 colonial and postcolonial politics of representation; scholarly knowledge, ideology, power and responsibility. To say that his passing in 2003 was ‘untimely’ is an understatement considering his legacy’s uncanny belated hold on global dilemmas in the early twenty-first century. We need only think of the imperilled Israeli–Palestinian peace process; the cultural ramifications of persistent military conflicts in and with the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Global South regions; the growing numbers of forcibly displaced people connected with these conflicts, which are of the largest scale in modern history;3 and the ongoing fallout of the Great Recession, which has exacerbated contestations over the status of the university, public education and the role of the intellectual. Given the breadth of his interventions, the transformative potential of Said’s legacies would appear at once urgent and latent in music studies and beyond. Rather than surveying existing musical literature on postcoloniality or globalization, this round table turns to Said’s speech and actions as specific provocations for scholarly reflection and change. This collection began by tending towards questions of historiography, power, close reading and representation – both as a disciplinary reaction to the initial AMS setting of the panel and as a response to Said’s own roots in history, philology and philosophy. It has since broadened to address wider orientations and concerns, most notably with Martin Stokes’s critical commentary on the disciplinary tensions underlying Said’s surprisingly sparse reception in ethnomusicology. All of the contributors maintain that Said’s legacy has proved secure in music studies yet relatively circumscribed. More than his other writings, Orientalism has remained a touchstone

Another Music, A Time to Forget: Reflections on Edward Said's Late Style

Using the West-Eastern Divan orchestra as a central referent, this essay outlines a modest utopian claim for music in our times. Set against the postmodern belief that music can only be understood responsibly by contextualizing it within the densely particularized networks of its specific localities, the essay argues for musical labor as a productive site for overcoming dangerously ossified sets of social relations. The essay detects in the late work of Edward Said a new vigilance toward the limits of ‘worldliness’, a conceptual orientation with which Said had become widely associated. Instead of merely indicating another site of cultural production, musical performance in the West-Eastern Divan orchestra, also becomes a site of productive forgetting. Against the identity-based forms of belonging and origin characterizing the stalemate of Israeli–Palestinian relations, Said found in music a mechanism for setting adrift identity from its contextualized locale.

Splinters in the Eye: Interpreting Webern's Bach transcription

This article is centered around an interpretation of Webern’s transcription of Bach’s six-part Ricercar from The Musical Offering . Its aim is to show how the transcription can be understood as a dramatization of certain dialectical issues regarding the relationship between ideas of style and philosophies of history. In particular, this article positions the work within Schoenberg’s writing about style, considerations drawn from the writings of Adorno, and suggestions regarding the Hegelian orientation of mid-twentieth-century historical models in use in Vienna. Interwoven into this structure is an underlying attempt to establish a preliminary position for reading Webern’s works from this particularly ideologically difficult period from a potentially politically redemptive vantage point.