ANTITUSSIVE

Edward Said was a great thinker. And it was music that made him tick. Daniel Barenbolm remembers his playing partner

Daniel Barenbolm Monday October 25, 2004

The Guardian

Edward Said was many things for many people, but in reality, his was a musician's soul, in the deepest sense of the word. He wrote about important universal issues such as exile, politics, integration. However, the most surprising thing for me, as his friend and great admirer, was the realisation that, on many occasions, he formulated ideas and reached conclusions through music; and he saw music as a reflection of the ideas that he had regarding other issues.

This is one of the main reasons why I believe that Said was such an important figure. His journey through this world took place precisely at a time when the humanity of music, its human value as well as the value of thought, the transcendence of the idea written in sounds, were, and regrettably continue to be, concepts in decline.

His fierce anti-specialisation led him to criticise very strongly, and very fairly, the fact that musical education was becoming increasingly poor, not only in the United States - which, after all, had imported the music of old Europe - but also in the very countries that had produced music's greatest figures: for example, in Germany, which had produced Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Schumann and many others; or in France, which had produced Debussy and Ravel. Furthermore, he perceived a sign that bothered him exceedingly, a perception that was to unite us very quickly: even when there was musical education, it was carried out in a very specialised way. In the best of cases, young people were offered the opportunity to practice an instrument, to acquire necessary knowledge of theory, of musicology, and of everything that a musician needs professionally.

But, at the same time, there existed a widespread and growing incomprehension of the impossibility of articulating the content of a musical work. After all, if it were possible to express in words the content of one of Beethoven's symphonies, we would no longer have a need for that symphony. But the fact that it is impossible to express in words the music's content does not mean that there is no content.

The paradox consists of the fact that music is only sound, but sound, in itself, is not music. There lies Said's main idea as a musician who was also an excellent pianist.

In recent years, due to his terrible illness, he was unable to maintain the level of physical energy necessary to play the piano. I remember many unforgettable times that we spent playing Schubert pieces for four hands. Two or three years ago, I had a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York and he was going through a very difficult period of his illness. The concert was on a Sunday afternoon. Although he knew that I had arrived that very morning from Chicago, he showed up very early at rehearsal with a volume of Schubert's pieces for four hands. He told me: "Today I want us to play at least eight bars, not for the pleasure of playing, but because I need it to survive."

As you can imagine, at that moment, just in from the airport and with one hour of rehearsal before the afternoon's concert, the last thing I wanted to do was to play Schubert for four hands. But, as is always the case, when you teach you learn, and when you give you receive. And you learn when you teach because the student asks questions that you no longer even ask yourself, because they are part of the almost automatic thought which each one of us develops. And suddenly, the question addresses something that forces us to rethink it from its origin, from its very essence.

Naturally, I did it, with the greatest pleasure, because my dear friend asked me to do so. But when we played, those few minutes of a Schubert rondo - an extremely beautiful piece, which was not, however, the deepest or most transcendent - I felt musically enriched in a completely unexpected way. That was Edward Said.

Said was interested in detail. Indeed, he understood perfectly that musical genius or musical talent requires tremendous attention to detail. The genius attends to detail as if it were the most important thing. And in doing so, he does not lose sight of the big picture; rather, he manages to trace out that big picture. Because the big picture, in music as in thought, must be the result of the coordination of small details.

He had a refined knowledge of the art of composition and orchestration. He knew that in the second act of Tristan and Isolde, at a certain moment, the horns withdraw behind the stage and, a couple of bars later, the same musical note re-emerges in the pit orchestra's clarinets. So many singers I have had the honour and pleasure of collaborating with on that piece are unaware of that detail and look behind them to see where the sound is coming from. He took interest in these things, because he understood that this meticulous interest in detail conferred a grandeur upon the whole.

He also knew how to distinguish clearly between power and force, which constituted one of the main ideas of his struggle. He knew quite well that, in music, force is not power, something that many of the world's political leaders do not perceive. The difference between power and force is equivalent to the difference between volume and intensity in music. When one says to a musician, "You are not playing intensely enough", his first reaction is to play louder. And it is exactly the opposite: the lower the volume, the greater the need for intensity, and the greater the volume, the greater the need for a calm force in the sound.

These are some examples that illustrate my conviction that his concept of life and of the world originated and lay in music. Another example is to be found in his idea of interconnection. In music, there are no independent elements. The character and intention of the simplest melody change drastically with a complex harmony. That is learned through music, not through political life. Thus emerges the impossibility of separating elements, the perception that everything is connected, the need to always unite logical thought and intuitive emotion. How often do we abandon all logic for the sake of an emotional need? In music, this is impossible, since music cannot be made exclusively with reason or with emotion. What is more: if those elements may be separated, they are no longer music, but a collection of sounds.

His concept of inclusion also derived from music, as well as the integration principle. The same could be applied to his book Orientalism. It speaks of the idea of Oriental seduction versus western production. In music, there is no production without seduction. Productive as a musical idea may be, if it is lacking the seduction of the necessary sound, it is insufficient. This is why I say that Edward Said was, for many, a great thinker, a fighter for the rights of his people, and an incomparable intellectual. But for me, he was always, really, a musician, in the deepest sense of the term.

· Translated from Spanish by Kimberly Borchard. The Barenboim-Said Foundation will open Ramallah's first Music Kindergarten in autumn, in memory of the late Edward Said. Most of the students come from refugee camps around the Ramallah area.

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