Kofi Agawu
Edward Said and the study of music
My first encounter with Edward Said’s work was in the
1980s with the book, Beginnings: Intention and Method
(1975). I was exploring a semiotic approach to late 18th-century
music, specifically, a beginning-middle-ending paradigm (an Aristotelian
paradigm) that seemed to me to capture the rhetorical intentions of
Classic composers. Said’s wide-ranging reflections and ruminations on
beginnings – as inaugural moments, as sites for the establishment of
difference, as authorially privileged moments, and as "first steps in
the intentional production of meaning" – proved inspiring. My enduring
impression of him at the time was that he was a very good analyst who
had also read a lot of books and maintained a humane stance as critic.
Some years later, I encountered his famous book,
Orientalism (no subtitle, by the way). It had become famous by the
time I read it, so it was impossible to read it without the intervention
of a series of veils, an unverified sense of its importance as a text.
The book’s essential point could be grasped immediately, namely, that
Western representation of the ‘Orient’ (which could in turn be
generalized into the non-Western world) revealed a consistent or
systematic bias. Discourse is ideological; it does not merely represent
but actually creates the Orient. This alignment of knowledge and power
was resonant for me, because I was myself beginning to think about
‘Western’ discourses on sub-Saharan African music. By the 1990s many of
us were gleefully announcing that Orientalism had emerged as
the inaugural text for the field of post-colonial theory. Among
other achievements, it had helped to expose a self-serving, indeed
racist West. Debates raged in various venues about Orientalism’s
significance. I remember one in the pages of the Times Literary
Supplement, where a Cambridge don, Ernst Gellner, came down hard on
Said’s book, describing it as "intellectually insignificant".
From then on, I encountered Said’s work in various
venues. There were essays in learned journals (I remember a stimulating
one in the U.S.-based journal Critical Inquiry called
"Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors"). I also
encountered a book called Musical Elaborations, and indeed wrote
a not particularly favorable review of it for the magazine Transition.
I was slightly put out by what I saw as Said’s frontal attack on
musicology and music analysis – telling us that we were sheltered and
cloistered, and that this was no longer justified; and yet, when he
turned to make his own associations between music and other expressive
systems, the results I found less than inspiring. Then came Culture
and Imperialism, which appealed to some musicologists because it
included a chapter on Verdi’s Aida which some opera scholars
found liberating – licensing them, it would seem, to talk about such
things as the historical Verdi and his material ambitions for Cairo, and
not just about matters aesthetic. For others, the significance of
Culture and Imperialism lay in the author’s engagement with cultural
production from the non-West. The non-West "writes back" to its
colonizers, it would be said.
By now (the 1990s), so much had been written about Edward
Said that it was possible to devote equal attention to the primary and
secondary literature. The growing literature on postcolonial theory had
always made a point of Said’s key role in making possible the kind of
interrogation of discourses found in his earlier texts. The work of
prominent postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak
was often contextualized in reference to Said. (Indeed the three
together seemed to represent a kind of holy trinity
in postcolonial studies). Of course, much was said about Said’s views on
Palestine and his friendship with Daniel Barenboim. And he had a whole
other life as a music critic. Said’s output is vast, impressive in its
reach, and, for better or worse, always accessible from a linguistic, if
not psychic point of view. In our increasingly interdisciplinary
approach to the humanities (in the US at least), his work is precisely
the kind that has the potential to open doors, stimulate other thoughts,
unsettle orthodoxies, and compel the dissolution of barriers. It is also
the kind of work that can be readily misappropriated or appropriated
opportunistically.
Since we have all day to talk about Said, I will use my
time to sketch the beginnings of a critique of a handful of issues that
interest me.
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Said is first and foremost a reader
of texts – an astute analyst with a keen eye for that which
motivates or makes possible a target text. But what is the
significance of reading for musicologists and
ethnomusicologists, especially since some of our languages and
parallel metalanguages occupy different material spheres?
Reading texts is obviously central to what we do as music
scholars, but it is not all; we are also engaged in interpreting
other forms of textuality, as for example, notated scores of
music, recorded works and live performances. If we follow Said’s
example literally, we may be tempted to alter our priorities by
privileging the reading of verbal texts – historical texts, for
example. We may even confine our actions to the metacritical
realm, the realm in which language about music rather than the
music itself rules. This, in my view, would be an unfortunate
turn. Rather than risk becoming mere parasites ("discourse
analysts"), so to speak, we might explore the many forms of
textuality that the practice of music makes possible. In short,
we should be readers and more.
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A second issue concerns the question of
the semantic element in music. (Gianmario Borio and Michela
Garda have written about this, as have others, so I will defer
to them for a proper formulation of the problem of music’s
decipherable content). I bring up the matter, however, because
it obviously mattered to Said; indeed his complaint against
musicology in Musical Elaborations is precisely that the
worldliness of music (the theme of worldliness of both text
and critic was important to him) has not been sufficiently
acknowledged and theorized. Again, one is inclined to agree that
the tension between the idea of the world and the idea of the
work assumes shifting configurations for us in music. At one
extreme lies the view that all works, by virtue of coming into
existence – being born – at a time and place, allow
interpretation in relation to those circumstances or conditions.
But what we don’t seem to agree on is the kind of relation that
the trace itself bears to the external world. The eagerness to
make this connection sometimes precedes deep reflection on the
material nature of music, and yet we would all probably agree, I
think, that adequate analysis of music must be based on accurate
characterization of musical materiality, and that that
characterization must in turn be based on historical, cultural
and systematic observation. If we rush into imposing a specific
iconic worldliness on the musical work (something I feel Said
might have been guilty of on occasion), we may end up falsifying
musical content, treating it but superficially, or overlooking
its complex and overlapping significations. In short, although
worldliness is a central tenet in Said’s theory, we do well to
approach it with some caution.
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For those who might prefer to take a more
catholic view of the musical repertoire, whose interests might
extend from classical to pop, jazz and non-Western music (Serena
Facci and Giovanni Giurati have lots to say about this), it is
striking that Said’s literary and musical references are
invariably to the core European canon. This unapologetic
Eurocentricism has been noted by more than one critic. For Said,
music is Bach, Beethoven and Brahms (not
Schoenberg, as it was for Adorno); for him, theory is Vico,
Marx, Auerbach, Foucault and Gramsci; and for him, literature is
Chaucer, Austen, Dickens, Flaubert and Conrad. Even in the book
Culture and Imperialism, in which he engages artistic
production from the Third world (including Rushdie, Achebe and
Soyinka), the frames of reference are still European. Achebe
does not write but ‘writes back’, so to speak, just as the
empire has written back. The framework for critical assessment
remains European.
Is Said’s Eurocentricism strategic? Is it a willed
Eurocentricism, or is he speaking at a first level, without quotation
marks? From an Africanist perspective, I would like to imagine a point
of analytical departure that denies a priori privilege to Europe. For
example, one point of departure might be work on indigenous epistemology
(such as Kenyan philosopher Odera Oruka’s sage philosophy), which
reinforces the unsurprising fact of the cogency of African thought
systems – a reinforcement that would not be necessary were it not for
the strong orientalist tide that we (post-colonial Africans) have had to
swim against in representing anything African in today’s academy. The
claim that African thought systems are cogent is not intended as an
overtly comparative claim; it is simply an affirmation of the viability
of certain ways of world-making that derive from the invented contours
of an ‘African’ world view. If we follow Said’s example, I fear that we
may forsake the possibilities of this line of thinking and research.
That would be a pity.
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A related reason for revaluing the complex of
forms known as indigenous thought systems is to escape the
increasingly repetitive discourse about Africa. Granted, repetition
is what it is all about – and we as musicians understand this better
than anyone, including poets – but some repetitions are productive
while others are not. Orientalism is in many ways a very
repetitive book, for once you grasp the motivating mindset that
ostensibly conditions Western representation of the Orient, you’ve
got the idea. Of course, variety and nuance come in the range of
texts from which Said draws his evidence, so it may be that the book
does not feel at all repetitive to readers with literary
backgrounds. And yet there can be a flatness to the theoretical
claims advanced in Orientalism
because their political implications are entered in relatively muted
terms. In any case, there is absolutely no way that Africans can
police the discourse about Africa unless intellectual power is
accompanied by more instrumental forms of power – economic,
political and military. Said’s model deserves to be emulated only
once, after which we will need to move on. In short, when Serena and
Gianmario ask "How can musicologists (studying African, Asiatic,
European music, etc) interpret Said’s considerations in their
specific fields?", I would answer by saying "With difficulty"
because he only shows us the first step – a gesture of resistance
that is necessary but not sufficient for full emancipation.
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Finally, as to the degree of "shared knowledge
in the field of musical culture between East, West, North and
South?" I want to say that this is, in some senses, a rather complex
question, one that demands a contrapuntal answer. Some of
Said’s critics have pointed out that the book Orientalism
(and, for that matter, postcolonial theory in general) is read more
in the metropolis than in the former colonies. Postcolonial theory
is thus consumed more by our historical oppressors than by the
historically oppressed. So if by "shared knowledge" one includes the
kind of knowledge produced over several decades by Said himself and
others like him, then an asymmetry remains between us and them. But
this is just the surface of the surface of the issue, so to speak.
Knowledge is produced and reproduced within the framework of
institutions, so ideally we need to thoroughly examine the contours
of colonial education and its legacies throughout Africa, including
post-independence attempts to modify or in some cases overturn its
premises. Continent-based musical education, though not the most
central concern of government-appointed educational planners, would
nevertheless reveal a significant sedimentation of ‘Western’ or
European ways of thinking in Africa. A little anecdote: During a
recent visit to the University of Ghana, I was allowed to sit in on
a few classes, both graduate and undergraduate. I learned, for
example, that in the music history class, students are (still)
reading Donald Grout’s A History of Western Music for the
Baroque unit of the course. The instructor has access only to the 2nd
or 1973 edition of a book published in 1960, although the book is
now in its 7th
edition! The instructor does not have access to the accompanying
recordings and scores (Norton Anthology of Western Music),
which means that these poor Ghanaian students are busy memorizing
facts about Vivaldi, Rameau, Corelli, Handel and Bach without
hearing or playing any of the music. Rather than turn this pathetic
condition into another opportunity for text-making – by pointing
out, for example, the ostensible ironies of post-colonial African
students reading the Traité of Rameau or writing about
Handel’s operas when their own sonic environment is dominated by
Highlife, reggae, afrobeat or
Hiplife music, eating fufu and omotuo, and
using cell phones, it is better to cut to the chase and confront the
material disparities that ensure that knowledge can never be
"shared" unless these very material conditions change.
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To conclude, let me just mention a few of the
issues that we might discuss later this morning and during the
afternoon session: first, the role of the post-colonial intellectual
in the modern world; second, the politics of clear language use;
third, the potential of abstract thinking as a mode of empowerment
(which Said seems not to appreciate fully, being always anxious to
return us to the concrete, the historically-specific, the worldly,
the here and now); fourth, the costs of person-based theorizing (a
kind of experiential epistemology) and how it underwrites the entire
postcolonial project; fifth, the peculiarly North American character
and context of Said’s work, with its obsession with difference and
identity politics.
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