Said, Grainger and the Ethics of Polyphony

Following the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said began to publish articles and reviews on music. At first this appeared to be a leisurely digression from the demands of being a public intellectual with strong investments in the divisive debates about the relationship between knowledge and power, as well as being a prominent critic of Israel. As time passed and Said’s reputation grew, music, surprisingly, made its way from the periphery to the centre of his work. So much so that he used a musical term—’contrapuntal’—to describe the methodological basis for Culture and Imperialism (1993). In the last decade of his life Said introduced music into every aspect of his work, almost always as an idealistic aperture in his criticism. Indeed, his central reason for musicalising his critical practice was to give it a strong idealistic drive. He believed that some unique aesthetic quality he discerned in music, particularly contrapuntal music, could play a defining role in developing a criticism that would move beyond the ethical ambivalences he identified in discourse analysis and deconstruction. A ‘contrapuntal’ analysis that can map social relationships beyond the limits of discourse would become, for Said, the basis of a ‘worldly’ consciousness that could in turn produce an awareness of how one might become an interventionary agent of social change. In order to scrutinise Said’s musical criticism I will submit his notion of ‘contrapuntal’ reading itself to a kind of contrapuntal reading. Just as Said uses the concept of counterpoint in Culture and Imperialism to juxtapose works from different historical moments, I will compare his attempt to formulate a contrapuntal ethics with the twentieth-century Australian composer Percy Grainger’s earlier efforts to outline a ‘polyphonic’ ethics. In making this comparison I will show how a certain formal conception of the relationship between melody and form to which both Said and Grainger subscribe in developing a polyphonic/contrapuntal ethics leads them to opposed positions on colonialism and race. I will conclude by suggesting that at the same point that Grainger dubiously subsumes race into his polyphonic ethics, Said subsumes an unreflective aesthetics.