THE ARTS

Where are the good vibrations?
Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said make bold claims for the power of music, but neither succeeds in conveying its true magic

* Peter Conrad
* The Observer,
* Sunday August 17 2008

Everything Is Connected: The Power of Music
Daniel Barenboim
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99, pp224
Buy Everything is Connected at the Guardian bookshop

Music at the Limits
Edward W Said
Bloomsbury £20, pp352
Buy Music at the Limits at the Guardian bookshop

Music, according to classical myth, was Heaven overheard on Earth, sifting down from the crystalline spheres that kept the universe on time and in tune. We no longer dare to describe the art as a spiritual bequest; in our fallen world, it is a mere atmospheric disturbance. Composer Busoni defined music as 'sonorous air'. Daniel Barenboim, mystified by the way that empty air erupts when he lifts his baton to conduct, wonders at music's penetration of the body and concludes that the ear is a more receptive organ than the eye. That is why Wagner blinded spectators in his opera house at Bayreuth by hiding the invisible orchestra in a hooded pit. Our eyes, relying on light, help us to interpret and rationalise the world. Our ears register vibrations that we cannot see; the music that elates and agitates or even deranges us happens somewhere in the impenetrable darkness of our bodies.

The obscurity of its workings means that music is uniquely difficult to write about. When Edward Said attempts to describe what happens when Barenboim conducts, all he can say is that his friend gives music 'the density and complexity of life itself, life elaborating itself into pattern, structure, order, energy and, not least, surprise and joy'. That hardly helps; Said's sentence has the vacuous agitation of a middle-aged man playing air guitar.

But despite their bafflement at these lyrical shockwaves, Barenboim and Said - a Jewish musician and a Palestinian literary critic - teamed up in 1999 to test the healing, harmonising power of an art that was allegedly handed down to us by the gods. They mixed Israeli and Arab musicians in their West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (the awkward name comes from the title Goethe gave to a collection of Oriental verse) and offered this happy consortium as a model for the coexistence of cultures in the Middle East.

The orchestra has given many concerts, including one at the Proms last Thursday, but the snarled and lethal political mess remains and Barenboim's reflections on the enterprise reveal that it was never more than a noble folly. Is there a connection between art and fractious life? Does music actually have the power to sponsor brotherhood, as Beethoven claimed in the boisterous finale of his ninth symphony? Only metaphorically; the best Barenboim can do is to liken the failed Oslo peace process to a symphony played at the wrong tempo, or compare a nation's constitution to a musical score, or claim that races and religions must be able to coexist because counterpoint demonstrates that divergent voices can overlap without drowning each other.

At least Said, in his collection of musical journalism, has less windily lofty evidence that the experiment worked, at least for two participants. He salaciously notes that 'an Israeli soldier-cellist and a lissome Syrian violinist' hooked up during rehearsals; I presume they resolved their 'heated arguments' on the titular divan.

Beyond expressing pious hopes about Utopia, Barenboim has little progress to report. Anecdotes are tediously recycled; the title of his book should have been 'Everything Is Repeated'. An insubstantial volume is filled out with a random sampling of interviews and journalistic articles, which supply inadvertent glimpses of the man behind the missionary. The conductor is more than an evangelist. Prospering in a corporate culture that rewards star performers with inflated fees and institutional sinecures like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or the Berlin Staatsoper, he is also a tycoon.

Coaxed by fawning interviewers, Barenboim discloses an unlovable tendency to self-congratulation. One hack asks if he has achieved his 'personal goals'. 'Yes, oh yes,' he smugly replies. Another sycophant wonders if the maestro, who began his career as a pianist while still in short pants, feels an affinity with the child prodigy Mozart. He beamingly saunters into the trap: 'In a certain sense, yes.' Conductors are notoriously tyrannical, so it is no surprise to find Barenboim, in another unguarded daydream, announcing: 'I am Prime Minister of Israel.'

Barenboim, who says that he reads Spinoza in his dressing room during intervals, worries about 'musical ethics' and fusses over 'the moral responsibility of the ear'. I'm not sure that a sense organ can carry such a burden; we don't ask our penises to possess a conscience.

But the ethical responsibilities of the music reviewer create a problem in the anthology of Said's journalism. Said, who died in 2003, was a trained pianist, which entitled him to assert, in a pitch for a book on Bach and Beethoven that no publisher wanted to commission, that he possessed a 'complete knowledge of music'. His knowledge of the musicians whose performances he attended, however, was woefully deficient. He misspells the names of conductor Charles Mackerras and sopranos Karita Mattila and Hildegard Behrens and writes at length about Beethoven's Fidelio while muddling the heroine's name. He even blunders when citing Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron: the composer pointedly deducted an 'a' from Aaron to ensure that the title would have 12 letters, like one of his dodecaphonic rows. In a literary aside, Said accuses Spenser's Faerie Queene of making propaganda for Elizabethan imperialism; the aspersion is wrong and so, more grievously, is his spelling of the poet's name.

At least he commits no orthographic error when he casually refers to 'the egregious Peter Conrad'. I guess he intended to insult me, but I'm happy to bask in a cack-handed compliment, since the dictionary says that the adjective means prominent, distinguished or, at worst, outrageous. No argument backs up the animadversion, so who can tell? If I'm on Said's shit list, the company I keep is melodious; he considers Verdi to be a bad composer, sniffs at Bartók, patronises Alfred Brendel as a 'decent, earnest' dullard and derides Pavarotti as 'a grotesque'. Said's sloppiness matters because he enjoys pretending to be holier and higher-browed than the rest of us. One article castigates Salzburg and other summer music festivals for succumbing to 'unashamed touristic promotion'; it's therefore piquant to find him, after a jaunt to the opera in Santa Fe, shamelessly informing potential customers that they can 'fly there [from New York] in about three hours', as if he were a travel agent soliciting business. Said jeers at Solti's 'podium persona' and ridicules his swishing gestures, though he has the honesty to admit that the careers of conductors rely on 'histrionic charlatanry'. We all know about the self-dramatising antics of those who practise what is called gestural politics.

Barenboim's assumption that the wand he manipulates can end wars suffers from the same delusion; I'm reminded of Michael Jackson's crusade to save the world by cuddling children. At one point, I even thought that Said had seen through the imposture. He refers, I noticed with a start, to Barenboim's 'glamorous conceit'. Alas, 'conceit' is another misprint, not an inconvenient truth: he probably meant 'concert'. I only hope, when Said transferred from the computer keyboard to the piano, that his fingers had more respect for notes than they have for words.
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Books reviews: Where are the good vibrations?
This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday August 17 2008 on p21 of the Features and reviews section. It was last updated at 00:03 on August 17 2008.


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