St John said, "In the beginning was the word", while Goethe claimed that, "In the beginning was the deed". But in these lectures Daniel Barenboim's contention is that: In the beginning was sound.
Read the transcript of the lecture below.
Lecture 1: In the Beginning was Sound
BBC RADIO
REITH LECTURES 2006
'In the Beginning was Sound'
Lecture by Daniel Barenboim at Cadogan Hall, London
SUE LAWLEY:
Hello and welcome to the Cadogan Hall in West London, where for the first time in the fifty-eight year history of this event our Reith lecturer is a conductor. He began his musical career as a pianist. This is how he sounded when he was making his debut here in London exactly half a century ago.
DANIEL BARENBOIM (AS A CHILD):
I gave a concert at the Royal Festival on Tuesday.
INTERVIEWER:
And what did you play then?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Mozart Concerto in A Major.
INTERVIEWER:
And then have you done anything else while you've been here?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yes I gave also a recital at the Wigmore Hall.
INTERVIEWER:
Well there you are, here's a young man of thirteen who's come over, and we thought you'd like to meet him tonight. What are you going to play tonight for us? You're going to play some Chopin?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
ŠŠŠŠ Chopin.
INTERVIEWER:
So here is Chopin now, here is Daniel Barenboim.
(BRIEF EXTRACT FROM RECITAL)
SUE LAWLEY:
Thirteen-year-old Daniel Barenboim playing Chopin in London in 1956. He'd given his first concert in Buenos Aires at the age of seven, and at the age of eleven he'd been declared a phenomenon by the legendary conductor Wilhelm Fürtwangler. His life has been and continues to be saturated with music. A virtuoso at the piano, he later became a supreme master of the podium. Currently he's Music Director of both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin State Opera. In these lectures he'll be drawing on a lifetime of musical experience to demonstrate that music, as he puts it, is a way to make sense of the world - our politics, our history, our future, and our very essence. Daniel Barenboim doesn't shy from controversy. He's shown himself willing to take courageous public stands. Six years ago he founded, against the odds, an orchestra made up of equal numbers of Arab and Israeli young members, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, not least to demonstrate that it's possible through music for people from warring factions to find peaceful co-existence.
Today he'll deliver the first in his series of lectures which, over the course over the next five weeks, will take us from here in London to Chicago, Berlin, Ramallah, and Jerusalem. Ladies and gentlemen, please will you welcome the BBC's Reith Lecturer 2006 - Daniel Barenboim.
(APPLAUSE)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm perfectly aware of the great honour to be asked to deliver the Reith Lectures. It is with some slight trepidation that I do that, because I firmly believe that it is really impossible to speak really deeply about music. All we can do then is speak about our own reaction to the music. So maybe the honour is dubious, or maybe the BBC thought it would be very short.
(LAUGHTER)
In any case, the impossible has always attracted me more than the difficult. The impossible, if there is some sense behind it, has not only a feeling of adventure, but a feeling of activity which I do admit I enjoy very much. I will therefore attempt the impossible and maybe try and draw some connection between the inexpressible content of music and, maybe, the inexpressible content of life.
In Chicago I will try to discover why it is that we are neglecting our ears so much, and why we have become such a visual society, and why it is that the eye seems to have so much more power than the ear.
In Berlin I will try, always with connection to music obviously, to explain why I think that it is so difficult in today's world to grow up when we don't really give our children real education, but at best information, and that this is why words have lost their meaning and words that are full of content have become pejorative. This leads us very often to create or develop a society in which we don't dare make judgement and make a point of view - have a point of view - contradiction in terms when I've just said that the ear is more important than the eye, and here am I speaking about a point of view. But the mental point of view is no different from the point of view of the film director.
In Ramallah I will speak about the ability of music to integrate, and how it is that a musician is by the sheer nature of his profession in many ways, an integrating figure. If a musician is unable to integrate rhythm, melody, harmony, volume, speed, he cannot make music.
And to end in Jerusalem, I will try to explain what to me is a very major difference between power and strength - something which I learned very precisely from music, that if you attack a chord with more power than you are going to sustain it, it has no strength.
So there we are at the first, if you want, connection between the inexpressible content of music and in many ways the inexpressible content of life. There have been many definitions of music which to my mind have only described a subjective reaction to it. The only really precise one to me is the one by Ferruccio Busoni, the great Italian pianist and composer, who said that music is sonorous air. It says everything and it says nothing. Of course, appropriate moment to quote Neitszche, who said that life without music would be a mistake.
(LAUGHTER)
And now we come to the first question - why? Why is music so important? Why is music something more than something very agreeable or exciting to listen to? Something that, through its sheer power, and eloquence, gives us formidable weapons to forget our existence and the chores of daily life. My contention is that this is of course possible, and is practised by millions of people who like to come home after a long day at the office, put their feet up, if possible have the luxury of somebody giving them a drink while they do that, and put on the record and forget all the problems of the day. But my contention is that music has another weapon that it delivers to us, if we want to take it, and that is one through which we can learn a lot about ourselves, about our society, about the human being, about politics, about society, about anything that you choose to do. I can only speak from that point of view in a very personal way, because I learn more about living from music than about how to make a living out of music.
And so I propose to you, before we embark on this journey, that we look at the moment at this physical phenomenon, that is the only way through which music expresses itself, and that is sound. Now, when people speak about sound, they speak very often in terms of colours. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. This is very subjective - what is dark for one is light for the other and vice versa. But there are some elements of sound which are not subjective, and I think that if you allow me to I would like to spend a few minutes on that.
If sound is a physical phenomenon, which it obviously is, then one should be able to observe it as such in a very discerning and in a very rational way. The first thing we notice about sound of course is that it doesn't live in this world. Whatever concert took place in this hall earlier today or yesterday, the sounds have evaporated, they are ephemeral. So although sound is a very physical phenomenon, it has some inexplicable metaphysical hidden power. The physical aspect that we notice first is that sound does not exist by itself, but has a permanent constant and unavoidable relation with silence. And therefore the music does not start from the first note and goes onto the second note, etc., etc., but the first note already determines the music itself, because it comes out of the silence that precedes it. Added to that, some instruments, percussion instruments primarily - and the piano is one of them - have a real life duration. In other words...
(PLAYS ONE NOTE FOLLOWED BY SHORT SILENCE)
and it's over. Other instruments, like the violin, or the oboe, or a brass instrument, non-percussive instruments, one can, and one does, manage to sustain them longer than the real life duration of the sound as compared to a percussion instrument. And therefore the beginning, the first sound, is already in relation to the silence that precedes it.
You must forget for a moment, please, that there are such things as technologically developed devices which permit to maintain this sound artificially so, and this is no ungratefulness to the radio, to the recordings, to the CDs and all other means that we have to preserve the unpreservable, but the fact remains that when you, even in the old days when you had a gramophone recording and you put the needle on the record, the sound was suddenly there.
(IMITATES SOUND)
And then there was a sound. Now we go directly into the sound, but it gives us no idea whatsoever about how this is produced. And this is why many young conductors today think they can learn a score from listening to records. Fantastic lifting of the arms, bring them down, and the perfect C major chord with blazing trumpets and inaudible strings is heard.
(LAUGHTER)
But let's look at the different possibilities therefore, of the first note. If we achieve a total silence, and we start a piece of music that becomes rather than is there - it's not about being, but about becoming. It's obviously a different case from starting something loud and blazingly. The prelude to Tristan and Isolde is an obvious case.
(PLAYS 2 NOTES)
In other words the music is not from the A to the F, but from the silence to the A first of all, and this is of course the main difficulty. There are many ways - it doesn't have to be slow music. There's also Beethoven's sonata opus 109
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
but suddenly the pianist has to create the feeling that the music has already been here, it's already going, and now much as you step on a train that is already in motion, you join it, and you cannot start
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
with an accent on the first note, because by definition the first note will be an accent because it interrupt the silence.
The next observation about sound is if it has a relation with silence, what kind of relation is it? Does it dominate silence, and silence stop the sound when it wants? Can the sound go over the silences? Is that all a realistic possibility? And I think if we observe that clearly we notice that sound reacts to silence much like the law of gravity tells us, that if you lift an object from the ground you have to use a certain amount of energy to keep it at the height to which you have brought it up to. You have to provide additional energy, otherwise the object will fall back to the law of gravitation on the ground. But this is exactly what sound does with silence. I play again the same note, I play it, I give a certain amount of energy, and if I do nothing more to it, it will die.
(PLAYS ONE NOTE PLUS BRIEF SILENCE)
This is the length of the duration of the life of this C sharp produced by my finger on this piano. Now, there may be other fingers that can do it longer or shorter and other pianos that will do that, but basically this is it. And there we are at the first clear expression of content in music, the contact with silence, with gravitation. What did I say just now? The note dies. And this is the beginning of the tragic element in music, for me. You understand that all of what I'm telling you now is what I have learned to feel, and hope to have learned through all these years of, of making music. I'm in no way pretending to give you a fundamentalist theory that provides all the answers, even for those things where there are no questions about.
(LAUGHTER)
But for me this relation between sound and silence is imperative to understand, because it does produce the first tragic element of expression in music.
I pondered for a very long time on this subject, and I will not bore you with all the details, but it is obvious that if a sound has a beginning, we have already seen it also has a duration, and it has an end, whether it does, or whether the next note comes. And then you get one more other means of expression, of content if you want, of music, and that is that the notes in music cannot be allowed to develop their natural egos, so that they hide the preceding one, but the expression in music comes from the linkage, what we call in Italian legato - bound. When we play five notes that are bound, each note fights against the power of silence that wants to make it die, and is therefore in relation to the preceding note and to the note that comes after that. So when you play five notes,
(PLAYS 5 NOTES)
if each note had a big ego it would want to be louder than the note before. And therefore I learned from this very simple fact, that no matter how great an individual you are, music teaches you that the creativity only work in groups, and the expression of the group is very often larger than the sum of the parts. And you can draw whatever conclusions you want from this, but I think that this is a not unimportant factor.
And maybe in a strange way I've found some answers to all this, not in music but in philosophy, especially from reading regularly and for many years the ethics of Spinoza. Spinoza was a religious scholar, a political architect, a philosopher, who aspired to geometric demonstration of the universe and the human being in it, and he was a biological thinker who advanced the science of emotion. And there lies of course one of the great difficulties of making music, the science of emotion. How do you play with passion and with discipline? Having realised all of this, I saw that there was a need for knowledge, and these much abused words 'He is so musical' was absolutely senseless because talent is certainly not enough. If music is sound with thought, then talent is a very poor weapon to have at one's disposal.
All this has brought me to the conclusion that I am very unhappy, and for a long time, about the place of music in society. This is the part that I will try to explore further in the next lectures. Music can and from my individual point of view should become something that is used not only to escape from the world but rather to understand it. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Daniel Barenboim thank you very much indeed. Now it's question time, and here in the Cadogan Hall we have an eight hundred or so strong audience make up of artistes, scientists, politicians and others, some of them music lovers, some of them maybe not - who knows? Do they accept what you're saying, that music is a metaphor for life, that through music we can arrive at a better understanding of the human condition? Well let's um have some question from them to test you on that. So can I have some questions please? Gentleman here?
DAVID MELLOR:
Er Maestro Barenboim, David Mellor. I had the pleasure of interviewing you in Berlin when you started with the East West Divan(?) orchestra. Um, er music helps us to understand and interpret the world, but of course I think you see music as a way of changing the world do you not? And also you've spent a lot of time that you probably don't have founding an orchestra of young Iraelis and young Arabs as a way of showing that people can not only co-exist together in a rather grudging way, they can actually make music, they can do something enthusiastically together. So music you obviously see as something that can bring about political change. How is that going, and how do you think we can measure the success or otherwise of this really rather extraordinary venture that you've embarked upon?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well I hope we have time at least until tomorrow morning ...
(LAUGHTER)
... because you have raised at least ten questions in that one seemingly innocent question. First of all I thank you for your compliments, and it's very flattering, but I'm afraid I have to disappoint you, that this project is not a project for peace. The West-Eastern Divan answers one very important question, and that is that there is a tremendous amount of ignorance on both sides, and that there is very little that can be done to integrate the people from the different countries, because the initial condition for dialogue is not there - namely equality. The West-Eastern Divan is a forum which came out of the musical idea, because what do we do when we make music? We express ourselves, but we also listen. If we don't listen to the other voices, whether they are subversive, as sometimes in Bach fugues, when the subject comes a second point and the counterpoint has a completely different character. It's subversive. Unless we do that we cannot make music. And therefore in our Utopian republic, as I like to think of it, as the West-Eastern Divan, we have learned and we give everybody the opportunity to express himself, herself, to the enemy, and also to hear the version of the enemy, to listen and to hear it. And therefore not necessarily to agree with it, but to understand the other narrative. And therefore there is automatically a common terrain on the music, because in front of the Beethoven symphony they are all equals. In real life they are not. The work with the West-Eastern Divan is not to give each other comfort, but to understand how music is structured and how music can only exist when all the different elements, whether they are rhythm, melody, harmony - let's stop at those three - are connected. And nothing in music is independent.
SUE LAWLEY:
But you want them to take the metaphor from that for life, is that what you're saying?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yes, so that they have to listen to the other. It's nothing to do with comfort, it's to try to understand the other.
SUE LAWLEY:
Okay. I'm going to take a question here.
STEVE MARTLAND:
Steve Steve Matrtland - I'm a composer. I wondered what you thought the role of living composers was in terms of what you're suggesting. What can composers contribute?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well composers can contribute by writing good music,
(LAUGHTER)
obviously. Obviously. I mean, I make no distinctions. I'm not talking about the music of the eighteenth century. You know I am playing tomorrow the second book of The Well Tempered Klavier in London. Let me tell you something, I have played it yesterday evening in Paris, and I had the feeling when I finished it that all music that was written since then is actually unnecessary.
(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)
Bec ... No, no no I'm not, I'm not being funny - because everything is already there in embryo. When you think that you write with the same twelve notes, that every piece of music that was written before Bach already, including the Levitas, including Schonberg, Puccini, and all other unlikely bedmates, all this was written with the same twelve notes. And therefore the question, the power of music has nothing to do with being contemporary or not being contemporary. The task of the composer today is made so much more difficult than it was before because very few people practise music. And they think that if they love music and they go home and play a record, that this is music appreciation. But I, I maintain that if I sat down, as I will, and played the first three bars of Schonberg Opus 11, nobody here will have a feeling, oh this is modern music, you know. And Schonberg is already a hundred years ago, but when you put them in the concert, these pieces, people have difficulty going to it. This is the beginning of Schonberg Opus 11.
(PLAYS FEW BARS)
Don't tell me that this purely an intellectual exercise. The relation between the harmonies - I didn't get to that, I will do that in the next lecture in Berlin probably.
SUE LAWLEY:
Okay, I'm going to take a question here.
JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER:
Julian Lloyd Webber, cellist. Maestro, from all the recent work you've been doing it seems obvious that you believe, as I do, that music is for all people, whatever their race, religion or colour. Do you think there's a danger of some educationalists assuming that because children are from certain ethnic backgrounds - and I'm thinking particularly here of our inner city schools - that somehow classical music is not for these children?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I think nothing could be further away from the truth. And in fact we have seen that, we have started um music education programme in Ramallah which has now spread to other cities er in the West Bank, in a society which is not known for its practice of classical music. And yet in a very short time the music education programme has given them a, er a wonderful ability to express themselves, and has given them a dignity which they were unable to get only through words. When one is able to share a passion with somebody else, a bond is created which is very very strong.
SUE LAWLEY:
There's a very famous voice sitting just in front of you sir - Willard White I see there. Willard, would you like to put a point?
WILLARD WHITE:
(LAUGHS)
Well I'm a singer myself, and um my life has been transformed by music, and I recognise the importance and significance of music in, in life. But sometimes I think that, you know people have asked me why is it that more black people aren't in classical performances for example, and I think what right have we to push music on them? There is this free will um that we have. Of course music education should be um, could be enhanced, but um it's likeŠ you know you talk about the subversive quality music - there is a subversion in the reluctance maybe of some people to join in music making.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yes but I think er, Willard first of all I'm very glad that you are here, and I know you are speaking the truth because I had the pleasure to make music with you so I know how much it means to you too. Having said that, I don't think that it has to do with free will. It has to do with a necessity to accept that music is an essential part of education, or not. If it is that, and you get the education, then out of your free will you choose not, not to exercise it, but ignorance has not yet for me acquired the category er of free will decision. First you have to know about it.
(APPLAUSE)
WILLARD WHITE (DURING APPLAUSE): Yes.
SUE LAWLEY:
I'm going to takeŠ Thank you, thank you very much Willard White for that. I'm going to take a question up there.
ALINKA GREASLEY: Hi, my name's Alinka Greasley and I'm researching everyday uses of music, er with Alex Lamont and John Sloboda at Keele University. And my question relates to something you said sort of earlier on in your lecture. My research shows that people talk about very ordinary everyday music listening experiences as having great personal significance for them. For example one woman described an epiphany experience while sitting in her lounge listening to a, a pop group, Hanson. And my question to you is, how far down do you feel musical value extends?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I think this is not only related to music, it's related to knowledge. Some people believe that if they have knowledge about a thing they will lose the freshness of their approach to it. I believe that if you have knowledge about something you have a better chance to, not only to understand it but to live it, and therefore to enjoy it. It is obvious that if you listen to a pop group, or even let's take one stage inbetween, if you listen to er a Strauss waltz, um ...
(LAUGHTER)
... er on the 1st January, beautifully played, er, you do need less shall we say knowledge - yes, knowledge of what is this power of music, what comes out of music in the sense of structuring, emotions and feeling forwards with emotion, and doing all those things - than if you are er listening to the Suite Opus 23 of Schonberg. You obviously need more knowledge.
SUE LAWLEY:
(OVERLAP)
But do you, doŠ Do you accept then, Daniel Barenboim, that, that, that pop music can have that same transcendental power that you were describing that Western classical music has?
(LAUGHTER)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
If you feel it, how wonderful for you!
(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
There must, there must, must be some jazz musicians here. Any, any jazz lovers? What about the ... ? Jazz lover here.
JULIAN JOSEPH: Er, yes er I'm Julian Joseph, jazz musician, and er my question that um I agree with you about learning about life from music, and the way that relationships between harmony and unity and working with different musicians and being open and, and all of those aspects, and my question to you is just um where do you see improvisation in that um whole area of learning from music?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
(OVERLAP)
Improvisation is the highest form of art for me, because when you see a score for the first time, and you don't know it and therefore you don't understand it, you have only a gut reaction to it. The first reaction is gut, instinct. NO matter how talented you are, the most talented person in the world will not at first sight be able to analyse. So this is your first reaction. Then we take the music and we analyse it and we work it and we think about it and we turn it upside down and everything, and we acquire a lot more knowledge than we had at the first encounter. And at that stage of the proceedings we have lost a lot of the freshness. We have forgotten the gut completely, and we're only thinking, and here the subject comes twice as fast and this is fast as slow, and the modulation comes here, etc., etc., etc., etc. But if we play it like this we are not doing any art. We only get to this possible stage of making music - possible - the moment we have digested all that and we achieve a kind of conscious naivete which allows us to improvise it, which allows us to play it at that moment as if it is on the spur of the moment. And very often, very often, when you have worked in, in depth, and you then play it at the spur of the moment, something, something tells you and makes you go in a direction that you didn't go in the two hundred times that you played it at home, and you worked at it, but it will not have been possible without the two hundred times. And this is why improvisation, that means the state of just sitting at the piano and suddenly in a completely unpremeditated way your fingers, your heart, your brain, your gut, everything, pushes you in a direction that you improvise, and you literally then create music. It's a very blessed er state in the life of a human being.
SUE LAWLEY:
I'm going to take a few different points from the audience and ask you Daniel for a compendium answer. Let's take the lady there. Yes?
LESLEY GARRETT:
My name's Lesley Garrett, I'm a singer. When I was a childŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well I know you!
(LAUGHTER)
LESLEY GARRETT:
Hello Daniel! When er, when I was a child I understood immediately that through music and through singing could I express how I felt, and only through music and through singing. My concern is, and my question to you is, that society seems now to be much more concerned with the visual. my children are now constantly bombarded with imagery from television, from DVD, from computers, from electric games and so forth. How do we, first of all how do we teach our children to listen in the way that it seemed to be effortless for me? And then if there isn't this possibility for our children to, to listen and to understand this connection, which I believe is visceral and common to all of us, between what we hear and the innermost feelings and the expression of these feelings, how then are we going to look after our children's emotionsŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well I comeŠ
LESLEY GARRETT:
Šwhen they become older?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yeah. I think Lesley that er the situation is even worse than you describe it, because not only has the eye taken over, but we have anaesthetised the ears through all the muzak that we hear all the time.
LESLEY GARRETT:
Yes.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
You know I have been for the last I don't know how many years, er, in, in Chicago, and I stay in the hotel in Chicago, and every day and I go in the lift and I hear bits of the Brahms violin concerto,
(LAUGHTER)
or the Mozart Symphonia Concertante, and I, not only I hate it but I know that every one of the people that goes in that lift and comes in the evening to the concert, and God forbid we should be playing the Men ... the Brahms violin concerto,
(LAUGHTER)
he will not hear it, because he will not listen. And in English you have this wonderful difference between listening and hearing, and that you can hear without listening, and you can listen and not hear. Not every language has that. And I think that we have done everything to anaesthetise the ear. And this is why the eye has so much importance. And in fact the ear ... Actually I don't want to talk too much about that because it's suppose ... I, I've made up my mind to talk about it in another lecture. But maybeŠ
LESLEY GARRETT:
Well in theŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Maybe you'd like to come with us to Chicago where I'll talk about that.
LESLEY GARRETT:
Yeah I'd be delighted!
SUE LAWLEY:
Let me get you aŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I'll talk about that in Chicago. But it is, it is really true, and the eye, the eye is an imperative necessity. When a child learns to cross the street for the first time the parents say look to the right - excuse me, in England look to the left,
(LAUGHTER)
- look to the right, to make sure that a car doesn't come. In other words in order to survive you need your eyes.
LESLEY GARRETT:
Perhaps you might agree that opera is perhaps the ultimate art form as it's the perfectŠ
(LAUGHTER)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Nonsense, in opera people don't look and don't listen!
(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE & CHEERS)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
They only watch the conductor. He's sitting right there. They only watch the conductor!
(LAUGHTER)
SUE LAWLEY:
Let, let me get this off this, because somewhere in this hall we have a neuro-scientist I think who's tested what it does to the brain. There he is. Give us your name and tell us what you've done, and does music going into the brain harm it or excite it.
PROFESSOR PARSONS:
Hi, I'm er Professor Lawrence Parsons, and I, I'm a brain scientist, and what we do is we put musicians in brain scanners and monitor the blood flow in the brain while they perform on an electric piano for example - or singers in other cases - but on an electric piano. And two of the things we noticed are that the brain areas that would normally be excited and represent the emotional responses to music are not active for the musicians who's performing, relative to playing scales for example. And we also noticed that large other regions of the brain are also de-activated, they're not engaged, and those are regions that allow you to plan the future, to think about what's going on in the environment, and for salient events. So my two findings about brains of musicians who are performing suggests that the performance of the music allows us to get to some sort of inner peaceful place in which our emotional worries and our attention to the world are detached. And you refer to this, as many of us do, as heart and brain, but as a brain scientist it all happens in the brain.
SUE LAWLEY:
You didn't say whatŠ you didn't say what sort of music you were playing to this ŠŠŠŠŠŠ
PROFESSOR PARSONS:
This was Bach.
SUE LAWLEY:
Bach? Okay.
PROFESSOR PARSONS:
Bach. So one thing I might ask you is whether your own intuitions, as you play The Well Tempered Klavier for example, fit this scientific view of what's happening in the brain of a musician like yourself.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
You know I won't be able to play tomorrow!
(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)
No no. No. I know, I think I know what, I know what er you are talking about. You know, when you play music, you get this peaceful quality I believe also because you are in control of something, or at least you are attempting to control something that you cannot do in the real world. You can control life and death of the sound, and if you imbue every note with a human quality, when that note dies it is exactly that, it is a feeling of death. And therefore through that experience you transcend any emotions that you can have in their life, and in a way you control time. I mean, we all know that when we are born, two minutes seem like two hours. And when we're interested, two hours are two seconds. But when you do that - and I'm especially conscious of that now because I'm been playing the, both books of The Well Tempered Klavier on several occasions in the last er few weeks, er in Europe - you have a feeling of a, of a journey through, through history. In other words a journey that is much longer than the life of a human being. When I finish playing one of the books of 'The Well Tempered Klavier' I have a feeling that this is actually much longer than my real life.
PROFESSOR PARSONS:
I think what you say fits with what the subjects in my experiments, yeah, told me.
SUE LAWLEY:
The artiste and the scientist are at one. I'm going to leave you there at one and take a question over here, thank you.
JAMES McMILLAN: Hello my name is James McMillan, I'm another composer. Recently the English musicologist Julian Johnson produced a fascinating book called Who Needs Classical Music? He implies that serious music has suffered in the face of the apparent triumph of the visual and the verbal, but also of what he would say as the banal and even the populist. And therefore my question is this - what is it about serious music that baffles and indeed in some cases offends the advocates of an ever increasingly ubiquitous, narrow, some might say debased popular culture? Is it its very ability to rise from the mundane? Is it the suggestion that there may be such a thing as a secret inner life which cannot be reduced to a rigorously enforced commonality, that there may be no such thing indeed as a closed universe?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Wow!
(LAUGHTER)
Well, I think I might be the wrong person ...
(LAUGHTER)
... for you to talk to, because I don't believe in all these things. I believe that things, creations, objects, are neither moral nor immoral. It's when the human being makes use of it that he, this is the free will, he decides whether it is moral or whether it is immoral. What is a knife? Is that an instrument with which you can murder someone, therefore an instrument of violence, or is it something with which you cut the bread and feed your neighbour? The knife in itself is perfectly innocent. The music is innocent - it is what the human being makes of it. Only the human being is not courageous by nature, and the human being always likes to blame something else - somebody else or something else - and therefore it says classical music is elitist, classical music is transcendent. I'm sorry, classical is none of that, classical music is nothing until it comes into contact with a human being. I can plead exactly the opposite of that. I can tell you that making music and playing it in an orchestra is the best way to understand democracy. Elitist? What do you mean, elitist? The oboe plays the most wonderful tune in a slow movement of a Brahms symphony, and the whole orchestra, all ninety or ninety-five of them, and the conductor with the big ego, is following him.
(LAUGHTER)
Everybody's following him, everybody supporting him, adjusting everything for him to be able to express this thing. He's the king of the world - and that lasts for eight bars!
(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)
I'll just finish that, I'll just finish that. And then, on the ninth bar, he holdŠ goes back in the society, in the collective, and he has to do what ninety-five people have been doing for him for eighty-five bars, he has to do maybe for the double basses or for the clarinet or whatever the case may be. I'm sorry, music is not democratic, music is not elitist, music is not transcendental, it is what the human being does with it that it becomes moral, immoral, amoral, transcendental, or sheer nonsense.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
I'm going to take some quick points if I can. The lady up there - quick points if you will.
DR ALISON LEVINE:
Dr Alison Levine, I'm a music therapist and I work with people who have no technical skill in music, have no perhaps ability to actually appreciate music in the traditional sense of the word, but we are all musical beings, there's something musical about us all. And I wondered if you had any thoughts about that really early state of how we are in music, that our musical beings are born very early in, in the broadest sense of the word.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yes. You know I was a child prodigy, so, so to speak - I mean there is so such a thing a child prodigy. Somebody asked me not long ago: 'Since you became an adult have you met a child prodigy?' I said, 'No never, but many parents' you know.
(LAUGHTER)
I mean, what I'm, whatŠ the reason I'm telling you this is because I think that children find it, and I would find it much more fun if I were able to three years old again, er to learn about discipline from rhythm, than from my mother telling me, and don't do that, and now is the time to eat, and you eat and don't do that, and you will learn one day this kind of discipline. But you can really learn that in the kindergarten through rhythms, and you know that you cannot mess around with them, that there is a certain order to it. Then I think you learn about life through the music at a very early age. And then you grow a little bit older and you come into the puberty, and you have your first er, er associations with sensuality and passion and all that, and er if you remember your experiences in music at three years old and you have a connection with music you will know that in order to make music you have to somehow combine passion and discipline. But I'm sorry I don't know about you but this is always a bit of a subject that I've had to battle with all my life, and I think every human being does that.
DR ALISON LEVINE:
But if you want, as you've said, us to put music in a, in a, er give it a greater precedence in our lives, then we have to make music more and not just receive it.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Of course, we have to make music and we have to teach our children from the beginning the connection between music and real life. I have learned a lot of things, I said it earlier only half in jest that I learn more from music about living than you know about making a living in music. I did, I really, I really did, I learned many things. I remember IŠ - in fact if you want I can demonstrate it, it's, it's rather silly but I will do that. No, IŠ I remember, I remember my great and, and admired friend Edward Said and I having very passionate discussions at the time of the beginning of the Oslo process, and he being from the very first moment absolutely against it, and I still hoping that somehow some things will happen. And then as time went by I said to him - and we had really very, I wouldn't say disagreeable but very hefty arguments about that, until one day I said to him, I said, 'You know Edward' I said, 'it doesn't really matter if Oslo is right or wrong, it will never work because the relation between content and time is erroneous.' I said, 'This I have learned from music.' And he looked at me and said, 'What are you talking about?' And I said to him, 'The preparation for the beginning of the Oslo discussions was practically non-existent, much too quick.' And the process itself, once the discussion started, was very slow, and then it was interrupted, and then they said they would meet next Tuesday, and then it was cancelled on Monday, and then they met again a month later, and everything. It had no chance. And I sat down at the piano and I showed to him what I meant, which I will do for you now. I'm sure many of you know the Pathetique sonata of Beethoven, which has a very majestic, slow introduction.
(PLAYS FEW BARS OF SONATA)
Etc. And this introduction goes on for whatever number of bars it does, and then there is the main movement - Allegro.
(PLAYS FEW BARS OF ALLEGRO)
Etc. And I said to him, 'Oslo, the equivalent of Oslo would be if I would play the introduction very fast and without any preparation of anything' - in other words,
(PLAYS FEW BARS VERY FAST)
You would not understand anything what I am doing. And then I would get to the main allegro and I will play,
(PLAYS ONE NOTE)
(LAUGHTER)
(PLAYS FEW MORE NOTES - FEW AT A TIME WITH PAUSES)
(APPLAUSE)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
And our discussion stopped from that moment on about Oslo because we both agreed it wouldn't work,
(LAUGHTER)
for different reasons. But it's true. In other words it's a permanent relation between content and time.
SUE LAWLEY:
Question here, then we must wrap up.
SUSAN BLACKMORE:
Susan Blackmore, I'm a psychologist from Bristol. Um Sue Lawley ought to ask this really, not me, but suppose you only had one minute left to live, what would you play, and would you play it for us now?
(LAUGHTER)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Would I play what?
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
What would you play if you had one minute left to live and would you play it for us now?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
You only want me to have one minute left?
SUE LAWLEY:
One minute.
(LAUGHTER)
SUE LAWLEY:
I have to tell you before we began that Daniel Barenboim that someone would ask him to play, soŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
This is why I refuse to sit at the piano to answer the questions. No I don't really feel ... But I nev ... I don't know, you know I don't, I never think in those er terms. The most wonderful thing, the most wonderful thing about playing music - two most wonderful things about playing music - is that no matter how much you learn, and how much you open your brain and get additŠ additional knowledge, with understanding, since you deal with sound, the next morning you start from scratch. And you get a wonderful combination of more knowledge and nothing materially there to show for it. Only the ability to find the courage in itself to start again from scratch with more knowledge than the day before. I think this is a very positive thing in that people play music, that's why I, one of the reasons why I think people would be happier playing music. And I don't want to think about the last er minute of my life to play, because I am rather happy, I would say almost proud of the fact that I attempt - I don't achieve - attempt to play every concert as if it was both the first and the last.
SUE LAWLEY:
That's it.
(APPLAUSE & CHEERS)
SUE LAWLEY:
Next week he'll be in Chicago, where for the past seventeen years Daniel Barenboim has been Music Director of the city's great symphony orchestra, as he closes the piano lid behind him. But he's unlikely to be constrained by the familiarity of these surroundings. On the contrary he's going to be railing against the nation that he argues has relegated music to aural - as in A U R A L - wallpaper. Muzak is more dangerous to health than smoking, says the maestro - there'll be more of that. That's Daniel Barenboim, the Reith lecturer, next week, same time, different place. For now, Mr Barenboim, thank you very much indeed.
Lecture 2: The Neglected Sense
Lecture by Daniel Barenboim
at Symphony Center, Chicago
SUE LAWLEY:
Hello and welcome to Chicago for the second in Daniel Barenboim's series of Reith lectures. For the past seventeen years he's been Music Director of this city's great orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, a job which he said, when inheriting it from Georg Solti, was "a dream I had never dared to dream".
In fact his link with this city goes back much further, to the 1950s, when he first appeared here as a sixteen-year-old pianist. Chicago has always been faithful to Daniel Barenboim so it's fitting that he should deliver one of his five Reith lectures here in its Symphony Center.
History however does not mean that he only has praise for this place and his players. Chicago is one of the most strikingly visual cities in the world, it was home to the great architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. If architecture, as Goethe said, is frozen music, then Chicago is a natural place for a lecture which addresses the nature and power of musical sound. But even here, in this city that has worked hard to look right, much happens, argues Daniel Barenboim, that prevents it from sounding right.
Well some of Chicago's current leading architects are with us in the audience today, as are jazz, blues and classical musicians, film makers, writers, students, and philosophers. They'll be exploring the subject matter of the lecture later through their questions. Its title is The Neglected Sense. Its author, Daniel Barenboim.
(APPLAUSE)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. If St John said 'In the beginning there was the word', and Goethe says 'In the beginning there was the deed', I would like to examine this is a little bit, saying, 'In the beginning there was sound'. And for that of course it is important to dwell on the very simple fact that sound is perceived by the ear. The ear is probably the most intelligent organ the body has. It is not for nothing that Aristotle said that the eyes are the organs of temptation, and the ears are the organs of instruction, because the ear does not only take sound or noise in, but sending it directly to the brain - and we will talk about that in a, in a few minutes - it sets into motion the whole creative process of thought that the human being is capable of. The first quality that comes to my mind as to the intelligence of the ear is that the ear helps us tremendously to remember and to recollect, and the ear is therefore the basis for all the aspects that have to do with music-making, both for the performer and for the listener. In London the other day I played the beginning of the Prelude to 'Tristan and Isolde' to demonstrate how the sound starts out of nothing and then grows. I'm sure most of you are familiar with that. I will try and play it again now, with a different view in mind. If you remember, of course you have to imagine the sound of cellos starting this out of nothing, but this is how the piece starts.
(PLAYS OPENING FEW BARS OF PRELUDE)
What is the first thing that comes to my mind in the context of what we are viewing today is that it is a repetition, the accumulation that makes the tension grow. Besides the fact of course that after hearing something which even to the not initiated ear is a dissonant,
(PLAYS ONE CHORD)
it's repeats.
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
That means Š that's what I meant earlier, the ear remembers, the ear recollects, and that shows you one of the most important elements of expression in music, one of repetition and accumulation. And this goes into many many areas, and composers have achieved great mastery of all the repeating, sometimes short parts of a theme, or of a motif, and creating different kind of accumulation. In any case, the ear has this incredible memory. But the ear, let us not forget, starts operating on the forty-fifth day of the pregnancy of a woman. That means the foetus that is in the womb of a pregnant lady begins to use his ear on the forty-fifth day of the pregnancy, which means it has seven and a half months advance over the eye.
(LAUGHTER)
And therefore the question is, what do we in our society, in our civilisation, do to continue this process and this wonderful fact that we have seven and a half months' advance. In any case, whilst on the subject of Wagner, let us not forget that Wagner understood the phenomenon of sound and the phenomenology of sound so well that he created a theatre, festspielhaus in Bayreuth, which as you know where the pit is covered. Now at first sight most people think Wagner wrote so large for the orchestra, if you cover the pit then the singers will be heard.
(LAUGHTER)
But I think this is very basic, and evident. The mystery of Bayreuth is especially evidenced when the opera starts softly. You don't know when the sound is going to start, nor where does it come from. And therefore the ear is doubly alert, and the eye has to wait until the curtain goes up, whereas the ear has already prepared you for the whole drama. This of course is linked to Wagner's whole idea about opera. After all overtures to operas before Wagner very often were just brilliant pieces that were meant to make the public sit and be ready. The 'Marriage of Figaro' overture has actually nothing to do with the piece, and I wonder if one could not play the overture to 'Cosi Fan Tutte' instead.
(LAUGHTER)
This is of course no criticism of either, I'm just saying that there is very little connection about Š except that they both are there to make people er sit up and listen. Wagner, who was more systematic, more, shall we say, Teutonic in his thinking,
(LAUGHTER)
in the same as he was about everything including his anti-Semitism, he thought that the ear hears the overture, and it not only puts you in the mood but tells part of the story. The audience is inextricably linked to the very essence of the drama. And therefore the ear plays the role of the guide in the museum in the concert I'm talking now. We don't have an oral guide, we have to provide it ourselves. One reason why active listening is absolutely essential.
But there are some things about the ear which we know, which may be not be out of place to remind ourselves here. One is that it depicts physical vibrations and converts them into signals which become sound sensations, or auditory images in the brain, and that the space occupied by the auditory system in the brain is smaller than the space occupied by the visual system, and that the eye detects patterns of light and converts them into signals which become visual images in the brain. All this is common knowledge. But the well known neuro-biologist and neuro-scientist who is sitting right here, Antonio De Marcio, has taught us many things about human emotion, about the human brain, and also about the human ear, and he says that the auditory system is physically much closer inside the brain to the parts of the brain which regulate life, which means that they are the basis for the sense of pain, pleasure, motivation - in other words basic emotions. And he also says that the physical vibrations which result in sound sensations are a variation on touching, they change our own bodies directly and deeply, more so than the patterns of light that lead to vision, because the patterns of light that lead to vision allow us to see objects sometimes very far away provided there is light. But the sound penetrates our body. There is no penetration, if you want, physical penetration, with the eye, but there is with the ear.
Now, when the baby is born, in many cases - in fact in most cases - the ear is totally neglected. Everything is centred on the eye. The fact that we live in a primarily visual society comes much later. Already in infancy the child is more often than not made more and more aware of what he sees and not about what he hears. And it is also, let's face it, a means of survival. When you take a small child to teach him how to cross the street, what do you say? Look to the right, look to the left, see that no cars are coming otherwise you will be run over. Therefore you depend on your eyes for survival.
And the ear is very often neglected, and I find much that is to my ears insensitive or disturbing goes totally unnoticed by society, starting with the coughing in the concert - as my friend and colleague Alfred Brendel has often remarked in great detail - to many many other noises to which we are totally insensitive. The equivalent of that to the eye would be enough reason I think to find it so offensive that people could even be accused of disturbing society. Just think of the most despicable aspect of pornography and how offensive that is. They are many things which are just as disturbing for the ear which are not really taken into consideration. And not only we neglect the ear but we often repress it, and we find more and more in our society, not only in the United States, although the United States I think was very active in starting this process, of creating opportunities to hear music without listening to it - what is commonly known as muzak. I have spent many very happy years here, but I have suffered tremendously. In the hotel where I stay they think that it is very culturally minded to play classical music in the elevator, or in the foyers of concert halls before the concert.
(LAUGHTER)
And I have been on more than one occasion subject to having to hear, because I cannot shut my ears, the Brahms violin concerto in the lift, having to conduct it in the evening.
(LAUGHTER)
And I ask myself, why? This is not going to bring one more person into the concert hall, and it is not only counter-productive but I think if we are allowed an old term to speak of musical ethics, it is absolutely offensive. And the most extraordinary example of offensive usage of music, because it underlines some kind of association which I fail to recognise, was shown to me one day when watching the television in Chicago and seeing a commercial of a company called American Standard. And it showed a plumber running very very fast in great agitation, opening the door to a toilet and showing why this company actually cleans the toilet better than other companies. And you know what music was played to that?
(FEW BARS OF A RECORDING PLAYED)
The Lachrymose from Mozart's Requiem. Now ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry, I'm probably immodest enough to think I have a sense of humour but I can't laugh at this. And I laugh even less when I read some, a document which I've brought here to read to you in its entirety. It was published, I'm afraid I don't know in what newspaper, but it is the Editor's note. The following is a letter sent in by Christine Statmuller of Basking Ridge, it is in reference to her previous letter which ran in the April issue of The Catholic Spirit. 'Thanks for printing my letter in which I objected to the use of music from Mozart's Requiem by American Standard to advertise their new champion toilet. As you can see from the enclosed letter below, it achieved results, thanks to the letters from other incensed readers.' And the letter is as follows:- 'Thank you for contacting American Standard with your concerns about the background music in the current television commercial for our champion toilet. We appreciate that you have taken the time to communicate with us, and share your feelings on a matter that clearly is very important to you.'
(LAUGHTER)
'When we first selected Mozart's Requiem, we didn't know of its religious significance.'
(LAUGHTER)
'We actually learned about it from a small number of customers like you, who also contacted us. Although there is ample precedent for commercial use of spiritually theme music, we have decided to change to a passage from Wagner's Tannhauser Overture,'
(LAUGHTER)
'which music experts have assured us does not have religious importance.'
(LAUGHTER)
'The new music will begin airing in June.'
(LAUGHTER)
I think that says it all!
(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)
Now I reallyŠ I don't know whether you believe me or not but it doesn't matter, I didn't read it to get a laugh, I find it absolutely abominable.
And now we have the whole association for descriptive marketing in the United States, which is how use descriptive marketing, how to use music as description and how to market it that way - in other words what they are saying to the public is you don't have to concentrate, you don't have to listen, you don't have to know anything about it, just come and you will find some association, and we will show you so many things that have nothing to do with the music and this way you will go into the music. And I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, is that the answer to the so-called crisis in classical music? Accessibility does not come through populism, accessibility comes through more interest and more knowledge, and not telling people don't worry you'll be all right, just sit there, buy your ticket, sit there, shut your ears, and you will think of something. That is in fact what we are telling them. And this is criminal. And this is something which has bothered me more and more and more over the years. Music in itself has nothing to do with a society that in a way rejects what I would call publicly accepted standards of life, and of intelligence, and of human existence, and takes the easy way out with a kind of political correctness which does only a few things, all of them in my view negative.
First of all it shows you how to hide your real feelings, it shows you how to cope with the fact that you are not allowed to show dislike of anything, and I wonder how long it takes before the not showing of dislike also goes on to the showing of like. And that the society that has accepted so many rules, so many regulations, and so many procedures, which have the great advantage of avoiding situations of conflict. And this of course very positive, very useful, and very necessary; however when taken beyond the human level it brings us to the point where there is of course no more conflict, but there is also no more contact. And this is in a way what I wanted to share with you today, that music teaches us exactly this. Conflict, difference of opinion, is the very essence of music, in the balance, in the dynamic, in the way that the music is written. You see that in a Bach fugue, you see that in Mozart concertos and operas, the subversiveness sometimes of the accompaniment. Music teaches us that it is precisely our capacity to bring all the different elements together in a sense of proportion so that they lead to a sense of a whole, and this is what I feel in my own subjective way one of the main lessons that I have learned from music for life, because having started very young I was put in contact very early on with the question, how does a child of twelve or fourteen without life experience, how can he express the mature thoughts of a Beethoven. And of course he can't. And there's a lot of things that I have learned from my experiences in life since then that I feel I try every day to put into the music, but there is a lot more. A lot more that I have learned from observing music, not as a specialised phenomenon of sound, not only as a specialisation or profession but as something which can teach us many things about ourselves and about life. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Daniel Barenboim, thank you very much indeed. Well there's a, there's a, a gauntlet or three thrown down, all of which I'm sure our audience here in Chicago would be only too willing to pick up, so let's have your questions please if we may. I wonder if we shouldn't in fact come to Professor Antonio Damasio, who's sitting on the front row, whom Daniel mentioned during the course of his lecture. And Daniel was telling us, Professor, about music penetrating our body. I mean is that right? IsŠ I'm sure it is right because he said so and presumably you told him
(LAUGHTER)
but er I mean is itŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
TrueŠ
SUE LAWLEY:
Šis it the caseŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Mr De Marcio doesn't ask questions, he gives answers!
(LAUGHTER)
SUE LAWLEY:
I'd just love him to answer it - is it the case that music can reach the parts of us that other arts can't - the visual arts, or even the spoken word cannot? Music has a direct line to our emotions - is that right?
ANTONIO DAMASIO:
I, I think that's actually a very good way of putting it, it's a direct line which comes out of the fact that there's a very important closeness of the auditory system, especially that the point that it enters the central nervous system, what we generally call our brain, and the parts of the brain that are related to emotion, and as Daniel said they are related to motivations and to our very deep sense of pain and pleasure for example. So that that closeness is certainly not there for the visual system. It enters also the fact that this connection between vibration and the sense of the body, you know we, you do have er the, the vibration that ends up being sound and its process from the inner ear into the brain is in itself very very close to other senses of the body, like for example touch, and even our sense of vibration in general outside of vibration that ends up forming musical sound. So there are many ways in which music goes very deep because of its closeness to sound, and sound goes very deep because of its closeness to emotion.
SUE LAWLEY:
And does it matter what kind of sound it is, is really the question. Does it, does it have to be harmonious sound?
ANTONIO DAMASIO:
Well sound in general has that capacity to erŠ In fact 'penetrate' is not a bad word, and of course it can do good and do harm. For example if you listen to the strings in the, the score of Bernard Hermann for Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' there's the famous bathroom scene where Janet Leigh is stabbed, and in fact what you are hearing is not screams, like most people imagine, what you are hearing is strings that were very nicely played in the score and that give you the suggestion of screaming. But in fact they are received by the listener as something horrible, as something in fact frightening. And so sound can produce fright, can produce fear, can produce many other emotions, so they can be good or bad, andŠ
SUE LAWLEY:
But, but do you object, Daniel, to music being used to manipulate us in terms of the visual, in terms of films? I mean and the 'Psycho' example is a very good one.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No. No of course not, I'm just saying the nature of music, er the 'Psycho' I mean that you're talking about, 'Psycho', I mean if you want to know the power of music just imagine the famous er shower scene to which Antonio Damasio is referring now, and instead of this absolutely excruciating music coming there's somebody playing something stupid likeŠ
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
(LAUGHTER)
I want to know what kind of sense of fear the viewer will have!
(LAUGHTER)
Shows you how powerful music is.
SUE LAWLEY:
(LAUGHS) )
Lady there?
CAROL ROSS-BARNEY:
I'm Carol Ross-Barney and I'm an architect here in Chicago, I'm one of the people that made the frozen music. I think um the idea that you put forward about muzak is really something that I encounter all the time, thinking about it as clutter, because if you look at architecture today I think we face the same issue, but it's not just sound clutter, it's visual clutter, and it's, it's all over. And um my question is, do you think that your theory about education and structure really needs to extend to all the arts? That it really, that we're neglecting those things and what's, what it's costing is in the environment to make um our spiritual and emotional lives grow.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I don't know, I'm, I am er even careful to articulate what I feel about the music you know because I've spent so much time with it, I would not consider myself in a position to make comments about this, but I would think so too. I think art, whether it is a visual art or the music, art only has sense for me if it really penetrates your innermost being as a human being, not when it is just an object to either hear or look at without it having any effect on you. So you tell people you don't have to think, you just think of something else and then you will be okay. On the contrary, you have to, er you will get more out of the music if you are able to really actively listen, to actively put in there, even if it is completely different for me or anybody else. If I think a piece of music has in that particular place an incredible mathematical construction, and you are totally oblivious to it, it's no problem at all so long as you have something instead of that. If you just listen to it mechanically and don't let it touch you, then I have a problem with you. And the political correctness allows us not to have a point of view.
SUE LAWLEY:
Can I just, while we're on the subject of architecture and music, just be the devil's advocate for one second, um because um I think you mentioned that it was clutter - architectural clutter, musical clutter. Isn't that the nature of the twenty-first century? What are you really suggesting, Daniel, that we should do? That we should walk around in silent buildings all day and preserve our ears for the concert hall that evening and never take a telephone call and never listen to an iPod?
(LAUGHTER)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well there's no need to be that radical you know!
(LAUGHTER)
You don't have to be, you don't have to become a fundamentalist of silence!
(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
I, I thought that's what you were advocating.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No, no, we ŠŠŠŠŠ for the silence of fundamentalism but not ofŠ
(LAUGHTER)
But I think that when you go to a concert and you are absolutely unavoidably put in a situation where you hear music and sometimes the same piece you hear, it is counter-productive.
SANDRA TREHUB:
I'm Sandra Trehub, I'm an experimental psychologist at the University of Toronto, and most of my work is with infants and young children. And I would argue contrary to what you've been saying. I would say that infants are intensely engaged by music, and when their mothers, you know mothers all over the world, informally sing to them, and they sing expressively, you know, often without training and so on but the expressiveness and sincerity of those performances is absolutely captivating for infants. And what you see really is that as children enter whatever you want to call it, the public music machine or the music lesson industry, some of that starts fading away. But you have intense passion for music early in life...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yes of course, yeah but...
SANDRA TREHUB:
...that's unequalled later on.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
But of course, I mean er, er you are er preaching to the converted.
(LAUGHTER)
I agree with you a hundred and fifty per cent. But what is happening is the system in the schools, this dimension what you are describing which is the human dimension, the expression of music being the human dimension, this is left aside because it is treated as a specialised er ivory tower profession that has nothing to do with anything else.
SANDRA TREHUB:
Well, but I mean in the course of training there's a big focus on, you know, self-discipline as you say, and a lot of repetition and drill and so on. When you have motivation, terrific motivation, whether it's for someone to get baskets on the basketball court or they adore music...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yeah I know.
SANDRA TREHUB:
...so young children will do things over and over and over again when they love it...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
But I think it is our...
SANDRA TREHUB:
...for ŠŠŠŠŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
It is our duty as educators to teach children that there is not contradiction between love and discipline. If we don't do that we will get nowhere.
SUE LAWLEY:
And look we've got some um young children over here. I think you'reŠ Are you musical students or anything? I mean do you any of you have a view on what you're hearing? A boy there?
DOMINIC NEELY:
Hi, my name is Dominic Neely and I'm a student at er Merit School of Music, I'm a vocal musician, and um I feel that the music today seems to be changing a lot because I'm really into classical music - I think it's cool the way all the different sounds and piano and violin come together to make one sound that's beautiful at one time. And it seems that everything seems to be changing into rap or hip hop, which I'm not against but you know they play it so much that it starts to get rather annoying actually.
(LAUGHTER)
So, and um, and it seems that in my school and many different schools that they seem to be pushing actual just music in general out of the school. It's more academically based and I need like an ounce of music a day so...
(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Is it, is thereŠ Is there an advocate of rap or hip hop here who'd like to defeŠ There, here we are, on the back row - just in case they think we've got a whole audience who are classical music fans here, there is one person.
DAVID KELLY:
Hi, I'm, my name is er David Kelly, I go by the name Capital D, I'm a hip hop musician, but actually had a, had a question with respect to um, given a connection between emotion and music, um do you see thatŠ
SUE LAWLEY:
Oh you're not going to defend hip hop?
DAVID KELLY:
No I'm not going to de, defend hip hop, it doesn't need to be defended.
SUE LAWLEY:
Is it indefensible?
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID KELLY:
A lot of what you hear is indefensible but not all of hip hop.
SUE LAWLEY:
Okay, go on, put your case.
DAVID KELLY:
Um but, but given the, the connection between emotion and music, do you believe that the disrespect of music inside of this society is inevitable given the downgrading of emotions inside of this society, and this concept is true intelligence is somehow divorced from emotions?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well I don't believe that true intelligence should be divorced from true emotion, and true emotion should be not be divorced from true intelligence. This is why music in a way seems that way - and this is what brings us back to the children - that music is not a profession, it has to be a way of life so that it is no difference between what you think and feel in music and what you do in other ways.
BOB GJERDINGEN:
Robert Gjerdingen Er Bob Gjerdingen, er North Western University. Er Maestro the, the noble houses of Europe often had a platform above a great room, where musicians would play behind a screen, and was this not er muzak for monarchs? And er wasŠ
(SUE LAWLEY LAUGHS)
Šwas Elizabeth I's private er lute player in her er, in her bedchambers, not a human iPod? Er and so has technology just transferred the delights and entertainments of er, of the rich to the masses?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yes, but I think that the rich at that time controlled when and how they wanted to do that. I'd, I would, I have, have absolutely nothing against that, I'm perfectly happy to come home one day at the end of a long day and put my feet up and have a good drink and maybe listen to whatever music it may be. But I resent the fact that I have to go on the plane, where I have to go to a concert, and on the way into the concert, in the foyer, I'm forced to hear music. I object to that.
SUE LAWLEY:
That's not to deny that Mozart wrote muzak for the rich and privileged?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No but the ones who were not rich and privileged had no access to music. Now we are fortunate that we have access to it, but we don't know how to really educate people in that.
SUE LAWLEY:
Here's another music student.
VERNON JACKSON:
Hi my name is Vernon Jackson and I play the piano. Um my question is, do you think growing up and wanting to be a musician and pursue a career as a musician is a good job choice?
(LAUGHTER)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well...
(LAUGHTER)
Let me start from the beginning!
(LAUGHTER)
If you want to play music because you think it's a good job, I think you will find easier ways of making a living. If you love it, and you want to spend your life in it and with it, you have a good chance of making a very good living.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
You wouldŠ you wouldn't like to hear him play afterwards Maestro?
(LAUGHTER)
MARK GEELHOED:
Hello I'm Mark Geelhoed from Time Out Chicago and I have a question er related to all the Vernon Jacksons of the world. And I've talked to many professors at American Conservatories and I asked them, you know, they are turning out so many students today, there's obviously not gainful employment going to be available for all of them, they all aren't going to be able to win er jobs at the Chicago Symphony, and whatŠ so why do they keep on teaching all of these students? And the answer that I've always gotten is that the diligence and work ethic that they hopefully have instilled in them will serve them well if they decide to be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, whatever. Do you see this as symptomatic of the cheapening of er classical music in this society, that it could be used as a tool to help somebody do something else?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well you know, Mozart didn't consider himself a professional, neither does Pierre Boulez. Music has to use professionalism in the sense of the discipline that is required. Orchestras all over the world, not only in the United States, all over the world, spend the maximum number of minutes in every hour, the maximum number of hours in every day and the maximum numbers of day in every week etc. etc. etc. discussing everything that has to do with the professionalism aspect of music, and not about the music in itself, because the arch enemy of music is routine, is not lack of professionalism. Lack of professionalism is very bad, but routine is the arch enemy. That means you make sure you make no mistakes and you make sure you play exactly the same way so that you don't make any mistake.
MARK GEELHOED:
So, so is there any lesson that you would have for all of the university er faculty who are I see in here today, for them to er give to their students?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I think that it is very important to see music as part of the human being, whether it is music that is written today, or whether it is music that was written two hundred years ago. Why does a child like him - what is your name?
VERNON JACKSON:
Vernon Jackson.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yeah, why does a child like him, why does he thinking about music? There must be something in him. He doesn'tŠ he asks whether I think it's a good idea for him to make a good job out of it. I don't think he knows in the end exactly what that means, but if he asks himself the question it means there is something in his heart that speaks about what the music says to him. And what the music says to him means that it is an obligation, the responsibility of all teachers, to make sure that with that feeling comes the necessary step, which is knowledge, because the human being has never achieved anything through ignorance. And it's no good to say oh don't bother with that, you, you just feel it. Nonsense. You will be much freer if you play music if you know more about it. The more you know, the freer you are. And there are people who are so superstitious, who think no I don't want to know about that because if I, if I know too much about it I won't be able to play it freely. Well I'm sorry, the more you know you should be able to play more freely and not less freely.
SUE LAWLEY:
But Daniel do you imply that that kind of disciplined and really what you were suggesting was a mechanical approach to learning music, is true the world over, or is it worse in some countries than others as an approach?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well I mean the mechanical repetition very often is used for insecurity, not for the thing itself but insecurity of the feeling. You know you have to repeat until you feel you know everything that you can know about it. When you get to the point where you're either too tired or unable to do it, there's no point in repeating, because every repetition then becomes counter-productive. I think that many musicians, professional and student, could get a lot more out of music than they do now. I think that in the end a lot of what made them start with music is forgotten, and it becomes a, er a, a pattern of life instead of a way of life.
SUE LAWLEY:
We have to draw to a close but er we can't really do so without, without my asking the other great musician in the room if he has anything he'd care to share with us, having listened, Alfred Brendel, to everything you've heard this morning. Would you like to comment.
ALFRED BRENDEL:
I'm coming back to what you said about seeing and listening and hearing. I had to think of a remark that I heard yesterday, somebody came and said "I saw your concert".
(LAUGHTER)
Can we change the usage of, of this phrase please? And I hope that some of the people in our concert tonight will listen and even hear what we are doing!
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
(LAUGHS)
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Thank you. Thank you very much for that. Um next week we travel to Berlin where Daniel Barenboim is Music Director of the State Opera, and there he'll be asking why it is that cultured people talk freely about books and films and the visual arts but when it comes to music often lack a view. Perhaps we just don't know enough about it, and who's fault is that? Well Mr Barenboim, as you will have gathered by now, has strong opinions on the matter. That's the third Reith Lecture, same time next week. For now my thanks to our audience here in Chicago, and of course all of our thanks to the BBC's Reith lecturer 2006, Daniel Barenboim.
Lecture 3: The Magic of Music
BBC RADIO
REITH LECTURES 2006
SUE LAWLEY:
Hello and welcome to the third in this year's Reith lectures. Today we're in another of our lecturer's homes, the Berlin State Opera, where Daniel Barenboim has been Music Director since shortly after the Wall came down. The Opera, here on Unter den Linten is older than Mozart. It was created by Frederick the Great, a man as much at home in the concert hall - he was a flautist - as he was on the battlefield. By contrast its present Director is a man of peace. Daniel Barenboim has seen it as his task, here in Berlin, to lead the Staatsoper out of the shackled world of its recent Communist past. He's used his talent here as he has in the Middle East, to make music a great reconciler, and a unifying force. In his first Reith lecture he explained how he believed music was a metaphor for life. In the second, he talked about how in the modern world the ear is either abused or neglected in favour of the eye, the visual. For his third lecture, his subject is what he's termed the magic of music. He'll argue that classical music is decidedly not an exclusive language, understood only by the musical elite, given the right attitude it's accessible to us all. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome this year's Reith lecturer, Daniel Barenboim.
(APPLAUSE)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. In London, I spoke and we discussed in detail mostly the question of the phenomenon, or the phenomenology, of sound, if you want, of the fact that when people very often talk about sound they talk about something to do with colour, whether it's a bright or whether it's a dark sound. And I maintain that this is much too subjective to be of great interest to us, because what is dark for one is bright for somebody else, or even for the same person in different moods, but there are certain elements of sound which are objective, and those we should examine very carefully, and that is of course the weight and therefore the duration of sound. I also mean that for me there is a permanent relation between sound and silence, because sound gets drawn to ..?.. the law of gravity which pulls the objects to the ground. In Chicago I then went on to speak, not only about the fact that we neglect the ear, the foetus in a pregnant mother begins to hear on the forty-fifth day of the pregnancy, and therefore has seven and a half months' advantage over the eye, and when the baby is born, basically what we do is only care about his eye and use every means we can to explain the fact that even his own survival is actually dependent on his eyes. When we teach a child how to cross the street, we say look to the left or look to the right, so that you're not run over by the car. Whereas the ear is neglected in today's world, what with muzak, and all sorts of noises, and hotel lifts, and aeroplanes, and all that, music actually forces us to close our ears. The first musical example I gave in London, then Chicago, and I would like to do today too, was the beginning of the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, ..?.. in London, from the point of view of silence becoming sound. The beginning of the Tristan prelude that starts out of nothing, and unless the nothing is there the first note has a completely different significance. In Chicago, I used this to describe the accumulative effect of music, the accumulation, in other words repetition, so that the ear remembers what it has already heard. And by the way, I'm sure you all know what an important function ear plays for memory, to remember even daily chores, to remember telephone numbers, to remember all sorts of things. The ear is a very very intelligent organ.
Anyway, Wagner was obviously a great composer - we know that...
(LAUGHTER)
Wagner was a highly, highly intelligent human being in so many areas, and wrote what to me remains one of the most interesting books about music, on conducting, where he describes many of the bad habits of the orchestras of his day, which I must say are not that different from the bad habits of the orchestras today, and that is the difficulty to maintain this inextricable relation between sound and silence - how we start a sound, how we hold it, and what happens to the next note. When Wagner starts the prelude of Tristan, first of all what does he do? He starts the music out of nothing, on one note.
(PLAYS ONE NOTE)
So. If we listen carefully, and intelligently, we can imagine a thousand possibilities. We can imagine that as part of that, part of that, part of that, part of whatever chord where the A is in there.
(PLAYED CHORDS DURING LAST SENTENCE)
And then you have the F
(PLAYS TWO NOTES)
so that's ..?..
(PLAYS THREE NOTES)
Obviously not. So what is it? This feeling of ambiguity and expectation is absolutely essential before
(PLAYS ONE CHORD)
the famous chord comes. If the bar before that had been fully written out, harmonically based bar, the dissonance would not have the effect that it has. But it is this creation of a situation of being in no man's land, harmonically, melodically, and also from the point of view of the sound. If we go from the silence...
(PLAYS TWO NOTES)
this is almost a modulation, a feeling of modulation in there.
(PLAYS FIVE NOTES)
Silence. Now comes the repeat for the accumulation,
(PLAYS SEVEN NOTES)
Silence. But the most important conclusion in the end is that Wagner very cleverly does not resolve, and he leaves the chord in mid air. I have tried to imagine how would a lesser composer, who, although being a lesser composer, had the inspiration, for want of a better word, to imagine the Tristan chord. What I want to show you now, and I suppose this will make you laugh, and which is not something that you normally associate with Tristan and Isolde, but how would he come out of this chord and not have the genius of Wagner of leaving it in mid air, creating a half resolution, which is the tonality for the repeat of the mood. It's the next one already in the key, because if you remember, after this,
(PLAYS FOUR NOTES)
if you keep the chord the next one is in the key
(PLAYS SEVERAL NOTES)
What would a composer with less genius and with less understanding of this mystery, of music if you want, of the magical quality that brings all the instruments together, he would think I have created tension, I have to resolve it.
(PLAYS EIGHT NOTES)
(LAUGHTER)
Resolved. Next one:
(PLAYS EIGHT NOTES)
(LAUGHTER)
And therefore I'm only bringing this up because it is this tension of being left in mid air that allows him to create more and more tension as this goes on. And the fact that ambiguity in music, in real life ambiguity may be described as a doubtful quality, somebody who is ambiguous, not knowing exactly what he or she wants, how to react etc. But in the world of sound, in this magical world of sound, ambiguity means that there are many many possibilities, many ways to go. And the longer you hold back on the resolution, the more interesting the whole thing becomes. And, since we are here, maybe it is not out of place to spend a few minutes on the question of sound, on the question of this famous typically dark German sound. And should there be such a thing as a German sound, and does Beethoven or Brahms, or Wagner for that matter, do they need a German sound, whatever that may be, or are other influences in our modern world permissible, positive or negative? First of all I think I can take a second to share with you a personal anecdote, if you want, which is of very little importance except to me, and that is that my family and I moved to Israel when I was ten years old, in 1952, and the Israel Philharmonic then consisted I would say about eighty-five or ninety per cent of Jewish musicians who had emigrated mostly from Central Europe - many of them from Germany, but also from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia in those days. Most of them had come in the thirties, fleeing Nazism. And that is the orchestra that I heard most of the great pieces of the repertoire for the first time. And when I started travelling more and more, in the late fifties and the sixties, I heard for the first time other kinds of sounds, all kinds of sounds. And finally, having been in and out of Germany for many years, I came here to this house, with the Staatsoper, in the late eighties, and had an absolutely chilling experience hearing the Staatskapelle playing for the first time, because it was exactly the same sound that I had heard as a child in Israel. And there was something in the sound that so completely reminded me of that, and that of course was the moment that I fell in love with that and I decided that I wanted to participate in the continuation of the life of this orchestra. Anyway, this is just on a personal note. The sound, the German, the so-called German sound in many ways is less harsh at the beginning of the note. Probably - and this again is very subjective - probably due also, not only but due also to the fact that the German language has such heavy consonants. And on this particular subject, on the subject of the sound of orchestras and national characteristics, the question is often asked nowadays: but do we want all orchestras to sound the same? Do we want to lose the very particular sound of the French bassoon, if they play on the German instruments which are the accepted norm in the rest of the world, and of many others, or do we want to have national characteristics in every orchestra? And then these national characteristics are adaptable if you want, or useful, only in a certain repertoire, in the repertoire of that country. It's actually narrowing the question, because I think if we have the possibility to acquire the knowledge and the virtuosity of playing in many different styles, I think it is the duty of each great orchestra in the world to have, if you want, a sound of its own which consists of understanding the different styles of sound that it has to adopt and adapt when it plays different kinds of music. In other words, this of course, the question is not, do I have an orchestra which has a wonderful personal sound, immediately, unmistakably recognisable, and I distribute it generously to Mozart, Boulez, Wagner, Verdi and Tchaikovsky and Messiaen, or do I find a way to nurture this very specific sound, understanding the different stylistic necessities and adapting and changing this sound so that it is at the service of the music that is being played. American musicians of course have in that way much easier, because everything for them is imported. I have yet to find a German musician who feels the same degree of closeness to La Mer of Debussy as he does to the fifth symphony of Beethoven. And in the opposite direction as well. For fifteen years I was conductor of the Paris orchestra, and believe me it was very difficult to get the French musicians to feel the kind of, not only enthusiasm but atavistic attachment to the fifth symphony of Beethoven which they did perfectly naturally with La Mer. But the question remains the same - do we all want to sound the same or do we want to develop in each and every one of the great orchestras. Every orchestra cannot do that, but in the great orchestras of the world, develop the capacity to have both an unmistakable personal sound and a sound that is flexible enough to change according to the style that we are playing. All these questions are nothing else but the musical equivalent to the questions that we are asking ourselves in the world today about economic globalisation, about cosmopolitanism. We don't live any more in a world that has accepted standards of judgement, or taste, as was in the case in Greece. For me one of the greatest enemies of humanity, to be politically correct means of course means to be able to hide your dislikes. It's fine, I can live with that, but political correctness means of course also not to have any responsibility for any judgement. And I think this is where we are in today's world very often that we only see the rights that come with democracy but we don't really see the responsibility. And that shows itself in the music making too. The personal investment of each player, be it when he plays alone or in chamber music or in an orchestra, the courage to have a point of view. And then I ask myself, why the courage of having a point of view? It's absolutely elemental. Why play music if you don't have a point of view? Why? In other words, the world that we live in, if you want, makes it ethically more and more difficult to make music, because it is a world which gives us answers, even when there is no question. My point is that music, classical music as we know it, European classical music that we have today, will not survive unless we make a radical effort to change our attitude to it and unless we take it away from a specialised niche that it has become, unrelated to the rest of the world, and make it something that is essential to our lives. Not something ornamental, not only something enjoyable, not only something exciting, but something essential. Some of us are more fanatic about music, more interested than others, but I think we should all have the possibility to learn not only it but to learn from it. It is perfectly acceptable throughout the world that you have to have acquired a lot of life experience in order to then bring it out in your music making, but there's so many things that you can learn from the music towards understanding the world, if you think of music as something essential.
I was very lucky, I grew up in a musical home, I grew up in a, in a, in a small flat in Buenos Aires where both my parents taught piano, so whenever somebody came to the house it was for a piano lesson - it was for me the most natural thing. I learned to think in music. and I still do to this day. And the first thing that I think of, having lived all these years in this terrible conflict that we live in the Middle East, because I grew up there and I feel part of it, and to live daily with so many horrible things that happen, I have been always every day asking myself since I was a very small boy, why is it that so much of the day goes by and nothing happens and then something happens at a certain moment of the day that influences not only everything I think and feel after the event but everything that I have known and felt before. And I'm sorry, but I learned this in a much stronger way from the music.
I have here on musical example which I would like to play for you, of exactly that, of the moment where there comes a fantastic vertical pressure on the horizontal floor of the music, and that that moment you know that the music cannot continue any more the way it was before, such as the world was not the same after the 9th November of 1938, or the 9th November of 1989, or the 11th September of 2001 - events that have changed everything both towards the future and towards the past. And I have this one little excerpt - it is probably, you will, might find it er not comparable to the incredible experiences that any of these events have been. My point is that I learned the fact that there is a vertical pressure on the horizontal floor, that there is something that shows at a certain moment that we have to accept the inevitability of something that has changed our life both to the future and to the end. And it is the moment in a passage in the last movement of the ninth symphony by Beethoven where the text is: 'And the cherub stat for Gott, for Gott, for Gott'.
(FEW BARS OF RECORDING OF 9TH SYMPHONY PLAYED)
And there are of course many other examples of this.
One of the questions that preoccupies many intellectuals today is why is the music of the past of such relevance to us today? And what about the music of today? And it's evident that the music of today could not have been created, and therefore cannot exist, without the music of the past. And there is a necessity to be able to play the music of today with a feeling of familiarity that seems to us perfectly natural when we play the music of the past, as it is necessary for us to have a sense of discovery from the music of the past as if it is being written today. And I will give you two very small and very simple examples of that. There's a wonderful sonata of Beethoven, Opus 81a - Les Adieux - which starts in a very clear settled way, of two chords, slow moving, in a very specific key, of E flat, and on the third chord there is a modulation.
(PLAYS 3 CHORDS)
Seems very simple today after all of the nineteenth century, but this is a...
(PLAYS 3 CHORDS)
The ear really expects this. And therefore if the ear is as intelligent as I, I think it is, that's what the ear expects,
(PLAYS 3 CHORDS DURING REST OF SENTENCE)
and the ear gets a shock when there comes the modulation. That's what I mean by sense of discovery. And the beginning of the first sonata of Pierre Boulez, you know if you really played it as a collection of notes...
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
But if you had the connection
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
you find the elements of familiarity. When I play those first two notes in the Boulez sonata I am sure, I am positively sure he did not think of that as part of a harmonic.
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
He didn't hear that in his, in his ear when he wrote that. But it is my duty, when I play something new, something that is not familiar, to play it with understanding it as if it had been here for many many years and for many many centuries in the same that it is necessary for me to find a sense of discovery in the music of the past. And this is of course - and this brings me to the end of this lecture - this is of course the most important point. Of all the different things that I believe we can learn from music, and each and every one of us obviously learns different things, the most clearly definable is the fact that music teaches us as human beings that everything, without an exception, has a past, a present, and a future. Very simple to say, but we all know how difficult it is to live. When we have a pleasant present, we want it to last, we think it will last forever, but in fact the fluidity of life is for me best expressed in music. Coming out of nothing, the past, the present of the first note, which is nothing but a transition. And what I have learned from music, and have of course not been able to apply to my daily life, is accepting the fluidity of life and the fact that nothing, absolutely nothing, is completely independent and solid, but everything that I think and feel is dependent on this fluidity of life. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Please ask good questions!
(LAUGHTER)
SUE LAWLEY:
Daniel Barenboim, thank you very much indeed. We're coming to question time, and obviously we want to know if you feel you have access to that magical world of sound that's been described, or we hope you're not hidebound by political correctness. The woman here?
JOYCE HACKETT:
I'm Joyce Hackett, I'm a novelist here at the American Academy. Much of what you seem to be talking about today is that we live in an era that's kind of... in which we're addicted to resolution. Your comments about the Tristan prelude talked about how much more interesting it was that Wagner did not resolve, and you could look at muzak as a kind of music that excessively resolves all the time. And I just wonder, um, if you have any thoughts on why we're living in an era that seems to be almost allergic to mystery and allergic to ambiguity. Do you think it's a result of secularisation, or...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No.
JOYCE HACKETT:
...whether it's just because of society moves faster?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I think it's a, it's a result of the fact that technology has advanced so much, and that we have... we and our ancestors have not done enough to make sure that the thinking capacity develops at the same speed, and is very much easier in technology or in sports to define progress. Somebody who runs a hundred metres today quicker than last year is obviously a better runner, but is Boulez a better composer than Mozart? I don't think so, I just think he himself would... he has learned a lot and he writes in a completely different style, but there is not the easy definition of what is better. Are we better human beings now than there were three or five hundred years ago? In some aspects yes. We don't have slavery, we accept so many things now that we were not able to accept even fifty years ago. But in our own individual private self we are still subject to the same pressures that our ancestors were five or ten thousand years ago.
JOYCE HACKETT:
Do you think one of the things that music teaches us to do is to question the notion of progress?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yeah, of course.
JOYCE HACKETT:
Thank you.
VIGALUF:
Hello, my name is Vigaluf(?) and I'm part of the managing committee of the Association of German School Musicians, in Berlin, and my question is, now you were referring to Pierre Boulez, and he is of course in the tradition of classical music. Is there ever a chance of avant garde music ever to become or ever represent the beliefs or aesthetics or ideas, thoughts, of the majority of people? Because you say classical music has to come out of its niche, and a modern form of classical music...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
(OVERLAPS ABOVE) Yeah, well I would not make a distinction. Wagner and Liszt were also avant garde musicians, but the avant garde of today is fighting two losing battles. First of all, that some of it has no contact with the past, which was never the case at all, but more important, it is fighting a losing battle in the sense that music is not part of society. And therefore anything that is not immediately accessible is very difficult to make part of our society. I think that a new work, the work of avant garde, has to have the possibility to put itself in the same programme with a symphony by Beethoven or whoever it may be, and, and then you see whether it stands on the same, if you wanted, the same league or not. I don't believe in making a niche, a separate niche for anything at all.
SUE LAWLEY:
But people resist it don't they Daniel...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
People resist it because, because...
SUE LAWLEY:
...because it is, because it's atonal and it doesn't appeal to them...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No no no no no no...
SUE LAWLEY:
...and their ear yearns for consonance, not dissonance.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No no no no no no no, I don't, I don't believe that at all. People resist a lot of things. People resist every... a lot of music that requires er listening with thought. It's not only contemporary music. I played a concert in Chicago a few years ago with Yo Yo Mar, where we played two of the, the last two Beethoven sonatas and inbetween the sonata by Elliott Carter. And you know what, many people, including musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which are very experienced musicians both with the music of Beethoven and in the last twenty years the music of Elliott Carter, they felt that Beethoven Opus 102 was more modern. There was... I don't think that this is the point. The point is that there is no music education to speak of, and when there is, it is only as a specialised profession. And music was never a profession, music was always a way of life. I am sure Mozart and Wagner and Strauss and all the composers, as well as Pierre Boulez and Michel Guilan, who is sitting here, and all the great musicians, don't consider themselves that as a profession. They do that in a professional way, but this is not a profession, it's a way of life, and therefore you cannot make a niche for that.
SUE LAWLEY:
A question here?
VLYMAR BALCON:
My name's Vlymar(?) Balcon, I work for the Goethe Institut, the German cultural institute. I'd like to follow up on the question that... or of the answer you just gave concerning the power of music. Briefly touched upon the Wagner issue, which of course immediately comes to mind, but I was wondering if you could further elaborate. Do you really think that music can be totally innocent of any kind of political use, if the music itself cannot bring across a message, or, on the other side of the spectrum as it were, do you think that music could formulate a universal message to all in the spirit of the ninth symphony maybe, if that's possible?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I think, I think that everything is made human by the way we do it and the way we look at it. Of course music does not have to have those qualities, of course music is subversive. I'm sorry, but when I conduct a Mozart opera and I, and the first violins play the, the, main melody, and the second violins and the viola, they are already providing the subversive element. What music teaches us is not that it is all beautiful or that it is all subversive, or that you can use it or that you can abuse it. What music teaches us is that all of those things can be made one. And this is what music does, and in that way it is not unlike religion. Not in an institutionalised way of religion, in the physic... or of the coming one - this is what music is about for me.
SUE LAWLEY:
But can you, Daniel, separate the composer from his music? I mean we... you've mentioned Wagner, and he was known to be deeply anti-Semitic, and there are a lot of people in Israel, as you know yourself, who cannot stand to have his music played there.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yeah but there's no ............
SUE LAWLEY:
They cannot hear Wagner's music.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yeah but that's not because he was anti-Semitic. This is a very dangerous sentence you just said now, because we will be here for the next two hours now.
(LAUGHTER)
The reason that Wagner is not being played in Israel, the reason at all is that, it's not because he was anti-Semitic. To be anti-Semitic was a part of the normal make-up of an intelligent thinking person in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was the very first...
SUE LAWLEY:
Well he was Hitler's favourite composer.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Think of the ............... - sorry let me finish - the problem with Wagner is that he was used and abused because his writing, his prose, is vociferous, and horribly anti-Semitic. The music is not. Even the characters in the opera, there is not one anti-Semitic character in a Wagner opera. That you can use it to make of it, this is something else, but it is not. The reason for the Wagner problem for many Jewish people, for whom I have complete and total sympathy and understanding, is that many of them have seen members of their families being taken to the gas chambers in the concentration camp in Germany to the sound of The Meistersinger overture, and you ask yourself, how could they ever listen to this music again? This is the, the, the problem. My contention is of course that they can't, and of course they shouldn't, and of course there is no reason to make them do that. And - not but - and at the same time one must not give these people the right to stop other people, who fortunately do not suffer from this association, from hearing this music. This is the Wagner problem in embryo.
SUE LAWLEY:
I'm going to move it on, because we're running out of time. Gentleman here?
PETER JONAS:
Peter Jonas.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Sir Peter Jonas!
PETER JONAS:
Peter Jonas from the Munich Opera. Um...
SUE LAWLEY:
Who we should probably say used to run the English National Opera.
PETER JONAS:
Yes. There are about twenty questions I would like to ask but...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Start with the...
SUE LAWLEY:
Could you just ask one Peter?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Start with the nineteenth.
PETER JONAS:
I'm only going to ask one, and it seems to me that the words 'lack of understanding' and incomprehensibility between nations, between beliefs, there's a constant theme here also in relationship to Munich. After all... Music! After all when....
(LAUGHTER)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
(LAUGHS) What was his name? Sigmund Freud, no?
(LAUGHTER)
PETER JONAS:
When we were born we were lifted up by our feet, and the first thing that comes out is not a fully formed sentence or a political speech, it is a cry, a scream, a sound which is very akin to singing. And it seems to me that people can sing before they can form logical sentences, without even Freudian slips. Is it your belief that the magic of music could be more than just an aid to un, understanding, but could be an Esperanto for future communication?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well there has to be a real revolution in that I think, because I'm rather disturbed very often by the concept of communication. Musicians today more and more are actually communicators who happen to be musicians, and they use music to communicate, and that the real communication of music comes when music is the communication itself. Not that music makes people feel good, and we know many horrible people who love music - we talked about two of them earlier, Wagner and Hitler and Stalin and... - but if Wagner had been able to be convinced by some force, a king - your er Ludwig - or, or or...
(LAUGHTER)
or, or, or some other force, that the nobility that he expresses in the music can only really come to being - if he is able to maintain that in his other thoughts and in his daily life maybe he would have been a better human being, maybe a lot of things would have happened. I think that the reason that we are in the situation that we are in is, I come back to the fact that music is more and more an ivory tower that is being er underdeveloped, and when developed, only as such. What it would do if suddenly the iron tower is removed and it becomes open to everybody is anybody's guess.
SUE LAWLEY:
That's it. There will be more, but for now, Daniel Barenboim, thank you very much indeed.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Next week... Next week we travel to the Middle East, where in 1999 Daniel Barenboim created the West Eastern Divan Orchestra in which Jews and Arabs co-exist, and it's there that the maestro will deliver his fourth lecture. Its theme, quite naturally, will be how music can bring understanding, patience, and the courage to listen to the narrative of others. That's Daniel Barenboim in the Middle East, same time next week. Until then, from the Berlin State Opera, goodbye.
In the first of his lectures from Jerusalem Daniel Barenboim will talk about how music is the great equaliser as he discovered in his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra which brings together young Arab and Israeli musicians.
Read the transcript of the lecture below.
Lecture 4: Meeting in Music
SUE LAWLEY:
Hello and welcome. For the last two in this series of Reith lectures we've come to the Middle East. Daniel Barenboim had intended to deliver this, the fourth lecture, in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, but because of the growing tensions in the West Bank, we've been advised not to go there. So both lectures will be delivered here in Jerusalem, but in different parts of the city. Today we're just outside the walls of the Old City, in an area mainly inhabited by Palestinians, who make up the bulk of our audience. Barenboim is a controversial figure in this part of the world. A Jew, whose family made their home in Israel when he was ten years old, he believes that the destinies of Israelis and Palestinians are, as he puts it, inextricably linked, and he's tried to exemplify this through that which he knows best - music. In 1999 he joined with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said to create an orchestra made up of young Israeli and Arab musicians. Called the West Eastern Divan orchestra, it's the living representation of its founders' central belief, that music has the power to bring people together. To explain why, and how, please would you welcome the Reith lecturer 2006, Daniel Barenboim.
(APPLAUSE)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Thank you very much. Edward Said said that music is a little bit subversive. That too of course speaks about how we perceive it, and not about the music itself. But he was unquestionably right. In music, different notes and voices meet, link to each other, either in joint expression or in counterpoint, which means exactly that - counter point, or another point. And yet the two fit together. Please allow me to give you some very simple, simplistic I would say, er examples of what I mean. The slow movement of Beethoven's Pathetique sonata - which I am sure many of you have heard many times and some of you probably even played - is a relatively simple melody.
(PLAYS FEW BARS OF SONATA)
Etc. When we examine it a little bit more closely we see that obviously there is a main voice that sinks its way through the whole passageŠ
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
And the bass accompanies it, in the best sense of the word - not in a situation where he, the bass is only following, but having its own to say, and goes up when the melody goes down, and oppositeŠ
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
thereby influencing each other. And there is still the middle voice that gives a sense of continuity, of fluidity.
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
This is relatively a simple example. I can give you one more perhaps which might be of use for us later, and that is the last prelude of the first book of Bach's Well Tempered Klavier.
(PLAYS FEW NOTES OF PRELUDE)
There the main voice is less obvious, because it could be:
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
that, or it could be:
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
with all sorts of possibilities.
But you see in all that, that in music there is a hierarchy, a hierarchy if you want with equality. And that is what of course is much easier than in life. How difficult it is to achieve equality and yet to find a hierarchy. In times of totalitarian or autocratic rule, music, indeed culture in general, is often the only avenue of independent thought. It is the only way people can meet as equals, and exchange ideas. Culture then becomes primarily the voice of the oppressed, and it takes over from politics as a driving force for change. Think of how often, in societies suffering from political oppression, or from a vacuum in leadership, culture took a dynamic lead. We have many extraordinary examples of this phenomenon. Some is that writings in the former Eastern Bloc, South African poetry and drama under apartheid, and of course Palestinian literature amidst so much conflict. We only mention one important Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Dalwish, and many others. Culture brings contact between people, or, shall we say, culture can bring contact between people, it can bring people closer together, and it can encourage understanding. This is why Edward Said and I started the West Eastern Divan project, as a way to bring together musicians from the different Arab countries and from Israel, to work together, to make music together, and ultimately, when we realised how much interest there was, to form an orchestra. When we had the first idea, which was linked to the city of Weimar in Germany, being culture capital of Europe in 1999, we expected to have a small forum of maybe eight or twelve young people who would come and make music together and spend a week or ten days at a workshop with us, so you can imagine the surprise we had when there were over two hundred applicants from the Arab world alone. And this is how this orchestra was formed. Edward and I met by chance in London in 1993, in a hotel lobby. I had gone to London to give a concert, and ironically he was there to give the 1993 Reith Lectures, which explored the changing role of the intellectual in today's world. Now, thirteen years later, I have brought the Reith Lectures here to the Middle East.
We took the name of our project, the West Eastern Divan, from a poem by Goethe, who was one of the first Germans to be genuinely interested in other cultures. He originally discovered Islam when a German soldier who had been fighting in one of the Spanish campaigns brought back a page of the Koran to show to him. His enthusiasm was so great that he started to learn Arabic at the age of sixty. Later he discovered the great Persian poet Hafiz, and that was the inspiration for his set of poems that deal with the idea of the other, the West Eastern Divan, which was first published nearly two hundred years ago, in 1819, at the same time, interestingly enough, that Beethoven was working on his ninth symphony, his celebrated testament to fraternity.
Goethe's poem then became a symbol for the idea behind our experiments in bringing Arab and Israeli musicians together. This orchestra consists of Arab musicians from Palestine, from the territories, and Palestinians from Israel, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and Egyptians, and of course Israeli musicians. Now, when you play music, whether you play chamber music or you play in an orchestra, you have to do two very important things and do them simultaneously. You have to be able to express yourself, otherwise you are not contributing to the musical experience, but at the same time it is imperative that you listen to the other. You have to understand what the other is doing. And the other may be doing the same as you, if he is sitting next to you if you're a string player, or he may play a different instrument and be in counterpoint to what you are doing. But in all cases it is impossible to play intelligently in an orchestra concentrating only on one of those two things. If you concentrate only on what you do, you might play very well but might play so loud that you cover the others, or so soft that you are not heard. And of course you cannot play only by listening, but the art of playing music is the art of simultaneous playing and listening. In other words, one enhances the other. And this is the main reason we started this workshop. Edward once said, separation between people is not a solution for any of the problems that divide people, and certainly ignorance of the other provides no help whatever. In this workshop we were trying to start a dialogue, to take a single step forward, and to find common ground. And we saw what happened when an Arab musician shared a music stand with an Israeli musician - both trying to play the same note with the same dynamic, with the same stroke of the bow if they were string players, with the same sound, with the same expression. They were trying to do something together about which they were both passionate, because after all you cannot be an indifferent musician. Music demands permanently, at all times, passion and effort. The idea in a sense was as simple as that, because once you have agreed on how to play one note together you can no longer look at each other the same way again. That was our starting point, and from the beginning Edward and I were filled with optimism, despite the darkening sky, as he called it, with what has turned out sadly to be all too accurate foresight.
In the West Eastern Divan the universal metaphysical language of music becomes the link, it is the language of the continuous dialogue that these young people have with each other. Music is the common framework, their abstract language of harmony. As I have said before in these lectures, nothing in music is independent. It requires a perfect balance between head, heart and stomach. And I would argue that when emotion and intellect are in tune, it is easier also for human beings and for nations to look outward as well as inward. And therefore through music we can see an alternative social model, a kind of practical Utopia, from which we might learn about expressing ourselves freely and hearing one another.
This, and many other things, you can really learn from playing music, so long as you don't view music only as a pastime, no matter how enjoyable, or as something to forget the world, but something from which you can actually understand the way the world can, should and sometimes does function. In any case, from the beginning it was our belief, Edward's and mine, that the destinies of our two people, the Palestinian people and the Israeli people, are inextricably linked, and therefore the welfare, the sense of justice and the happiness of one has to eventually, inevitably be that of the other, which is certainly not the case today.
Of course the West Eastern Divan orchestra is not going to bring about peace. What it can do however is to bring understanding. It can awaken the curiosity, and then perhaps the courage, to listen to the narrative of the other, and at the very least accept its legitimacy. This, if you want, is the main idea behind this project. And people very often ask me, but this is a wonderful example of tolerance, and I say no I don't like the word 'tolerance', because to tolerate something or somebody means you tolerate them for negative reasons. You tolerate somebody in spite of the fact that he or she is ugly, you tolerate somebody er in spite of the fact that he or she is stupid. And therefore tolerance is used, and I would say misused in today's world, and in the press very often, is a very misleading word. The French Revolution gave us three much more important and powerful ideas, or concepts - liberty, equality and fraternity. But these ideas of the French Revolution are not only right in themselves, but they are so because they come in the proper order. You cannot have equality without liberty, and you certainly cannot have fraternity without equality. The importance of this I learnt from music, because music evolves in time, and therefore the order inevitably determines the content. And I have never had to ask myself the question, can't we have equality before liberty. And this underlines if you want a central problem of our conflict here in the Middle East. When young musicians from the opposite camp, as it were, come together, they have the liberty. They have the liberty or choice whether to come or not to play music together. They also however have something just as important, and that is automatically they have equality, because music gives everyone the same possibilities regardless of race, sex, religion, or where they came from. In front of a Beethoven symphony we are all equal. And although the fraternity does not have to be there, it is at least a possibility, whereas now in real life it is not.
I know, or rather I feel - no, I feel I suspect and I know - that some of you might think the idea of Palestinians and other Arabs and Israelis playing together is unacceptable. I know that this is unacceptable for many of my friends in Ramallah for instance. And I understand it, because it is seen as a form of normalisation - and by that I mean an acceptance of the status quo. And this is unacceptable to them, because the real problems of actual existence have not been solved. And when we played in Ramallah last August there were people who said, how can we look at Israelis, Palestinians and other Arabs playing together when the Israeli tanks are here, and when we have the situation that we have now. But, as Edward Said said - I quote - 'My friend Daniel Barenboim and I have chosen this course for humanistic rather than political reasons, on the assumption that ignorance is not a strategy for sustainable survival'. When Palestinians and other Arabs meet Israelis in music, the primary quality that is missing in the political life, namely the equality, is already a given. Therefore this may be precisely the starting point for them to show each other that what they have in music, the equality and the ability to converse with each other on equal footings, will lead them to look for ways to find that outside of music. Music in this case is not an expression of what life is, but an expression of what life could be, or what it could become. Music itself should not be used for political or any other purpose. But although you cannot make music through politics, perhaps you can give political thinking an example through music. As the great conductor Sergei Celibidache said, music does not become something, but something may become music. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Daniel Barenboim, thank you very much indeed. So music is a great equaliser but only if the players are willing to listen to each other. Here in the Middle East, where the Israeli Palestinian conflict is as tense as ever, is it possible that this metaphor of music can describe a way forward? Let me remind listeners that our audience this evening is a predominantly Arab one. We're in a part of Jerusalem inhabited mainly by Palestinians. Next week in another part of the city we'll have a predominantly Jewish Israeli audience. So, to our questions, and the first is from Razan Kaloti who works for the Office of the British Council, which is responsible for the Palestinian territories. Razan, your question please.
RAZAN KALOTI:
Er as a Palestinian, and having to live under extremely harsh living conditions and daily humiliation, my question would be how would music really help?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well, maybe you should go to Ramallah the day after tomorrow. In Ramallah the day after tomorrow, in the Palace of Culture, there is a concert by an all Palestinian orchestra, half, or more or less half, from Ramallah, and the other half from Nazareth. Now since you are Palestinian and you live in the area, you know that what I have said is practically an impossibility. How do you get twenty or twenty-five youngsters from Nazareth to go through the checkpoints and to get the permissions and to go to Ramallah to join other children who have the same passions and the same will to play together? This is not going to solve the problems, it's not going to solve the inner Palestinian problems, but it can do several other things.
First of all, I think it should be a day of great joys and pride to all Palestinians, to see forty or forty-five youngsters, as I said from Ramallah and from Nazareth, walking on stage to produce something which is not even something that one associates with Palestinian culture. Classical Western music is not exactly the quality that first comes to mind. And yet you have children, and very young people, most of them under sixteen, some of them ten and eleven, who have through their passion and the curiosity, found something that will give them a sense of pride, as I said, of dignity, all those things which Palestinians so rightly complain the lack of in their society.
SUE LAWLEY:
But I wantŠ I mean are you in any way convinced by that? You sounded sceptical when you began. You're saying that the realities of everyday life make it quite difficult.
RAZAN KALOTI:
It's much different thanŠ And it's, as they say, it's easier said thanŠ
SUE LAWLEY:
Than done.
RAZAN KALOTI:
Than ŠŠŠŠ
SUE LAWLEY:
Easier said than done.
RAZAN KALOTI:
The salaries are not paid, er extremely hard living conditions, er even having to go to Ramallah to do some work we have to cross checkpoints, the humiliation, er so it's not that easy.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No I know, I never claimed it was easy and I didn't claim that it is a substitute for the other. I'm just saying that we have to find ways that each and every human being in life has achieved something that he doesn't want to lose.
SUE LAWLEY:
Is thisŠ On this subject of, of, of music being the equaliser is very difficult when you're confronted with the harsh reality of everyday life in the occupied territories.
GEORGE SAHAR: My name is George Sahar, I am er from Care International. What I hear Mr Barenboim saying is that it doesn't necessarily have to be that er the guns have to be silent so that we can hear the music, and I feel that this is um, it's interesting but it's an added challenge for us as Palestinians, because we still are in a state where we have to prove our humanity to the world, and music is supposed to be an equaliser, so I'd really like to hear your perspective about it. Can we hear the music when the guns are still so loud? Thank you very much.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well I think, you know you are perfectly right. There is an area where the music and the reality does not always go hand in hand, and I don't believe that music is an equaliser. Music is nothing except itself. What you can do is find the equality in the music. It will not silence the guns, and it will not do any of those things.
SUE LAWLEY:
But theŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Now let me tell you something else in a very conŠ Sorry. In a very constructive and positive way. I wish many Israelis could go to Ramallah on Saturday to hear this all Palestinian orchestra. Believe me, the Jewish people have played a major role in classical music over the last two or three hundred years. Some of the best musicians all over the world were that. And with what respect they would suddenly look at these Palestinians who are able to play this music in a way that is not only as good as some of the Israeli children, in some cases maybe even better. When I was a child, I came to Vienna from Argentina - I was ten years old, it was in 1952 - and Vienna was occupied by the four powers - the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France. And the Americans brought Coca Cola, and the whole of Vienna went on a Coca Cola feast. They had never seen anything like that. And a week or ten days later the Vienna Philharmonic played a concert with the great Soviet violinist David Oistrakh, and believe me that day the Soviets conquered a place in the hearts of all the Viennese - and not just the musicians - because of that. And I am sure you are such a talented people - and I am not saying this to flatter you, I know this, for many years I have been working with a lot of your people - you have such a fantastic strength, and force of talent that everything has to be done to allow all Palestinians to develop and express themselves in that. This is why I am involved in all this.
SUE LAWLEY:
I'm going to take one more point on this and then I'm going to move on.
SHIRLEY BENJAMIN:
My name is Shirley Benjamin, and I'm a Jewish Israeli, and from my point of view the terrible problem is to get the Israeli Jews to open their eyes to what's going on. I am on the internet every day and I have friends and I know what's going on. Can you not bring this orchestra to Israel, to the Jewish part of the country, to let Jews see whatŠ that they're not everything that we see on the television.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well Edward Said and I started this orchestra, and we saw what it can do and how it travelled. We realised that the full dimension of the project will only happen when this orchestra is allowed to play in all the countries that are represented in it - Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, etc. We are not there yet. We made the conscious decision to go to Ramallah last year because we thought this is the most obvious and clear humanistic attitude. It was not a politicalŠ Had we tried to go to Damascus, or to Tel Aviv, this would have been a very very clear political thing, which we didn't really want to do that. But I am sure that the day will come when we will play both in Tel Aviv and in Damascus. We are not quite there, but we will get there.
SUE LAWLEY:
And can you come to a question here on the front row now, from Tova Lesarov, who describes herself as an American Israeli - that's right isn't it? - and she's a journalist with the Jerusalem Post.
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
I had a couple of questions actually.
SUE LAWLEY:
No no no, give us one question.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
She is bossy with me too - don't worry!
(LAUGHTER)
Not personally.
SUE LAWLEY:
No you can't, you can't ask a couple. Ask a question, and if it's good and if the answer rolls then we'll let you ask another one butŠ
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
OkayŠ
SUE LAWLEY:
Šdon't push your luck.
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
I, I'll, I'll start with this one then. Um can you think of a specific example where music in this area has actually changed the political process?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No, because neither the political leadership of Israel or from I know the Palestinian is musical enough.
(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Go on, you can ask another one then.
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
Well, wellŠ
(LAUGHTER)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No, ask the other question - maybe it's better!
(LAUGHTER)
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
I, I'm going to continue that. I, I mean is it people that you're trying to change here or the politicians?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
You think politicians are not people?
(LAUGHTER)
Sorry! You know, I am not trying to change anyone, I am trying to work in an area which to me personally is very important, and that is the understanding of the narrative of the other. And I think that we can do that in our small Utopian republic, which has existed since 1999, where everybody's life has been to some extent changed by these experiences. This is what gives music making a quality that is lacking in so much of the music making today in the whole world, and that is its existential quality. We have now wonderful specialists on the violin, on the oboe, on the piano, whatever they are, really specialised workers that can do all sorts of acrobatics and things on their instrument. But this is not what we are talking about. We are talking of the expression in music as being something existential, which is more than pain or pleasure - it is pain and pleasure. And this is what this orchestra does.
SUE LAWLEY:
But I think that is the point, I think that is what people feel sometimes, Daniel, about this, that you are - and one understands why you're insistent that it's not any kind of a political thing that you have set up here with the West Eastern Divan, but nevertheless if you are setting up a Utopia that you hope is some kind of metaphor for how life could be led, how there could be some kind of equalisation and some kind of harmony, you cannot say it is not political, whether you like the ŠŠŠŠŠ idea or not.
DANIEL BARENBOIM: (OVERLAP) But then you have to reallyŠ I am sorry but then you have to really define very clearly and very specifically what is political. Is political tactic or is political strategy? If political is strategy, then I take what you say about our project as a compliment. If you think political is tactical, then I will continue saying it is not that.
DR MAMDOUH AKER:
My name is er Mamdo Hakar, I am a physician, a Palestinian physician and surgeon. I'm very glad Daniel that you mentioned Mahmoud Dalwish in your er lecture. Just last week Mahmoud Dalwish and I were talking about the harsh reality we are facing as Palestinians. Maybe I need just to mention to you that to be here, it took me honestly two hours to get from Ramallah to here, in spite of ha, having all the necessary credentials, but what actually, what Dalwish was saying is that now am I, within all this er reality, focusing on culture is our chance to keep floating - this is exactly what he said - to keep floating in this world. Can music go to the open air and be a cry for justice and freedom, liberty, equality and fraternity as you mention? Why not to perform in the open air in front of the wall, not to make a political statement but at least to show the ugliness of the situation - can this happen?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Why not? Please, I, I mean I rather wish there were no wall and this would not be necessary, but since the wall is here, why not?
DR MAMDOUH AKER:
That's true.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
But you have noticed I am sure that I have refrained from voicing too much criticism if you want er of the Israeli side today here, and if I have done so it is only because it would be very easy success for me here. I'd rather do that in Israel proper. I have never spoken a critical word about Israel in Ramallah, and I have no intention of doing it here today - not because I have nothing to criticise, I have been very vocal about this on many occasions all over the world. But allow me just only one sentence. One of the most important things in my view is it is imperative that a situation is brought about where the legitimacy of the Palestinian narration is accepted by Israel, its politicians and all its citizens. This has to be the first step. Until that moment has come, nothing will be real. And this is exceptionally important.
SUE LAWLEY:
Um I'm going to call in Ari Shavit, who's an Israeli and a senior columnist on Haaretz, um a leading national newspaper here.
ARI SHAVIT:
Mr Barenboim, I think that it, for me it's obvious that your project, the project you launched with Professor Saeed, is a benign project. I don't see any way one can contest the idea of an orchestra of the others learning to play together and to be in dialogue one with another. But what I would like to question is the metaphor there. You have come with the BBC team to the land of tragedy, the tragedy being that there are two people here who have lost their own music. Don't you think that in order to move forward, in order to have a civilised peaceful life here, each people needs a time with his own music? Don't you think that if you try to put two peoples into one position where they are challenged with the music of the other in an intimate situation, that endangers the very project that you want to advance?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I think it's a very er um legitimate question, although based, if I may say so, on an erroneous understanding of the problem. Er it, this is not Israeli music versus Arab music, we're not talking here about Jewish music, we're not talking about Kletzmer music against the music of Beirut. Beethoven was German, yes, but he was much more than that, he was everything. This is something that we all draw from. It is not the privilege of the Israelis to say we are classical musicians, and therefore they are not forcing the Palestinians to accept something of their own.
ARI SHAVIT:
No I, I, I want to emphasise that the project itselfŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yes.
ARI SHAVIT:
ŠI find inspiring in every way. I just think that we all should think about whether we want to take the metaphor seriously and to translate it to a political goal, or where do we reach the more realistic idea which says that each people need some time with itself, to assert its own identity. And I think you've heard it in the questions here, among the Palestinians, many of the Palestinians who somewhat feel threatened by what they see as a cultural invasion of Israelis into their own terrain, which I think very much IŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM: (OVERLAP) I'm sorry, I am sorry to disagree with you. I haven't felt that at all. I have felt some questioning and criticism of many other things, but I haven't felt that at all. And I think that anything that makes every single Israeli have to think for a moment that there is a legitimacy in the point of view of the other, even if they are uncomfortable for the Israelis, and I have never shied away from that, and I don't er really believe in that. And if anybody has the fear that er this is another form of Israeli invasion if you want, I can only tell you that this is a total misunderstanding of the nature of music and where it comes from.
SUE LAWLEY:
I'm going to call finally um Rudyar Shihada, who's a human rights lawyer and writer, based in Ramallah, which is where he was born. He was called to the Bar in London and then returned to um private practice in Ramallah and has been there ever since.
RAJA SHEHADEH:
I am very concerned about the destruction of the landscape, which I find to be a diverse ..?.. The rolling hills of the West Bank and the deep valleys are light music captured in stone. Er the beauty and the lives of the Palestinians who inherit them are being destroyed by the discordant wall, which is so out of sync with the nature of the land. My question is, can music made by people from the different sides of the wall restore the harmony before it is lost forever?
SUE LAWLEY:
We come back to the same point again every time Daniel.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Rudyar, you're making it very difficult for me. You make it very difficult for me. I still believe that anything that people can share together, whether it is through music or through ideas or through friendship or whatever it is, cannot be negative. It cannot do damage. And what I wish, I wish for a much greater percentage of er Israelis to really concentrate and understand this part of Palestinian history. That's what I said earlier, that until Israelis accept the legitimacy of the Palestinian narration, nothing will move, not only in the way that you Palestinians want but in a way that is humanly just.
SUE LAWLEY:
Pick up pleaseŠ
RAJA SHEHADEH:
Er I, I absolutely believe that this is true. I have heard the Divan orchestra on several occasions, and what struck me is not only that it's possible to have people form both sides play together but the fact that when they play together they can create something which is more beautiful than what either alone can produce.
DANIEL BARENBOIM: (OVERLAP) They inhabit each other.
RAJA SHEHADEH:
Yeah. And, and I think that's a very important message, because I think the Israeli experience and, and ideology is that we must have Jews only in Israel, so the, there were always Jews living in Arab countries, and, and now they don't, and that this is a better situation that Arabs live on one side, the Jews live on another side. And the possibility of hybridity is lost, and I think the Divan is showing that if it is restored it will be better for everybody.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Thank you.
SUE LAWLEY:
Music to your ears, as they say. That's it, thank you very much. Next week Daniel Barenboim ends his series with a lecture about the difference between power and strength. Music, like politicians, can have both. The art is knowing how to combine them. That's Barenboim in Jerusalem on music and political leadership at the same time next week. For now, our thanks to Daniel Barenboim, and goodbye.
Reith 4
In the first of his lectures from Jerusalem Daniel Barenboim will talk about how music is the great equaliser as he discovered in his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra which brings together young Arab and Israeli musicians.
Read the transcript of the lecture below.
Lecture 4: Meeting in Music
SUE LAWLEY:
Hello and welcome. For the last two in this series of Reith lectures we've come to the Middle East. Daniel Barenboim had intended to deliver this, the fourth lecture, in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, but because of the growing tensions in the West Bank, we've been advised not to go there. So both lectures will be delivered here in Jerusalem, but in different parts of the city. Today we're just outside the walls of the Old City, in an area mainly inhabited by Palestinians, who make up the bulk of our audience. Barenboim is a controversial figure in this part of the world. A Jew, whose family made their home in Israel when he was ten years old, he believes that the destinies of Israelis and Palestinians are, as he puts it, inextricably linked, and he's tried to exemplify this through that which he knows best - music. In 1999 he joined with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said to create an orchestra made up of young Israeli and Arab musicians. Called the West Eastern Divan orchestra, it's the living representation of its founders' central belief, that music has the power to bring people together. To explain why, and how, please would you welcome the Reith lecturer 2006, Daniel Barenboim.
(APPLAUSE)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Thank you very much. Edward Said said that music is a little bit subversive. That too of course speaks about how we perceive it, and not about the music itself. But he was unquestionably right. In music, different notes and voices meet, link to each other, either in joint expression or in counterpoint, which means exactly that - counter point, or another point. And yet the two fit together. Please allow me to give you some very simple, simplistic I would say, er examples of what I mean. The slow movement of Beethoven's Pathetique sonata - which I am sure many of you have heard many times and some of you probably even played - is a relatively simple melody.
(PLAYS FEW BARS OF SONATA)
Etc. When we examine it a little bit more closely we see that obviously there is a main voice that sinks its way through the whole passageŠ
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
And the bass accompanies it, in the best sense of the word - not in a situation where he, the bass is only following, but having its own to say, and goes up when the melody goes down, and oppositeŠ
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
thereby influencing each other. And there is still the middle voice that gives a sense of continuity, of fluidity.
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
This is relatively a simple example. I can give you one more perhaps which might be of use for us later, and that is the last prelude of the first book of Bach's Well Tempered Klavier.
(PLAYS FEW NOTES OF PRELUDE)
There the main voice is less obvious, because it could be:
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
that, or it could be:
(PLAYS FEW NOTES)
with all sorts of possibilities.
But you see in all that, that in music there is a hierarchy, a hierarchy if you want with equality. And that is what of course is much easier than in life. How difficult it is to achieve equality and yet to find a hierarchy. In times of totalitarian or autocratic rule, music, indeed culture in general, is often the only avenue of independent thought. It is the only way people can meet as equals, and exchange ideas. Culture then becomes primarily the voice of the oppressed, and it takes over from politics as a driving force for change. Think of how often, in societies suffering from political oppression, or from a vacuum in leadership, culture took a dynamic lead. We have many extraordinary examples of this phenomenon. Some is that writings in the former Eastern Bloc, South African poetry and drama under apartheid, and of course Palestinian literature amidst so much conflict. We only mention one important Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Dalwish, and many others. Culture brings contact between people, or, shall we say, culture can bring contact between people, it can bring people closer together, and it can encourage understanding. This is why Edward Said and I started the West Eastern Divan project, as a way to bring together musicians from the different Arab countries and from Israel, to work together, to make music together, and ultimately, when we realised how much interest there was, to form an orchestra. When we had the first idea, which was linked to the city of Weimar in Germany, being culture capital of Europe in 1999, we expected to have a small forum of maybe eight or twelve young people who would come and make music together and spend a week or ten days at a workshop with us, so you can imagine the surprise we had when there were over two hundred applicants from the Arab world alone. And this is how this orchestra was formed. Edward and I met by chance in London in 1993, in a hotel lobby. I had gone to London to give a concert, and ironically he was there to give the 1993 Reith Lectures, which explored the changing role of the intellectual in today's world. Now, thirteen years later, I have brought the Reith Lectures here to the Middle East.
We took the name of our project, the West Eastern Divan, from a poem by Goethe, who was one of the first Germans to be genuinely interested in other cultures. He originally discovered Islam when a German soldier who had been fighting in one of the Spanish campaigns brought back a page of the Koran to show to him. His enthusiasm was so great that he started to learn Arabic at the age of sixty. Later he discovered the great Persian poet Hafiz, and that was the inspiration for his set of poems that deal with the idea of the other, the West Eastern Divan, which was first published nearly two hundred years ago, in 1819, at the same time, interestingly enough, that Beethoven was working on his ninth symphony, his celebrated testament to fraternity.
Goethe's poem then became a symbol for the idea behind our experiments in bringing Arab and Israeli musicians together. This orchestra consists of Arab musicians from Palestine, from the territories, and Palestinians from Israel, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and Egyptians, and of course Israeli musicians. Now, when you play music, whether you play chamber music or you play in an orchestra, you have to do two very important things and do them simultaneously. You have to be able to express yourself, otherwise you are not contributing to the musical experience, but at the same time it is imperative that you listen to the other. You have to understand what the other is doing. And the other may be doing the same as you, if he is sitting next to you if you're a string player, or he may play a different instrument and be in counterpoint to what you are doing. But in all cases it is impossible to play intelligently in an orchestra concentrating only on one of those two things. If you concentrate only on what you do, you might play very well but might play so loud that you cover the others, or so soft that you are not heard. And of course you cannot play only by listening, but the art of playing music is the art of simultaneous playing and listening. In other words, one enhances the other. And this is the main reason we started this workshop. Edward once said, separation between people is not a solution for any of the problems that divide people, and certainly ignorance of the other provides no help whatever. In this workshop we were trying to start a dialogue, to take a single step forward, and to find common ground. And we saw what happened when an Arab musician shared a music stand with an Israeli musician - both trying to play the same note with the same dynamic, with the same stroke of the bow if they were string players, with the same sound, with the same expression. They were trying to do something together about which they were both passionate, because after all you cannot be an indifferent musician. Music demands permanently, at all times, passion and effort. The idea in a sense was as simple as that, because once you have agreed on how to play one note together you can no longer look at each other the same way again. That was our starting point, and from the beginning Edward and I were filled with optimism, despite the darkening sky, as he called it, with what has turned out sadly to be all too accurate foresight.
In the West Eastern Divan the universal metaphysical language of music becomes the link, it is the language of the continuous dialogue that these young people have with each other. Music is the common framework, their abstract language of harmony. As I have said before in these lectures, nothing in music is independent. It requires a perfect balance between head, heart and stomach. And I would argue that when emotion and intellect are in tune, it is easier also for human beings and for nations to look outward as well as inward. And therefore through music we can see an alternative social model, a kind of practical Utopia, from which we might learn about expressing ourselves freely and hearing one another.
This, and many other things, you can really learn from playing music, so long as you don't view music only as a pastime, no matter how enjoyable, or as something to forget the world, but something from which you can actually understand the way the world can, should and sometimes does function. In any case, from the beginning it was our belief, Edward's and mine, that the destinies of our two people, the Palestinian people and the Israeli people, are inextricably linked, and therefore the welfare, the sense of justice and the happiness of one has to eventually, inevitably be that of the other, which is certainly not the case today.
Of course the West Eastern Divan orchestra is not going to bring about peace. What it can do however is to bring understanding. It can awaken the curiosity, and then perhaps the courage, to listen to the narrative of the other, and at the very least accept its legitimacy. This, if you want, is the main idea behind this project. And people very often ask me, but this is a wonderful example of tolerance, and I say no I don't like the word 'tolerance', because to tolerate something or somebody means you tolerate them for negative reasons. You tolerate somebody in spite of the fact that he or she is ugly, you tolerate somebody er in spite of the fact that he or she is stupid. And therefore tolerance is used, and I would say misused in today's world, and in the press very often, is a very misleading word. The French Revolution gave us three much more important and powerful ideas, or concepts - liberty, equality and fraternity. But these ideas of the French Revolution are not only right in themselves, but they are so because they come in the proper order. You cannot have equality without liberty, and you certainly cannot have fraternity without equality. The importance of this I learnt from music, because music evolves in time, and therefore the order inevitably determines the content. And I have never had to ask myself the question, can't we have equality before liberty. And this underlines if you want a central problem of our conflict here in the Middle East. When young musicians from the opposite camp, as it were, come together, they have the liberty. They have the liberty or choice whether to come or not to play music together. They also however have something just as important, and that is automatically they have equality, because music gives everyone the same possibilities regardless of race, sex, religion, or where they came from. In front of a Beethoven symphony we are all equal. And although the fraternity does not have to be there, it is at least a possibility, whereas now in real life it is not.
I know, or rather I feel - no, I feel I suspect and I know - that some of you might think the idea of Palestinians and other Arabs and Israelis playing together is unacceptable. I know that this is unacceptable for many of my friends in Ramallah for instance. And I understand it, because it is seen as a form of normalisation - and by that I mean an acceptance of the status quo. And this is unacceptable to them, because the real problems of actual existence have not been solved. And when we played in Ramallah last August there were people who said, how can we look at Israelis, Palestinians and other Arabs playing together when the Israeli tanks are here, and when we have the situation that we have now. But, as Edward Said said - I quote - 'My friend Daniel Barenboim and I have chosen this course for humanistic rather than political reasons, on the assumption that ignorance is not a strategy for sustainable survival'. When Palestinians and other Arabs meet Israelis in music, the primary quality that is missing in the political life, namely the equality, is already a given. Therefore this may be precisely the starting point for them to show each other that what they have in music, the equality and the ability to converse with each other on equal footings, will lead them to look for ways to find that outside of music. Music in this case is not an expression of what life is, but an expression of what life could be, or what it could become. Music itself should not be used for political or any other purpose. But although you cannot make music through politics, perhaps you can give political thinking an example through music. As the great conductor Sergei Celibidache said, music does not become something, but something may become music. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Daniel Barenboim, thank you very much indeed. So music is a great equaliser but only if the players are willing to listen to each other. Here in the Middle East, where the Israeli Palestinian conflict is as tense as ever, is it possible that this metaphor of music can describe a way forward? Let me remind listeners that our audience this evening is a predominantly Arab one. We're in a part of Jerusalem inhabited mainly by Palestinians. Next week in another part of the city we'll have a predominantly Jewish Israeli audience. So, to our questions, and the first is from Razan Kaloti who works for the Office of the British Council, which is responsible for the Palestinian territories. Razan, your question please.
RAZAN KALOTI:
Er as a Palestinian, and having to live under extremely harsh living conditions and daily humiliation, my question would be how would music really help?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well, maybe you should go to Ramallah the day after tomorrow. In Ramallah the day after tomorrow, in the Palace of Culture, there is a concert by an all Palestinian orchestra, half, or more or less half, from Ramallah, and the other half from Nazareth. Now since you are Palestinian and you live in the area, you know that what I have said is practically an impossibility. How do you get twenty or twenty-five youngsters from Nazareth to go through the checkpoints and to get the permissions and to go to Ramallah to join other children who have the same passions and the same will to play together? This is not going to solve the problems, it's not going to solve the inner Palestinian problems, but it can do several other things.
First of all, I think it should be a day of great joys and pride to all Palestinians, to see forty or forty-five youngsters, as I said from Ramallah and from Nazareth, walking on stage to produce something which is not even something that one associates with Palestinian culture. Classical Western music is not exactly the quality that first comes to mind. And yet you have children, and very young people, most of them under sixteen, some of them ten and eleven, who have through their passion and the curiosity, found something that will give them a sense of pride, as I said, of dignity, all those things which Palestinians so rightly complain the lack of in their society.
SUE LAWLEY:
But I wantŠ I mean are you in any way convinced by that? You sounded sceptical when you began. You're saying that the realities of everyday life make it quite difficult.
RAZAN KALOTI:
It's much different thanŠ And it's, as they say, it's easier said thanŠ
SUE LAWLEY:
Than done.
RAZAN KALOTI:
Than ŠŠŠŠ
SUE LAWLEY:
Easier said than done.
RAZAN KALOTI:
The salaries are not paid, er extremely hard living conditions, er even having to go to Ramallah to do some work we have to cross checkpoints, the humiliation, er so it's not that easy.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No I know, I never claimed it was easy and I didn't claim that it is a substitute for the other. I'm just saying that we have to find ways that each and every human being in life has achieved something that he doesn't want to lose.
SUE LAWLEY:
Is thisŠ On this subject of, of, of music being the equaliser is very difficult when you're confronted with the harsh reality of everyday life in the occupied territories.
GEORGE SAHAR: My name is George Sahar, I am er from Care International. What I hear Mr Barenboim saying is that it doesn't necessarily have to be that er the guns have to be silent so that we can hear the music, and I feel that this is um, it's interesting but it's an added challenge for us as Palestinians, because we still are in a state where we have to prove our humanity to the world, and music is supposed to be an equaliser, so I'd really like to hear your perspective about it. Can we hear the music when the guns are still so loud? Thank you very much.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well I think, you know you are perfectly right. There is an area where the music and the reality does not always go hand in hand, and I don't believe that music is an equaliser. Music is nothing except itself. What you can do is find the equality in the music. It will not silence the guns, and it will not do any of those things.
SUE LAWLEY:
But theŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Now let me tell you something else in a very conŠ Sorry. In a very constructive and positive way. I wish many Israelis could go to Ramallah on Saturday to hear this all Palestinian orchestra. Believe me, the Jewish people have played a major role in classical music over the last two or three hundred years. Some of the best musicians all over the world were that. And with what respect they would suddenly look at these Palestinians who are able to play this music in a way that is not only as good as some of the Israeli children, in some cases maybe even better. When I was a child, I came to Vienna from Argentina - I was ten years old, it was in 1952 - and Vienna was occupied by the four powers - the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France. And the Americans brought Coca Cola, and the whole of Vienna went on a Coca Cola feast. They had never seen anything like that. And a week or ten days later the Vienna Philharmonic played a concert with the great Soviet violinist David Oistrakh, and believe me that day the Soviets conquered a place in the hearts of all the Viennese - and not just the musicians - because of that. And I am sure you are such a talented people - and I am not saying this to flatter you, I know this, for many years I have been working with a lot of your people - you have such a fantastic strength, and force of talent that everything has to be done to allow all Palestinians to develop and express themselves in that. This is why I am involved in all this.
SUE LAWLEY:
I'm going to take one more point on this and then I'm going to move on.
SHIRLEY BENJAMIN:
My name is Shirley Benjamin, and I'm a Jewish Israeli, and from my point of view the terrible problem is to get the Israeli Jews to open their eyes to what's going on. I am on the internet every day and I have friends and I know what's going on. Can you not bring this orchestra to Israel, to the Jewish part of the country, to let Jews see whatŠ that they're not everything that we see on the television.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well Edward Said and I started this orchestra, and we saw what it can do and how it travelled. We realised that the full dimension of the project will only happen when this orchestra is allowed to play in all the countries that are represented in it - Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, etc. We are not there yet. We made the conscious decision to go to Ramallah last year because we thought this is the most obvious and clear humanistic attitude. It was not a politicalŠ Had we tried to go to Damascus, or to Tel Aviv, this would have been a very very clear political thing, which we didn't really want to do that. But I am sure that the day will come when we will play both in Tel Aviv and in Damascus. We are not quite there, but we will get there.
SUE LAWLEY:
And can you come to a question here on the front row now, from Tova Lesarov, who describes herself as an American Israeli - that's right isn't it? - and she's a journalist with the Jerusalem Post.
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
I had a couple of questions actually.
SUE LAWLEY:
No no no, give us one question.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
She is bossy with me too - don't worry!
(LAUGHTER)
Not personally.
SUE LAWLEY:
No you can't, you can't ask a couple. Ask a question, and if it's good and if the answer rolls then we'll let you ask another one butŠ
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
OkayŠ
SUE LAWLEY:
Šdon't push your luck.
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
I, I'll, I'll start with this one then. Um can you think of a specific example where music in this area has actually changed the political process?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No, because neither the political leadership of Israel or from I know the Palestinian is musical enough.
(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Go on, you can ask another one then.
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
Well, wellŠ
(LAUGHTER)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No, ask the other question - maybe it's better!
(LAUGHTER)
TOVAH LAZAROFF:
I, I'm going to continue that. I, I mean is it people that you're trying to change here or the politicians?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
You think politicians are not people?
(LAUGHTER)
Sorry! You know, I am not trying to change anyone, I am trying to work in an area which to me personally is very important, and that is the understanding of the narrative of the other. And I think that we can do that in our small Utopian republic, which has existed since 1999, where everybody's life has been to some extent changed by these experiences. This is what gives music making a quality that is lacking in so much of the music making today in the whole world, and that is its existential quality. We have now wonderful specialists on the violin, on the oboe, on the piano, whatever they are, really specialised workers that can do all sorts of acrobatics and things on their instrument. But this is not what we are talking about. We are talking of the expression in music as being something existential, which is more than pain or pleasure - it is pain and pleasure. And this is what this orchestra does.
SUE LAWLEY:
But I think that is the point, I think that is what people feel sometimes, Daniel, about this, that you are - and one understands why you're insistent that it's not any kind of a political thing that you have set up here with the West Eastern Divan, but nevertheless if you are setting up a Utopia that you hope is some kind of metaphor for how life could be led, how there could be some kind of equalisation and some kind of harmony, you cannot say it is not political, whether you like the ŠŠŠŠŠ idea or not.
DANIEL BARENBOIM: (OVERLAP) But then you have to reallyŠ I am sorry but then you have to really define very clearly and very specifically what is political. Is political tactic or is political strategy? If political is strategy, then I take what you say about our project as a compliment. If you think political is tactical, then I will continue saying it is not that.
DR MAMDOUH AKER:
My name is er Mamdo Hakar, I am a physician, a Palestinian physician and surgeon. I'm very glad Daniel that you mentioned Mahmoud Dalwish in your er lecture. Just last week Mahmoud Dalwish and I were talking about the harsh reality we are facing as Palestinians. Maybe I need just to mention to you that to be here, it took me honestly two hours to get from Ramallah to here, in spite of ha, having all the necessary credentials, but what actually, what Dalwish was saying is that now am I, within all this er reality, focusing on culture is our chance to keep floating - this is exactly what he said - to keep floating in this world. Can music go to the open air and be a cry for justice and freedom, liberty, equality and fraternity as you mention? Why not to perform in the open air in front of the wall, not to make a political statement but at least to show the ugliness of the situation - can this happen?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Why not? Please, I, I mean I rather wish there were no wall and this would not be necessary, but since the wall is here, why not?
DR MAMDOUH AKER:
That's true.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
But you have noticed I am sure that I have refrained from voicing too much criticism if you want er of the Israeli side today here, and if I have done so it is only because it would be very easy success for me here. I'd rather do that in Israel proper. I have never spoken a critical word about Israel in Ramallah, and I have no intention of doing it here today - not because I have nothing to criticise, I have been very vocal about this on many occasions all over the world. But allow me just only one sentence. One of the most important things in my view is it is imperative that a situation is brought about where the legitimacy of the Palestinian narration is accepted by Israel, its politicians and all its citizens. This has to be the first step. Until that moment has come, nothing will be real. And this is exceptionally important.
SUE LAWLEY:
Um I'm going to call in Ari Shavit, who's an Israeli and a senior columnist on Haaretz, um a leading national newspaper here.
ARI SHAVIT:
Mr Barenboim, I think that it, for me it's obvious that your project, the project you launched with Professor Saeed, is a benign project. I don't see any way one can contest the idea of an orchestra of the others learning to play together and to be in dialogue one with another. But what I would like to question is the metaphor there. You have come with the BBC team to the land of tragedy, the tragedy being that there are two people here who have lost their own music. Don't you think that in order to move forward, in order to have a civilised peaceful life here, each people needs a time with his own music? Don't you think that if you try to put two peoples into one position where they are challenged with the music of the other in an intimate situation, that endangers the very project that you want to advance?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I think it's a very er um legitimate question, although based, if I may say so, on an erroneous understanding of the problem. Er it, this is not Israeli music versus Arab music, we're not talking here about Jewish music, we're not talking about Kletzmer music against the music of Beirut. Beethoven was German, yes, but he was much more than that, he was everything. This is something that we all draw from. It is not the privilege of the Israelis to say we are classical musicians, and therefore they are not forcing the Palestinians to accept something of their own.
ARI SHAVIT:
No I, I, I want to emphasise that the project itselfŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Yes.
ARI SHAVIT:
ŠI find inspiring in every way. I just think that we all should think about whether we want to take the metaphor seriously and to translate it to a political goal, or where do we reach the more realistic idea which says that each people need some time with itself, to assert its own identity. And I think you've heard it in the questions here, among the Palestinians, many of the Palestinians who somewhat feel threatened by what they see as a cultural invasion of Israelis into their own terrain, which I think very much IŠ
DANIEL BARENBOIM: (OVERLAP) I'm sorry, I am sorry to disagree with you. I haven't felt that at all. I have felt some questioning and criticism of many other things, but I haven't felt that at all. And I think that anything that makes every single Israeli have to think for a moment that there is a legitimacy in the point of view of the other, even if they are uncomfortable for the Israelis, and I have never shied away from that, and I don't er really believe in that. And if anybody has the fear that er this is another form of Israeli invasion if you want, I can only tell you that this is a total misunderstanding of the nature of music and where it comes from.
SUE LAWLEY:
I'm going to call finally um Rudyar Shihada, who's a human rights lawyer and writer, based in Ramallah, which is where he was born. He was called to the Bar in London and then returned to um private practice in Ramallah and has been there ever since.
RAJA SHEHADEH:
I am very concerned about the destruction of the landscape, which I find to be a diverse ..?.. The rolling hills of the West Bank and the deep valleys are light music captured in stone. Er the beauty and the lives of the Palestinians who inherit them are being destroyed by the discordant wall, which is so out of sync with the nature of the land. My question is, can music made by people from the different sides of the wall restore the harmony before it is lost forever?
SUE LAWLEY:
We come back to the same point again every time Daniel.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Rudyar, you're making it very difficult for me. You make it very difficult for me. I still believe that anything that people can share together, whether it is through music or through ideas or through friendship or whatever it is, cannot be negative. It cannot do damage. And what I wish, I wish for a much greater percentage of er Israelis to really concentrate and understand this part of Palestinian history. That's what I said earlier, that until Israelis accept the legitimacy of the Palestinian narration, nothing will move, not only in the way that you Palestinians want but in a way that is humanly just.
SUE LAWLEY:
Pick up pleaseŠ
RAJA SHEHADEH:
Er I, I absolutely believe that this is true. I have heard the Divan orchestra on several occasions, and what struck me is not only that it's possible to have people form both sides play together but the fact that when they play together they can create something which is more beautiful than what either alone can produce.
DANIEL BARENBOIM: (OVERLAP) They inhabit each other.
RAJA SHEHADEH:
Yeah. And, and I think that's a very important message, because I think the Israeli experience and, and ideology is that we must have Jews only in Israel, so the, there were always Jews living in Arab countries, and, and now they don't, and that this is a better situation that Arabs live on one side, the Jews live on another side. And the possibility of hybridity is lost, and I think the Divan is showing that if it is restored it will be better for everybody.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Thank you.
SUE LAWLEY:
Music to your ears, as they say. That's it, thank you very much. Next week Daniel Barenboim ends his series with a lecture about the difference between power and strength. Music, like politicians, can have both. The art is knowing how to combine them. That's Barenboim in Jerusalem on music and political leadership at the same time next week. For now, our thanks to Daniel Barenboim, and goodbye.
Music has shown Barenboim that there is a fundamental difference between power and strength which could map a new journey for our politics.
Lecture 5: The Power of Music
SUE LAWLEY:
Hello and welcome. Over the past five weeks we've been to London, Chicago, Berlin, and now Jerusalem, in the company of our lecturer Daniel Barenboim. All these places are central to both his music making and his philosophy that music has the power to transform and improve the world. Last week before a mainly Palestinian audience he described music as a great equaliser. An orchestra can't bring peace, he said, but it can bring the understanding, patience and courage for people to listen to one another. Today we're in the Jerusalem International YMCA, but this is no ordinary YMCA. It was designed in fact by the architect of the Empire State Building, and described by Field Marshall Lord Allenby, when he opened it in 1933, as a place where - and I quote - 'jarring sectarians may cease from wrangling and men's minds be drawn to loftier ideals'. A noble note then on which to introduce our last lecture. Please welcome the man who argues that music should be seen as a metaphor for life, capable of demonstrating the great qualities of leadership. Ladies and gentlemen, Daniel Barenboim.
(APPLAUSE)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Thank you very much. Today I would like to concentrate on the fact that music has a power beyond mere words. It has the power to move us, and it has the sheer physical power of sound, as we know. Throughout this series of Reith lectures I have been focused on the content of music and its relationship to life. Here, today in this final lecture, I would like to explore the power that music has over us, the power of the association that music evokes - that is to say I would like to distinguish between the substance of music, and our perceptions of it, and ultimately to consider the difference between power and strength in music, and in life.
It is essential to understand that music is conceived of, and eventually delivered, from the point of view of one individual. As a result subjectivity is an integral and necessary part of music. And therefore the permanent relationship between subjectivity and objectivity is an essential aspect of music making, as it is of life. Even the freedom of speed in music, what is called tempo rubato, which is nothing else but Italian for stolen time. Tempo rubato can not be willfully conceived, but must inevitably have at the very least a contact with the objective sense of time, i.e. not stolen. And here again we are confronted with what I like to see as the moral responsibility of the ear. After all, it is the ear that determines audibility and transparency in music. It is the ear that must guide us in tempo rubato to have the moral strength to give back what was inadvertently stolen. In other words, when taking time in parts of a phrase, we must find the right place to give it back. This is not unlike the moral responsibility to give back what has been stolen. I will give you a very simple, or I should almost say simplistic example. In the first movement of the Tchaikovsky piano concerto, which I am sure you have heard many times, there is a very beautiful and interesting second subject.
(PLAYS FEW BARS OF PIANO CONCERTO)
etc. Now, if played totally without any sense of freedom, you get only the sense of regularity.
(PLAYS SAME FEW BARS DIFFERENTLY)
Now quite apart from the question of style of how much freedom there can be, it is I think quite evident that it needs a certain amount of freedom where the melody and the harmony create a specific kind of tension which needs more time for the ear to perceive and understand, and therefore then has to find a way to give it back.
(PLAYS SAME FEW BARS)
And now...
(CONTINUES)
I have to take the time there, but then I have to give it back...
(CONTINUES)
If I wouldn't do that, this is what it would sound like.
(PLAYS SAME FEW BARS AGAIN)
I have nowhere to go. There is a certain logic in the speed that goes in there. Because music only expresses itself through sound, and takes place in a given time. It is by its very nature ephemeral. What is difficult in real life is something that is essential in music, that is to be able to start from scratch each time we play something, because what we did yesterday, and what we did this morning, is gone, and we must start over as if the for the first time but with the knowledge of the last time. It is very difficult for the human being to truly have the courage and the ability to start from scratch, to start from zero, to take experience from the past and yet think it anew. And yet this is essential, in music as well as in life. Music allows us certain emotions or combination of emotions that are practically impossible in life without sound - that is in life without a musical dimension. We know at least since Spinoza that joy and its variant lead to a greater functional perfection, and that sorrow and related effects are unhealthy and should therefore be avoided. But music allows us to feel pain and pleasure simultaneously, both as players, and as listeners.
It is crucial to distinguish between the nature of music on the one hand, and the associations that it evokes on the other. Consider how Beethoven was misused and abused in German politics, by Bismarck, by Hitler, and by the East German Republic. The irony of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony being played in the Nazi era - 'Alle Menschen werden Bruder' - 'All men will be become brothers' - all that is except a few. In other words the concept of fraternity is being defined in advance in the sense that you can keep some people out of it. We are talking here about a critical distinction. We are back at my earlier question about the knife - a question that I raised in one of the earlier lectures. Is the knife an instrument with which we can commit murder, therefore a violent instrument, or is it one with which we can feed the other? The knife in itself is not moral, it is the human being who has the capacity to make it moral or immoral, and it is the human being who has the responsibility of creating the associations. And therefore the problem with playing Beethoven's music in Nazi times, or even with playing Wagner's music here in Israel, is not the music in itself, but the association that it evokes in people. This I am afraid is linked to political correctness, and is tied to ideological thinking. When you play a piece of music you must find the content, and you can only do that from the point of view of one individual. And no matter how wide and objective that individual tries to be, there is inevitably an element of such activity in it. The use and abuse of Wagner's ideas and music was an integral part of the last years of the Third Reich - in fact of the whole Third Reich - and it is not only understandable, but self-evident, that somebody who suffers from this kind of association is not only unwilling but unable to hear this music. And there is no reason in the world to force him or her to do so.
It is not my intention - it never was, and it never will be - to force this music or any music on anybody, and I certainly do not question the horrible associations that holocaust survivors have with specific pieces of Wagner. I can only hope that time will eventually help to liberate these human beings from previous negative associations, ultimately to hear the music for what it truly is. It is not my place to tell those who suffered from terrible associations what to do about Wagner, but I believe it is my place to tell those who can and want to listen to Wagner, that the music itself is not the agent of the suffering. In the meantime however, I do believe that it is equally important not to force negative associations on those who fortunately who do not suffer from them. Therefore, in the democratic society, the decision whether it is permissible to hear Wagner or not must be individual and not imposed by law or even worse, the result of a taboo. True democracy can only exist without taboos.
Obviously it is imperative to differentiate between substance and perception. The problem with association is that one is the victim of the perception, and not of the substance. It is critical that we are not just slaves to the associations created by listening to a piece of music, but that we understand its substance, in the same way that a leader has to understand the substance of what his people are telling him. I went into great detail, and I'm afraid I cannot do it again today, er into the fact that one can only articulate the content of music with sound and not with words, but the fact that one cannot articulate it with words of course does not mean that it doesn't have a content. And although music means many things to many different people, and very often means many different things to the same person at different times - poetical, mathematical, sensual, philosophical - it is only expressed through sound and therefore it can be said without a question of a doubt that it has something to do with the human being, that it has something to do with the human condition. And this is the humanity of music.
I had the great privilege of attending several lectures given here in Jerusalem by Martin Buber(?), many years ago. It was Buber who made me realise the necessity of always looking beyond one's first impression, of digging deeper and finding connections. As he wrote in I and Thou, and I quote, 'There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, specious(?) and instance, law and number included, and inseparably fused.' As human beings we often tend to want to manipulate the element of time. When we are in a pleasurable situation we would like it to go on forever, and when we are in a painful situation we wish we could shorten it, in both cases because we either want change from a painful situation, or we want to keep change from interfering with pleasure. But music shows us the inevitable flaw of life, which depends on change, the fluidity of life. The Zionist idea was a Jewish European idea, but even Zionism cannot go against the very nature of life, which brings constant change with it. Change for me in this case means the development of the idea in the geographical and cultural context that we live amongst our neighbours, that Israel does not remain a foreign body, European inspired, in the Middle East, but becomes an integral part of the Middle East. Therefore it is essential to integrate Arab musical culture into an existing rich but dwindling Western musical life in Israel. For this reason I will donate the entire sum of the prize that I will receive from the Korn-Gerstenmann Foundation at the Jewish Community Centre in Frankfurt on the 7th May, for the studying and research of classical Arab music in Jerusalem, precisely because the Zionist idea was a Jewish European idea but the State of Israel is not in Europe, it is in the Middle East. And therefore if Israel wants to have a permanent place it must become part of the Middle East, and it must be aware of the culture that already existed here, and not pretend, as has been done for a long time now, that it was a desert and an uncultured one at that. For the future of Israel it is necessary for Israelis to open their ears to the Arab culture. this is not an issue of Israel denying its European roots but instead a question of enriching and enhancing its European heritage by placing it side by side with its Middle Eastern heritage. Otherwise the State of Israel will remain forever a foreign body, and as such there is no possible perspective of future for its remaining here, because a foreign body can exist in a society, or in music, or in a human being, only for a limited amount of time.
Transition, let us not forget, is the basis of human existence. In music it is not enough simply to play a statement of a phrase, it is absolutely essential to see how we arrived there, and to prepare it. One plays a statement one way at the beginning of a piece, but when the same statement returns later, in what we call in musical terminology the recapitulation, it is in a completely different psychological state of mind. And therefore the bridge, the transition, determines not only itself but what comes after it. It is important to recognise that the present does not exist without the past, and that the present would be different with another past. At the same time, what we do in the present is inevitably the prelude to what the future will be. And the future is determined not by something that we passively wait for, but it is the inevitable outcome that we prepare for from the present moment.
Therefore in my view the future of the State of Israel must develop and find the golden mean that will lead to harmonious internal and external relations, just as in a piece of music its harmony can be achieved even if it is made up of conflicting elements, albeit of the strongest and most radical nature, as long as each element can develop itself to its fullest. The genuine and original idea of the renewal of Jewish settlement in Palestine has been totally overwhelmed and diverted by forces that believe that power and not what Buber called the command of the spirit, that power rules the social and political destiny of humanity. This celebration of power has led to an insensitivity and misunderstanding of the fact that the command of the spirit can mean in this case nothing else but a true realisation that this is a land for two people, with opposing narratives, but of necessity equal rights. To quote Martin Buber again: 'There can be no peace between Jews and Arabs that is only a cessation of war. There can only be a peace of genuine co-operation.' End of quotation. Therefore peace requires dialogue, a dialogue which consists of sensitive talking and often painful listening.
(BRIEF APPLAUSE)
It is essential in this regard to understand the difference between strength and power. Power itself has only one kind of strength, which is that of control. But even the great power of sound, in Beethoven, Brahms or Wagner, does not have to create the association of power that works exclusively through control, but instead through actual real strength, the accumulative strength that comes from the build-up of tension. Even the most powerful chord has to allow the inner voices to be heard, otherwise it has no tension, only brutal aggressive power. You must hear the opposition, the notes that oppose the main idea. In other words, the concept of transparency is essential in music, because if it is not orally transparent you cannot actually get the totality of the music, you only get one line of it. In Mozart for example, very often in the operas you have perfectly harmonised ensemble, and yet every single voice is saying something completely different, and all this at the same time. But you still have a definite sense of organisation, you have main voices and you have subsidiary voices - music would be totally uninteresting without this. Even at the moment when all the elements are unified, when everything comes together in a single chord, you still hear all the different voices.
Let us consider for a moment the example of playing in an orchestra. When very powerful instruments, the so-called musical heavyweights - trumpet and trombone - play in a chord where the whole orchestra is playing they have to play in such a way that they give a full sense of power, but that they allow the other instruments, who are less powerful, to be heard at the same time. Otherwise they cover them up, and then the sound has no strength, only power. See the difference? Therefore when you play in an orchestra everybody is constantly aware of everybody else.
In my view this is a model for society. Leadership throughout history, and it is probably inherent in the human nature, has been based on the effect it can produce because of the weakness of the people, not because of their strength. How wonderful the world would be if it were ruled by people who understood this lesson from music, and understood the importance of combining transparency, power and strength. But if music is so human, if music is so all inclusive and so positive, we have to ask ourselves how is it possible that monsters such as Adolf Hitler and others had such love for music? How do we explain that? How to explain the fact that Hitler was able to send millions of people to the gas chamber and would be moved to tears listening to music? How? How was Wagner able to write music of such nobility and also write his monstrous anti-Semitic pamphlet? I believe people don't think about music, they just let it wash over them, and operate on them in an almost animal way. Music to me is sound with thought, and as Spinoza believed that rationality was the saving grace of the human being, then we must learn to look at music like this too.
This is why music in the end is so powerful, because it speaks to all parts of the human being, all sides - the animal, the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual. How often in life we think that personal, social and political issues are independent, without influencing each other. From music we see that this cannot occur, it is an objective impossibility, because in music there are no independent elements. Logical thought and intuitive emotions are permanently united. Music teaches us that everything is connected.
Throughout these lectures I have been attempting to draw parallels between the inexpressible content of music and the inexpressible content of life. We have talked about the phenomenon of sound, about the distinction between hearing and listening, about the need for having a point of view, both in music and in life, and we have spoken about how music can bring people together, how music itself can be a great connector. As I conclude these lectures here in Jerusalem today, we have come full circle. This too, ladies and gentlemen, I learned from music, because when you perform a piece of music you have to be able to hear the last note before you play the first. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE and CHEERS)
SUE LAWLEY:
Daniel Barenboim, thank you very much indeed. Um let me remind our listeners that we are in Jerusalem, and our audience is made up of, largely of Jewish Israelis - the mirror image of last week's mainly Palestinian audience in another part of this city. We have several people er ready with questions here on the front row, and I want to invite comments from the rest of the audience here as we go on. But let's begin with a question from Rita Janssen, who is Belgian. She's an economist who's lived and worked in both Jerusalem and Ramallah for some years now. Mrs Yansen, your question please?
RITA JANSEN:
Thank you. I always had a keen interest in the Middle East. My focus was Israel, and I had a great admiration for its achievement in creating a state. This admiration was founded by association on my deep feeling for the Jewish people and their achievements in the arts, in science, in education, and most of all the humanistic and philosophical values which are at the basis of Jewish society. For the past three years I have been living and working in Palestine, where I witness on a daily basis blatant injustice, and the dehumanisation and despair of the Palestinian people, for whom I feel the highest respect, for whom they are and what they are fighting for. And I sadly have to admit that my love affair with Israel has gone sour. Mr Barenboim, can you identify with my experience? And have you gone through a similar process of re-thinking over the past years?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I had, if you want, the good fortune to come to this country as a little boy, when to me it was a completely different country. I think that we have to divide the history of modern Israel into two periods - from 1948 to 1967, and everything that's happened from 1967 until today. I will not go in this particular case into the problems of dispossession - this is a subject for another discussion - but the transition from being a minority for so many years to being a nation was done in my view in a very very positive way. This for nineteen years, and only nineteen years. Suddenly we found ourselves, after the war in 1967, in a situation that Israel was controlling another minority. I have more and more the feeling that after the war in 1967 this country went drunk, but the hangover is still felt today. Unless we are in a position that we can examine this, in my view there is no way that you will be able to recapture your love affair with this country, because your love affair with this country is precisely what draws you now to Ramallah. This is one of the reasons why I feel it is not my duty but it is my privilege to bring whatever I can to the Palestinian people.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
Let me call er Yisrel Medad (?) - he's Vice Chairman of Israel Media Watch, an organisation set up to provide a critical voice on radio and television reporting here. Mr Medad?
YISRAEL MEDAD:
Mr Barenboim, you have been described as a courageous idealist to believe that symphonic music can heal human conflict. And during a visit to Ramallah August 2003 you said of the Israel/Arab conflict that there is no military solution either morally or strategically. And just recently, even today, you said that there's a very major difference between power and strength, that if you attack a chord with more power than you are going to sustain it, it has no strength. But is it not possible that you are simply fiddling away - to misappropriate the metaphor - extending succour to a terrorist entity, now supported by a popular vote, while Israel's security is endangered by the sounds of Qassam rockets, this despite the withdrawal from Gaza, as well as the loud bangs of suicide bombers who continue to kill its citizens and tourists. Perhaps it is the Arabs now who are mistakenly using too much force.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Well, mm hm...
(APPLAUSE)
The whole idea of unilateral action is something completely foreign to me, because I know that unilateral action can only be short-term. And just remember, the war ended in 1967. A unilateral action in 1970, 71, 82, 83, 94, 96, 2001, 2002, may have had a certain element even of generosity to it, but now it is only being done by force. And I don't see what there is to congratulate ourselves for a pull back from a place where we should have never been. Sorry.
SUE LAWLEY:
But Daniel, just...
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
(DURING APPLAUSE)
The, the, the, the, sub...
YISRAEL MEDAD:
Mr Barenboim...
SUE LAWLEY:
Hang on, hang on...
YISRAEL MEDAD:
(OVERLAPPING APPLAUSE) In other words we will not merit to hear any condemnation of terror from you?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
But of course.
YISRAEL MEDAD:
Okay. Without any moral strings attached?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No.
YISRAEL MEDAD:
You oppose the use of terror...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Absolutely.
YISRAEL MEDAD:
...of... Thank you.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
And I'll tell you something else. As you know perfectly well, probably better than I, many Israeli politicians have said not only in private but in public that if they had been Palestinians they would also be terrorists and they would also be using violence. I don't think I would, I think the most useful way for Palestinians today would be to have non-violent resistance. That would give them...
(APPLAUSE)
That in my view would give them not only the admiration of the world, but in the long-term would achieve for them many better results.
SUE LAWLEY:
But it just seemed to me, and correct me if I'm misunderstanding you, that the substance of that question was a suggestion, putting it bluntly, Daniel, that you might just be making music in Ramallah with people who, or the relatives of people who may have it in mind to kill Israelis.
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
When I went to Ramallah with the West Eastern Divan, er last August, I felt, and it was clearly felt by everybody there, that we were coming with a message saying look how it works in music. If we were able to create conditions in life, conditions of equality and acceptance, we would get further. And this is what I say to all the Palestinians, friend and foes alike, who say to me we cannot listen as long as the Israelis tanks and er army here, and I say to then the same thing - I expect everybody to do as I have said earlier in the lecture, sensitive talking and painful listening, because the Israeli narrative is no less painful to the Palestinians as the Palestinian narrative might be to many people in Israel.
SUE LAWLEY:
Daniel we're coming towards the end and nobody's asked you so far about the Arab Study Centre that you announced you're setting up. You have Israelis and Palestinians who don't like the idea of it being set up, the Israelis because they don't want Arab culture in their midst here in Jerusalem and Palestinians because as one put it, er to me, and I wrote it down after you said...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
I've always worked on the assumption that if I am criticised with the same vehemence by both sides I must be right.
(LAUGHTER)
SUE LAWLEY:
You, you sound rather like the BBC! Um...
(LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
As this person put it, you know, a Palestinian - 'The Israelis have taken our land, occupied our territory, and now they want to hi-jack our culture'. That's the kind of thing you're up against, when it's a... you know your cultural gestures become seen as fiercely political. How does it make you feel? Does it make you want to turn away and say I give up?
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No. I believe that if the State of Israel is not to be just a short episode in the long Jewish history, then it must vehemently change its education and its way of looking at culture. Otherwise it will never be free from the criticism that this is a colonial power. It starts with the culture. And we have to stop relying always, politically, morally and culturally on the United States of America. I am sorry.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
(GOES TO SPEAK)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Wait I minute, I have to finish, no no no.
SUE LAWLEY:
Let me just give...
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Let me finish. I, I am not finished.
(LAUGHTER)
When, when Yasha Heifetz came here in 1953, he was asked by the taxi driver that took him to the concert hall, 'Mr Halfitz, what cadenza do you play in the Beethoven concerto?' You know, this was a European heritage that was alive here, and this is what made musical life here in the fifties and in the sixties so extraordinary. Why do we on the one hand not take into account our neighbours - very important culturally - and why do we stop the contact, both culturally and politically, with Europe that has given us so much? And why is it that automatically every single Israeli government does not want the Europeans to have anything to say in here, because they don't think that they will be pro-Israeli enough? I am sorry, I am not getting polemic, and this is the only polemic sentence I'm going to say. How long are we going to look for Jewish lobbies to defend our situation here? You know, the Jewish intelligence, for which we are so famous, should really help us do that, and look for a Middle East that is a strong, intelligent, secular force on this corner of the Mediterranean.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
I am on a promise to take one more very brief comment here.
MAN:
You get to say something of what's going on in Israel, which you don't disagree, but it certainly has a goal of er improving the situation, of changing it. And to compare it to music, isn't a matter of if something doesn't go well in a concert, isn't it a matter of the members of the orchestra or is it the conductor? Thank you.
(V.BRIEF APPLAUSE)
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
No. You know first of all, you cannot separate the leaders from the people. If we have in Israel the leaders we have here, this is the result of fifty years of half truths, straight out lies, and lots of actions which have nothing to do with the situation in general. And you cannot only criticise the leaders. You know, the same thing in the orchestra. I will give you the answer. You know, I mean of course many times I make mistakes, I make mistakes when I conduct. You know, you'll be surprised - when I make mistakes the musicians usually cover up for me. They are very nice, they are very good. And so I think we have to, we have to really ask ourselves, I didn't come here to criticise,
(SOMEONE STARTS SPEAKING)
I didn't come here to criticise the State of Israel.
(MAN STILL TRYING TO SPEAK)
Let me just finish. Please, I listened to you to the end. I didn't come here to criticise the State of Israel, I came here basically, as far as this part of the lecture is concerned, to ask a simple question. We see now for so many years, at least since 1967, that the situation does not get better. It is getting worse. The more the physical strength of the state, the less the moral strength. How come so few people ask themselves the real questions of how we got there? Thirty-nine years of occupation. I am sorry, when you are the occupier and the others are occupied and things are not right, you cannot really continue living more or less in the same ways. For your own survival you have to ask yourself the question, why, and what for? And I am sorry but this, I don't believe that we are asking ourselves these questions, at least not with enough vehemence. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)
SUE LAWLEY:
I'm sure there are more hands waving at us, but um I have to say thank you to our audience here in Jerusalem, indeed thank you to all of our audiences over the past five weeks, in London, Chicago and Berlin too. Daniel Barenboim set out in these lectures to draw on his lifetime of musical experience to demonstrate that music is a way of making sense of the world, and like his musical performances it's been an illuminating, a provocative and an entertaining journey. And like them, as he's often reminded us in his lectures along the way, it returns for now, but only for now I suspect, to silence. Daniel Barenboim, Reith lecturer 2006, thank you very much indeed, and goodbye from Jerusalem.
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