JANUARY 2006

Edward Said spoke of music as political resistance

"Beethoven is sustained by an abiding rational faith .........a faith in humanity, which otherwise slowly disappears over the course of the century into private myths - if you think of Wagner - or into music, as Adorno describes the case of Schoenberg, that's totally immobilized. It doesn't have a social or humanistic message anymore.

"Beethoven is, to a certain extent about that (there are certain things that one must not accept) that is to say there is resistance.I'm more interested in what can't be resolved and what is irreconciliable.....that's what I think is, in the contrast between aesthetics and politics, that if every aesthetic phenomenon could be somehow recuperated to a political one, then in the end there is no resistance; whereas I think it is useful at times to think of the aesthetic as an indictment of the political - it's a stark contrast, forcefully made to inhumanity, to injustice.

"For me, as somebody who cares so deeply about music, a very important part of the practice of music is that music, in some profound way, is perhaps the final resistance to the acculturation and the commodification of everything."
Parallels and Paradoxes.Dec.14. 2000.