Rachel Beckles Willson

The Parallax Worlds of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra

The West–Eastern Divan Orchestra – founded in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim with the support of Edward W. Said in response to the Israel–Palestine conflict – brings together young Arabs, Jews and Spaniards for a workshop and concert tour every year. It displays a tension between repertoire (exclusively the Western classical tradition) and marketing (as an expression of inter-cultural dialogue). Drawing on fieldwork from 2006, the article analyses this tension as it evolves for players who shift repeatedly between the demands of Western orchestral playing and political discussion. It exposes the way the hierarchy of musical roles and the discourse elaborated around them create an environment that erases the political identities of players; and discusses the ways in which this environment is punctured at certain moments by a discursive or practical intervention, causing political allegiances to rise back to the surface explosively (only to be subsumed once again into music). Although the orchestra is set up to oppose the violence of war in the Middle East, it can be seen to contain its own disconcertingly coercive regime, one emerging from its hierarchical constitution with Barenboim as omnipotent leader, the professional ambitions of players, and the power that music can have in confounding the conceptual sphere.

Music Teachers as Missionaries: Understanding Europe's Recent Dispatches to Ramallah

In this article I address ideas underpinning the teaching of western classical music by European and North American musicians on Palestines West Bank. I introduce the establishment and growth of this teaching movement since the mid-1990s as a product of broader international investment in the region, and suggest that it can be approached tellingly through the lens of mission. My extensive interview material has indicated ideational echoes with nineteenth-century Protestant interventions into ‘the Holy Land’, and exposed how Orientalist tropes about social difference, western musics beneficence and regional violence continue to underpin the thinking of foreign workers in the region. It has also revealed a structural similarity to earlier missionary impulses: foreign musicians in residence focus on their music-aid work in Palestine, yet—just as were nineteenth-century missionaries—they are most often there as a result of perceived problems in their homelands.

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