Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society - Softcover

Said, Edward

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401 ratings by Goodreads

9780747566847: Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747566844 ISBN 13: 9780747566847

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2003

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Israeli Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said have been close friends for years. "Parallels and Paradoxes" is a series of discussions between the two friends about music, politics, literature and society. Barenboim and Said talk about, among other subjects, the differences between writing prose and music; the compromising politician versus the uncompromising artist; Beethoven as the ultimate sonata composer; Wagner; great teachers; and the power of culture to transcend national differences.

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From the Inside Flap:

These free-wheeling, often exhilarating dialogues--which grew out of the acclaimed Carnegie Hall Talks--are an exchange between two of the most prominent figures in contemporary culture: Daniel Barenboim, internationally renowned conductor and pianist, and Edward W. Said, eminent literary critic and impassioned commentator on the Middle East. Barenboim is an Argentinian-Israeli and Said a Palestinian-American; they are also close friends.
As they range across music, literature, and society, they open up many fields of inquiry: the importance of a sense of place; music as a defiance of silence; the legacies of artists from Mozart and Beethoven to Dickens and Adorno; Wagner's anti-Semitism; and the need for "artistic solutions" to the predicament of the Middle East--something they both witnessed when they brought young Arab and Israeli musicians together. Erudite, intimate, thoughtful and spontaneous, Parallels and Paradoxes is a virtuosic collaboration.

From the Back Cover:

“Music is real only when it is carried by the flesh and blood of performance. Ideas stay pale when they lie flat on the printed page. Wherever we open this book, Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said seem to rise up before us, thoughtful and passionate, bringing a music to their theories and a living presence to their questions.”
—Peter Brook

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