West-Eastern Divan Orchestra Research Articles

Music, Exile, and Edward Said: An Interview with Layale Chaker

Abstract The following interview with Layale Chaker, conducted on 14 September 2023, delves into her unique journey as a Palestinian-Lebanese composer, highlighting the pivotal role of music in shaping her sense of “home” following the Lebanese Civil War. Drawing from her diverse musical upbringing, spanning community choirs to formal conservatory education, Chaker elucidates the disparity between institutional training and the lived musical experiences of the Arab world, informing her quest for authenticity in composition. Chaker recounts her involvement with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, juxtaposed with her decision to pursue an individual artistic trajectory. Central to the conversation is her composition “En Présence de l'Absence – Homáge à Edward Saïd,” revealing a deeply personal connection to Said's legacy and a nuanced exploration of his ethos through music. The interview culminates with insights into Chaker's forthcoming opera, “Ruinous Gods,” co-crafted with playwright Lisa Schlesinger. Addressing the profound trauma of refugee children afflicted with uppgivenhetssyndrom (resignation syndrome), the opera promises a poignant musical narrative probing themes of parenthood, displacement, and societal obligation. Set for premiere at the 2024 Spoleto Festival USA, Chaker's work continues to blend artistry with advocacy, offering a resonant reflection on human resilience and responsibility.

A Study on Peacebuilding through Music

이 연구는 분쟁과 갈등을 겪은 지역의 평화구축에 있어 음악이 어떻게 적용될 수 있고 어떤 역할을 할 수 있는지에 대한 가능성을 제안한다. 이를 위하여 평화와 평화구축에 대한 개념과 정의를 검토하고, 평화의 문화 조성에 기여하는 예술에 대해 알아보며, 비폭력적인 기제로서의 음악의 가치와 역할 및 음악을 통한 평화구축에 있어 중요한 개념을 탐색하였다. 또한, 이스라엘과 아랍의 청년들로 구성된 서동시집 오케스트라(West-Eastern Divan Orchestra), 보스니아 헤르체고비나의 폰타니마 종교 간 합창단(Pontanima Inter-Religion Choir)과 2018년 한반도의 남북 예술단 교류 공연의 사례를 고찰하여 이들의 음악 활동의 의의를 평화구축 관점에서 논하였다. 연구결과, 음악은 평화구축 과정에 있어 관계 형성의 공간을 창출하고, 대화, 치유, 화해, 연대를 위한 역할을 할 수 있으며, 평화로운 공존의 모습을 은유적으로 형상화할 수 있다는 사실이 일부 도출되었다. 이 연구를 통하여 음악을 통한 평화구축에 대한 다양한 시각이 양산되어 음악학, 음악치료학, 예술학, 평화학, 사회학, 교육학 등 다양한 학문 분야에서의 융·복합적 접근과 연구가 촉발되기를 기대한다.This study proposes the possibility of how music can be applied and what role it can play in peacebuilding in regions that have experienced strife and conflict. To this end, the concept and definition of peace and peacebuilding were reviewed and arts that could contribute to the creation of a culture of peace were studied and the value and role of music as a nonviolent mechanism and important concepts in peacebuilding through music were explored. In addition, cases of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra consists of Israeli and Arab youth, the Pontanima Inter-Religion Choir of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Inter-Korean Art Group Exchange Performances on the Korean Peninsula in 2018 were reviewed to discuss the significance of their musical activities from the perspective of peacebuilding. As a result of the study, it was partially derived that music could create a space for relationship formation and play a role for dialogue, healing, reconciliation, and solidarity and metaphorically embody peaceful coexistence in the peacebuilding process. It is hoped that various perspectives on peacebuilding through music will be produced through this study and convergence and complex approaches and research in various academic fields such as musicology, music therapy, art,peace studies, sociology, and education will be inspired by it.

다중적 국경경관(Multi-scalar Borderscapes)과 접경의 재현정치

This paper noted the politics of representation of multi-scalar and multilateral borderscapes to examine the possibility of contact zones as research texts and a methodology. The process by which borderscapes make thought about borders multi-scalar and multilateral makes them see contact zones as an alternative space and dynamic frame of thought that clearly reveals the limits of national, ethnic, and dichotomous thinking.<BR>Borderscapes exist in the borderlands and at the same time make the border and borderlands exist away from it. Art Hotel Re:maker recently installed in Goseong is an example of the former, the documentary film All live Olive with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is examples of the latter. Art Hotel Re:maker transforms the national and security-oriented borderlands’ landscape into a multi-scalar and multilateral platform. Orchestra and documentary film also acquire the meaning of borderscapes as devices for revisiting borders and representing transboundary life by infiltrating borders or borderlands into the daily life of everyone in the world. This aspect of existence of the borderscape extends the borders to contact zones with the borders and suggests the possibility as a methodology seeking liberation from borders.<BR>The contact zones study is distinguished from the existing border study in that it distances the border from the existing marginalized image. Multi-scalar bordercapes make contact zones into nearby subjective place rather than distant other’s space, and approach the possibility of contact zones as a methodology by juxtaposing the origins of pre-border and the future of trans-borders. Contact Zones research and contact zones as a methodology are closely linked with social practice that eventually discovers multi-scalar and multilateral borderscapes and creates a variety of platforms for reciprocating the values of reconciliation and coexistence.

Art Music as Universal Language: Youth Orchestras' Reactions to Social Conflict

This article identifies the role art music plays in orchestra projects that deal with social conflicts of youth populations. I argue that art music serves well in this context because it is a universal language that allows for an alternative method of communication and expression between the young musicians themselves and with others. I apply metaphysical explanations, studies from cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of language in three specific youth orchestra contexts: the Retiro Youth Orchestra, El Sistema, and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. These different lenses help uncover why and how art music positively impacts the development, both socially and personally, of young musicians in a healthier or alternative manner.

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra: A Representation of Peace Optimism from the Middle East

The high escalation of conflict that occurred in the Middle East region became a global issue which until now still has not found a solution. This situation is also complicated by the presence of US President Donald Trump's controversial immigration policy, which targets the Middle Eastern countries. Various efforts have been made by each country to reduce tension and maintain social and political stability in each country. In the midst of the many efforts made, emerging non-state actor that are trying to resolve conflicts, one of which is the Divan OrcThe high escalation of conflict that occurred in the Middle East region became a global issue which until now still has not found a solution. This situation is also complicated by the presence of US President Donald Trump's controversial immigration policy, which targets the Middle Eastern countries. Various efforts have been made by each country to reduce tension and maintain social and political stability in each country. In the midst of the many efforts made, emerging non-state actor that are trying to resolve conflicts, one of which is the Divan Orchestra, an international music organization that runs Music Diplomacy in the conflict countries. In this study, researchers will try to discuss The Divan Orchestra diplomatic roles as a representation of the message of peace from its members. The researcher will use the concepts of Music Diplomacy, Soft Power and Non-State Roles as Analysis Tools. While the research method used is a Qualitative Method using Literature Study. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1953-7663

How Universal is Beethoven? Music, Culture, and Democracy

Daniel Barenboim, conductor of the Arab/Israeli West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, claims that “everywhere in the world . . . [Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony] speaks to all people.” But just how universal is Beethoven? Does his music exceed cultural boundaries or is Barenboim’s idea of a “utopian republic,” built, in part, upon Beethoven’s music, just “another Euro-American vision?” In his paper, Mark Whale explores two ways of understanding Beethoven’s music in line with two versions of the “idea of culture” proposed by literary theorist, Terry Eagleton. First, he suggests that our experience of music has to do with its association with the specific cultural “loyalties and allegiances” built into our lives. Second, he argues that there is a mode of musical encounter, one which crosses cultural boundaries, in which we do not simply experience music but actively choose to care about, and to attend to, what we experience. In choosing to attend carefully to Beethoven’s music we discover that it invites and deepens our attention, not only to it, but also to ourselves.

Reviews: Music and the Politics of Negation

Music and the Politics of Negation , by James R. Currie. Musical Meaning & Interpretation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. xxi, 222 pp. In James Currie's book, a distantly Adornian conception of negation organizes a series of close readings of compositions by Mozart and Haydn, plus a concluding excursus on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. It amounts to a defense—timely, some would say—of values that have been under the cosh lately: aesthetic autonomy and the human autonomy that it ostensibly models; the utopian potential and politically resistant capacity of art; and the continuing importance of canonical (that is: late eighteenth-century Viennese) music. Consequently, the book is also a sustained critique of the liberal intellectual vernacular of much present-day musicological discourse: happy-clappy pluralism, which arguably echoes the foodcourt multiculturalism of free-market ideologies; knee-jerk historicism, which tends to imagine that its methods axiomatically puncture the lofty aspirations of the aesthetic by exposing art's origins; the idea that disenchantment and demystification, in a sort of permanent intellectual upheaval, should be the main elements of a musicologist's job description; the broadly postmodern suspicion of any perspective that can be described as “totalizing”—and indeed any artistic practice that professes to transcend the quotidian, or the material given-ness of the world as it is. Though I have a great many doubts about the particulars of this book's arguments and argumentation, these broad preoccupations are, it seems to me, important—even pressing. This study will not be everyone's cup of tea. This is partly because of its tone, which is by turns playful and portentous, knottily abstract, sweepingly big-picture, and self-consciously eclectic in its range of collateral reference. Certainly, this book at times wears its learning rather heavily, ostentatiously parading its intellectual gurus in a way that can be distracting to read. Early on, one characteristic paragraph (pp. 3–4) develops a boldly adumbrated claim about the history of mirror metaphors via Romantic theories of the uncanny, a frothy description of the climactic bathroom …

A Civilizing Mission? Music and the Cosmopolitan in Edward Said

Though Edward Said’s passionate interest in Western classical music is a well-known aspect of his biography, scholars have largely treated Said’s musical writings and activities as peripheral to his intellectual legacy. Through an examination of his extensive writings on music and his intense engagement with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an explicitly political/musical project intended to promote Arab-Israeli collaboration in the context of Western classical performance, this article examines how Said deployed Western classical music as a discursive space on which he could inscribe and celebrate the political and cultural values of his mobile, cosmopolitan upbringing in interwar Cairo. Said’s insistence on the universality and political applicability of Western musical forms thus came to represent a mode of relocating a lost form of elite cosmopolitanism as a central aspect of Arab identity and rejecting what he saw as the intolerant, philistine parochialism of the post-war Arab political landscape.

Beginning Again: Rereading Edward Said

If there is some especially urgent claim to be made for criticism . . . it is in that constant re-experiencing of beginning and beginning-again whose force is . . . to stimulate self-conscious and situated activity.-Edward Said, BeginningsIt is hard to believe that it is ten years since Said's untimely passing. Such was the intensity and activity of his last decade that it seemed impossible that such energy could simply come to a halt. This special issue of College Literature seeks to mark and honor his anniversary. It also seeks to take stock of how we read Said's work now and how that work may yet function as a critical and intellectual resource for the future.Said's career was highly unusual in various ways. He lived within the very predicament he wrote about-between Western, Anglophone academia and the Arab world, between America and Palestine-and his work sought to mobilize and deploy cultural and intellectual materials which were themselves outcomes of this very particular historical and cultural juncture. was uniquely acculturated: born in Jerusalem, he grew up in Palestine, Egypt, and America, where he trained in comparative literary studies. But this variegated cultural heritage was always shot through in complex ways by the often-violent geopolitical changes that shaped Said's world from his birth onward: the disappearance of historical Palestine after 1948 and 1967 and, equally, the developing and increasingly violent interventionist relationship between the United States and the Arab world in the period after the Cold War. This meant that his understanding of the sphere of culture, even in its highest Arnoldian sense, was always of it as rifted and striated by conflict, power, exile, and pain. His earliest work on Conrad, filtered through the phenomenological criticism that offered a productive alternative to the New Criticism then dominating the literary academy, may have concentrated on the shifts and movements of the Polish exile's mental and emotional state; but there was no doubt as to the importance of the extraordinary life of mobility, alienation, and exile lived against the background of political instability and revolution to this phenomenology of Conrad's mind. Conrad's life and writing spoke to precisely because of this difficult and complex experience of selfdivision, and the compelling struggles of self-creation in writing and thought it seemed to necessitate. It is this that explains Said's interest not only in literal exiles such as Erich Auerbach in Istanbul and America, Frantz Fanon in Algeria, or Jonathan Swiftmoving back and forth between England and Ireland, but also in figures he perceived as radically divided internally, such as T. E. Lawrence or Michel Foucault. His early analysis of Conrad in Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography ( 1966) m ay s eem p rofoundly d ifferent from the later reading in Culture and Imperialism (1993), but there are important continuities there to be seen.By the 1990s, had become the Edward Said we now remember: a global icon of intellectual radicalism and engagement, read as eagerly in India or Japan as in the US or Britain. Given the power and charisma of this figure- denouncing the Gulf War of 1991; producing within weeks of the Declaration of Principles in 1993 the most prescient and clear critique of the Oslo Process; setting up the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim in Weimar in 1999; writing literary and musical analysis, political commentary, and literary journalism with equal fluency-it is necessary to remember the excitement and importance of the period when was making that role. This process of creation occurred in the 1970s, a decade which surely comprised a set of anni mirabiles for him, with the publication in quick succession of a series of career-making books: Beginnings in 1975, Orientalism in 1978, and The Question of Palestine in 1979. All the while, was writing and publishing the essays that would be collected in The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983-perhaps his finest book. …

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.

Music as social medicine: Two perspectives on the West‐Eastern Divan Orchestra

The social power of music can effect stable and positive changes in individual health and communities that have significant health risks. Two observers, a medical student and a music student, discuss respectively the ideals and challenges of this principle put into practice. Their reflections about the role of music as social therapy and space for cultural communication stem from their one-week involvement with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at its summer institute in Spain.

Whose Utopia? Perspectives on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Whose Utopia? Perspectives on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Music quickens time

In this eloquent book, Daniel Barenboim draws on his profound and uniquely influential engagement with music to argue for its central importance in our everyday lives. While we may sometimes think of personal, social and political issues as existing independently of each other, Barenboim shows how music teaches that this is impossible. Turning to his intense involvement with Palestine, he examines the transformative power of music in the world, from his own performances of Wagner in Israel and his foundation, with Edward Said, of the internationally acclaimed West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Music Quickens Time reveals how the sheer power and eloquence of music offers us a way to explore and shed light on the way in which we live, and to illuminate and resolve some of the most intractable issues of our time.

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.