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Elaboration, Counterpoint,
Transgression: Music and the Role
of the Aesthetic in the Criticism
of Edward W. Said
KATHERINE FRY

Abstract:
This article examines the role of the aesthetic in the criticism of Edward Said
through a reading of two lesser-explored texts, Musical Elaborations (1991) and
On Late Style (2006). It explores how, by drawing upon ideas from Gramsci
and Adorno, Said advocates a convergence of social and aesthetic approaches
to musical analysis and criticism. Although critical of some of the tensions
arising from Said’s varying perspectives on music and society, the article suggests
that we can nonetheless detect a distinctive ideology of the aesthetic in Said’s
writings on music. It argues that Said’s ideas on the temporal or narrative
structure of certain musical works or performances function, within his wider
thinking, as an aesthetic paradigm for undermining fixed identity and linear or
totalizing narratives. Thus Said’s reflections on music do not simply retreat from
social and political concerns, but rather elaborate a utopian thinking regarding
the interface between criticism and the aesthetic.

Keywords: Edward Said, musical aesthetics, Gramsci, Adorno, late style,

musical performance, humanism

1
Said’s most extended reflections on music, in Musical Elaborations1 and
On Late Style,2 present a particularly conflicting set of ideas on the
role of the aesthetic in society. In approaching the subject of the
interface between Western classical music and critical theory, Said
enters into a discourse that has been largely shaped by the philosophy
of Theodor Adorno, for whom music, particularly that of Beethoven
and Schoenberg, is central to his critique of modernity. In Said’s
writings on music, an ambivalent relationship with Adorno’s theory
of music history emerges, creating a tension with another theoretical
Paragraph 31:3 (2008) 265–280
DOI: 10.3366/E0264833408000278
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influence in Said’s music and literary criticism, that of Gramsci.
Through his critique of Adorno’s view of modern music as a purely
aesthetic entity, Said integrates music into a notion of the elaboration
of civil society. However, in the second and third essays of Musical
Elaborations, and in Said’s last and unfinished work On Late Style, the
project to integrate music into a social structure seems less central.
Thus within Said’s music criticism there is an implicit tension between
the criticism of art as part of a specific context or social structure and
the analysis of art as a more independent or aesthetic phenomenon.
This tension produces varying definitions and applications of Said’s
notions of ‘transgression’, ‘elaboration’ and ‘counterpoint’, suggesting
ambivalence and inconsistency with regard to the role of the aesthetic.
For instance, Said’s view of the transgressive capacity and defiant
autonomy of the late works of Richard Strauss seems conservative
in comparison to his earlier project to instigate a level of social
and political accountability to artworks. However, in the analysis of
Mozart’s Così fan tutte, in the reflections on temporality in Messiaen
and in certain discussions of the pianist Glenn Gould, Said formulates
a notion of the aesthetic as a model for a critical thinking that can itself
transgress theoretical categorization or closure. It is this relationship
between musical and critical notions of elaboration, counterpoint
and transgression that is of significance both in the interpretation
of Said’s views on music and, in a broader sense, in assessing the
place of music and the aesthetic within Said’s wider critical outlook.
After exploring some of the social and theoretical implications of the
relationship between Said’s musical and critical thinking, I suggest that
the significance of Said’s writings on music lies in their elucidation
of an aesthetic paradigm capable of, in a utopian sense, challenging
conventions concerning narrative, identity and structures of meaning.

2
Said’s Musical Elaborations discusses the relationship between music,
critical theory and society. As such, it necessarily confronts the work of
Theodor Adorno, whose analyses of music are central to his theory of
the role of the aesthetic in society. At the heart of Adorno’s philosophy
of music history is an interpretation of the middle and late-style works
of Beethoven. Adorno views Beethoven’s middle period treatment of
sonata form as immanently Hegelian: the subjective material (the com-
positional development of an initial musical idea) forms a dialectical
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totality with the objective structure (the inherited conventions
constituting ideas of sonata form). For Adorno, these middle period
works present a narrative of temporal progression that is synonymous
with ideals of the bourgeoisie at the time of the French Revolution.
Yet for Adorno, such ideals could never achieve realization in a
society that was becoming increasingly reified and fragmented. In
the philosophy of Adorno, the late works of Beethoven recognize
this tragic fact through the formal severing of musical subjectivity
from objective structures and conventions. Adorno writes of the late
quartets of Beethoven:
Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which — alone — it
glows into life. [Beethoven] does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As
a power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order perhaps to preserve
them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.3
Adorno looks back on this point in the history of music and
philosophy from the vantage of what he sees as the apocalyptic
climax of an already manifest path of increasing rationalization: Nazi
totalitarianism. It is within this context that Adorno understands the
dissonance, difficulty and rarefication of the twelve-tone music of
Schoenberg as the inevitable fate of authentic music to disengage
from any social mediation. Instead the authentic artwork, faced with
the apparatus of totalitarianism, turns in on itself, becoming a self-
referential aesthetic entity, ‘the concealed social essence quoted as the
phenomenon’.4
In the first essay of Musical Elaborations, ‘Performance as an Extreme
Occasion’, Said puts forth a critique of the determinism and limits
inherent in Adorno’s view that music since Beethoven must veer
into the aesthetic realm in order to retain any vestige of authentic
subjectivity. Said suggests that the occasion of musical performance
provides an instance of social mediation where the aesthetic and
cultural converge to form a contribution to society:
The fact is that music remains situated within the social context as a special
variety of aesthetic and cultural experience that contributes to what, following
Gramsci, we might call the elaboration or production of civil society. In Gramsci’s
usage elaboration equals maintenance, that is, the work done by members
of a society that keeps things going; certainly musical performance fits this
description (. . . ). The problematics of great musical performance, social as well
as technical, therefore provide us with a post-Adornonian occasion for analysis
and for reflecting on the role of classical music in contemporary Western society.
(ME, 15)
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Thus Said’s initial aim in Musical Elaborations is to integrate music
into a social and worldly context. This use of Gramsci’s notion of
the elaboration of civil society is reminiscent of a similar project
undertaken in a literary context in The World, the Text, and the Critic:
By elaboration Gramsci means two seemingly contradictory but actually
complementary things. First, to elaborate means to refine, to work out (e-laborare)
some prior or more powerful idea, to perpetuate a world-view. Second, to
elaborate means something more qualitatively positive, the proposition that culture
itself or thought or art is a highly complex and quasi-autonomous extension of
political reality and ( . . . ) has a density, complexity, and historical-semantic value
that is so strong as to make politics possible.5

It is the pianist Glenn Gould to whom Said turns in Musical

Elaborations and The World, the Text, and the Critic as an exemplar of
the possible worldly engagements between an aesthetic object and
society. Gould retired from the concert platform in the 1960’s and
devoted the rest of his life to making records, television broadcasts
and radio programmes, consisting of piano performances interspersed
with interviews and discussions. For Said, Gould’s performances allow
mediation between the musical work and a discursive dimension,
a convergence of music with speech, enabling performance to
‘engage or to affiliate with the world itself, without compromising the
essentially reinterpretive, reproductive quality of the process’ (ME, 29).
In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said is critical of Paul Ricoeur’s
perception of the text as a non-referential aesthetic object in a state
of suspension from the circumstantial reality of speech. By way of
challenging this demarcation, Said draws attention to a recording of
Gould playing and discussing the Liszt transcription of Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony so as ‘to provide an instance of a quasi-textual
object whose ways of engaging with the world are both numerous
and complicated, more complicated than Ricoeur’s demarcation
between text and speech. These are the engagements I have been
calling worldliness’.6 The use of Gould’s recording here could equally
function to illustrate Said’s attitude towards Adorno’s narrative of
the isolation of the aesthetic from society. In contrast to Adorno’s
linear philosophy of music history, Said’s use of the Gould recording
emphasizes an aesthetic of mediation within space, allowing for com-
plex and multiple engagements between an artwork and the world.
In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said writes of the need to
find a critical discourse that can overcome what he sees as a gap in
left literary and cultural studies, wherein there is ‘no allowance for
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the truth that all intellectual and cultural work occurs somewhere, at
some time, on some very precisely mapped out and permissible terrain,
which is contained by the state.’7 This sentiment is reiterated in Musical
Elaborations, in the statement that ‘the fact is that music remains situated
within the social context.’ (ME, 15) Yet Said also insists on the multi-
layered, complex and ‘quasi-autonomous’ nature of art, suggesting that
the extent to which art is accountable to a specific social space remains
ambiguous.

3
In the next chapter of Musical Elaborations, this ambiguity becomes
more explicit. Said is once again critical of Adorno’s narrative of the
descent of humanist optimism in Beethoven into the dissonance and
alienation in Schoenberg, for its ‘overlapping theory of history and
of music that relies on the occult, transgressive aspects of music to
interpret history and, conversely, the deterministic and “objective”
character of history to interpret music’ (ME, 49). For Said, the occult,
transgressive aspects of music allow it to engage in any number of social
mediations, thus resisting determinist and totalizing narratives:
In short, the transgressive element in music is its nomadic ability to attach itself
to, and become part of, social formations, to vary its articulations and rhetoric
depending on the occasion as well as the audience, plus the power and the gender
situations in which it takes place. (ME, 70)

However, in the conclusion to the second essay of Musical Elaborations,

Said seems to move away from the integration of music into a social or
referential context. According to Said, music can not only transgress
boundaries and limits as part of an overall structure of social mediation,
but certain music can achieve a radical transgression, to the point
where it discharges empirical social space altogether. Said argues that
we should be able to locate:
A relatively rare number of works making (or trying to make) their claims entirely
as music, free of many of the harassing, intrusive, and socially tyrannical pressures
that have limited musicians to their customary social role as upholders of things
as they are. I want to suggest that this handful of works expresses a very eccentric
kind of transgression, that is, music being reclaimed by uncommon, and perhaps
even excessive, displays of technique whose net effect is not only to render the
music socially superfluous and useless — to discharge it completely — but to
recuperate the craft entirely for the musician as an act freedom. (ME, 71)
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Quite a dramatic shift takes place here, from an emphasis on a
social and cultural context for music, to the abstract independence
of certain works. Said goes on to describe Bach’s Canonic Variations
as ‘an exercise in pure combinatorial virtuosity’, an instance of pure
technical mastery: ‘One will have to wait until Webern’s Variations to
get something so formidably, concentratedly articulated as this music,
but so far in excess is it of any occasion or need that it dangles pretty
much as pure musicality in a social space off the edge’ (ME, 72).
Until this point in Musical Elaborations, Said has been critical of
Adorno’s view of music as a purely aesthetic phenomenon. Yet Said
here develops his own understanding of a heightened musicality as a
purely aesthetic realm, resisting and transgressing any confinement to a
particular socio-cultural location or identity. Indeed, Said understands
this purely musical space to be defined precisely by its indifference to
language and discourse and its withdrawal from mainstream notions
of historical progress. Furthermore, the transgressive element in music
prevents it from being bound to ideological or theoretical structures
such as Adorno’s philosophy of music history. Yet it is Adorno’s
writings on late-style Beethoven that prove most influential in Said’s
development of an aesthetic of musical transgression, particularly the
notion that late-style Beethoven rejects totality through a dissociation
of the subjective core of the music from the objective landscape. This
emphasis on irreconcilable extremes becomes a central component in
Said’s own conception of late style, as ‘intransigence, difficulty, and
unresolved contradiction’ (LS, 7).
We have seen how, in the opening chapters of Musical Elaborations
and in The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said uses Gramsci’s term
‘elaboration’ to advocate the importance of the circumstantial reality
and worldliness of a text or aesthetic object. The aesthetic thus
construed is constituent of the structure of historical materialism,
whereby artistic and intellectual endeavours exist as part of the dialectic
of the forces and mode of production. Yet, through the influence
of Adorno’s interpretation of late style in Beethoven, Said heightens
the notion of the transgressive elements in music to a point where the
aesthetic no longer engages in the dialectical structure at large. The
influence of both Gramsci and Adorno on Said results in a conflict
between two different philosophies of history: one in which the
dialectic of historical materialism is central, the other in which this
dialectic has become a dominating and ideological apparatus from
which the authentic artwork must necessarily escape. Thus the role
of the aesthetic becomes contradictory in Said’s criticism, as it exists
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in a state of simultaneous immunity to and mediation with the mode
of production. But Said’s neglect of the philosophy of history upon
which these theories are based has a further consequence, particularly
with regard to the increasing influence of Adorno. Said is critical of
the totalizing narrative of history in Adorno’s theory, yet, without the
philosophy of negative dialectics upon which Adorno’s aesthetic
theory is based, Said’s adoption of ideas concerning the autonomy
and resistance of certain musical works results in a generalized and
conservative view of the category of the aesthetic. This is most clearly
evident in Said’s analysis of late-style Strauss.
Said views the ‘distilled and rarefied technical mastery’ of Strauss’s
late works, such as the huge wind pieces or Metamorphosis, scored for
twenty-three individual string parts, as synonymous with the ‘eccentric
kind of transgression’, which discharges the social and makes claims
entirely ‘as music’ (LS, 7). For Said, the ‘strangely recapitulatory and
even backward-looking and abstracted quality’ of Strauss’s late works
presents an escapism and disengagement that epitomizes the ‘out of
timeness’ of late style (LS, 25). Said also draws attention to the polish
and surface perfection of the eighteenth-century musical pastiche in
the opera Capriccio. The refinement and outward sheen of these works
stand at the opposite extreme to the fissures, tensions and rifts inherent
in Adorno’s picture of late style in Beethoven. Yet in their indifference
both to the trauma and political upheavals of post-war Germany, and
to the contemporary status of modern music, the tensions and conflicts
of late-style Strauss emerge:
From beginning to end it makes none of the emotional claims it should, and
unlike late-style Beethoven with its fissures and fragments, it is smoothly polished,
technically perfect, worldly, and at ease as music in an entirely musical world.
Perhaps the last thing one would normally say about Strauss’s final works is that
they are defiant, but I think this is exactly the word for them. (LS, 47)

Said’s analysis of the music of Strauss reveals an appreciation of abstract

music as a purely aesthetic space in which defiance and resistance are
synonymous with a lack of compliance with historical, generic and
theoretical classifications. This view is made explicit in a passage from
Said’s writing on humanism:
In the main, I would agree with Adorno that there is a fundamental
irreconcilability between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic that we must sustain
as a necessary condition of our work as humanists. Art is not simply there: it
exists in a state of unreconciled opposition to the depredations of daily life, the
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uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. One can call this heightened state for
art the result of performance, of protracted elaboration (as in the structures of
a great novel or poem), of ingenious execution and insight: I myself cannot do
without the category of the aesthetic as, in the final analysis, providing resistance
not only to my own efforts to understand and clarify and elucidate as a reader,
but also as escaping the levelling pressures of everyday experience from which,
however, art paradoxically derives.8

Said’s reference to Adorno here is problematic. Said does not

maintain the dialectic at the heart of Adorno’s formulation of
the opposition between the ‘authentic’ artwork and society, and
instead portrays a more generalized heightening of the aesthetic to
a realm outside historical context. In the case of Strauss, given the
connections between the composer and the Nazi party, there are
serious implications involved in Said’s appreciation of the ability of
the music to discharge the social and political circumstances of its
composition. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said is critical of
the treatment of a ‘sacrilized past’ in new humanists such as Allan
Bloom, and as such draws attention to Benjamin’s claim that ‘every
document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism’,
as a ‘notion that seems ( . . . ) essentially a tragic humanistic truth of
great significance’.9 Yet Said presents a sacrilized musical content in
his dismissal of the conditions surrounding the composition of Strauss’s
late works.
Said’s reference to art as the ‘uncontrollable mystery on the bestial
floor’ suggests that the aesthetic poses something primordial, natural, at
odds with the social structure.10 What we find in Said’s interpretation
of late style Strauss, and in his comments on the aesthetic in Humanism
and Democratic Criticism, is a slippage between Adorno’s specific theory
of artistic truth-content, inherent in the dissociation of extremes in
the late quartets of Beethoven, and Said’s idea of musical autonomy or
‘transgression’ as an automatically emancipatory act of resistance. For
Adorno, the idea of art as something archaic with claims to Being in
its own right is regressive and ahistorical; it does not account for the
important element of subjectivity in art, the traces in music of, say,
motivic work and development. If the aesthetic becomes something
uncontrollable, mysterious and complex, as Said seems to perceive it
here, it loses any engagement with social and human activity. What
we are left with instead, in the writings on late-style Strauss and the
category of the aesthetic, is the vague notion of the power of great
music to transcend socio-political and ideological categorization.
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4
However, in his essay on Mozart’s Così fan tutte in On Late Style, Said
moves away from references to both Adorno and Gramsci and puts
forward the notion that history and identity are themselves inherently
representational, superficial and changeable. Said thus poses the heroic
constancy of identity in Beethoven’s Fidelio against an inconstancy and
multiplicity of identity in Mozart’s Così fan tutte:
[In Fidelio] all the characters are rigorously circumscribed in their unvarying
essence: Pizaro as unyielding champion of good, Fernando as emissary of light,
and so forth. This is at the opposite pole from Così, where disguises and the
wavering and wandering they foster, are the norm, and where constancy and
stability are mocked as impossible. (LS, 56)

Said argues that, beneath the exterior of comedy, frivolity and

superficiality in Così, there is a transgression of the acceptable, ordinary
experiences of love, life and ideas. Said describes the character of Don
Alfonso as a ‘late figure’, testing and manipulating the relationships
between the four lovers in the opera in order to highlight the fragility
of social conventions, structures and identities:
To have discovered that the stabilities of marriage and the social norms habitually
governing human life are inapplicable because life itself is as elusive and inconstant
as his experience teaches makes of Don Alfonso a character in a new, more
turbulent, and troubling realm, one in which experience repeats the same
disillusioning patterns without relief. What he devises for the two pairs of lovers
is a game in which human identity is shown to be as protean, unstable, and
undifferentiated as anything in the actual world. Not surprisingly, then, one of
the main motifs in Così fan tutte is the elimination of memory so that only the
present is left standing. (LS, 60)

For Said, this emphasis on the present and transgression of social norms
in Così disturbs the very foundations of authority and identity. The
conclusion of Così uproots the ‘rhetoric of love and the representation
of desire’ from a ‘fundamentally unchanging order of Being’, opening
up ‘a troubling vista of numerous further substitutions, with no tie, no
identity, no idea of stability or constancy left undisturbed’ (LS, 68).
Said recognizes that whilst this ‘troubling vista’ and ‘bottomless sea’
remain no more than a set of gestures within the limits of the
work, Mozart and De Ponte seem to have uncovered nonetheless ‘a
potentially terrifying view ( . . . ) of a universe shorn of any redemptive
or palliative scheme, whose only law is motion and instability expressed
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as the power of libertinage and manipulation, and whose only
conclusion is the terminal repose provided by death’ (LS, 71).
In an interview with Said, Jacqueline Rose raised the issue
of inconsistency in his criticism between the project to hold art
accountable to historical and ideological conditions and the aesthetic of
musical transgression in which works such as Bach’s Canonic Variations
exist in a ‘social space off the edge’ (ME, 72). Said responds by saying
there has been a change in his outlook, to which the vision of multiple,
unstable and changing identities in Così is central:
It is basically almost Schopenhauerian, that there’s a kind of indistinguishable,
seething, endlessly transforming mass into which we are going. It really is very
much a part of what I am writing about. One of the reasons for this (. . . ) is that
I’ve become very, very impatient with the idea and the whole project of identity
(. . . ). What’s much more interesting is to try to reach out beyond identity to
something else, whatever that is. It may be death. It may be an altered sense of
consciousness that puts you in touch with others more than one normally is. It
may be just a state of forgetfulness which, at some point, I think we all need —
to forget.11

Thus Said’s interpretation of the elimination of memory and emphasis

on the present at the end of Così fan tutte is symptomatic of his
own critical thinking on an aesthetic of forgetfulness, a realm beyond
identity. This more specific idea of transgression, as a space beyond
fixed identity, emerges as an aesthetic of musical form in Said’s
reflections on the temporality of certain musical works.
In the last chapter of Musical Elaborations, Said writes of an ‘anti-
narrative aesthetic’ in the music of Messiaen, a style of ‘diverting and
prying us away from the principal discursive strands that mainstream
classical music embodies and carries forward’ (ME, 101). In contrast to
the linear mastery of time in, say, the classical sonata form, the music
of Messiaen embodies ‘another way of telling’ that is more digressive
and contemplative. This music symbolizes an aesthetic of ‘being
in time, experiencing it together, rather than in competition, with
other musics, experiences, temporalities’ (ME, 100). In the elaborative
style of Messiaen is an essentially contrapuntal and dialogical mode,
in which the ‘nonlinear, non-developmental uses of theme or melody
dissipate and delay a disciplined organization of musical time that is
principally combative as well as dominative’ (ME, 102). This musical
ideal is of particular significance for Said’s notion of ‘contrapuntal
reading’ in Culture and Imperialism. For Said, the spatial and divergent
temporal structure of this ideal informs the way in which we
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read the ‘cultural archive’, not ‘univocally, but contrapuntally, with
a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is
narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with
which) the dominating discourse acts’.12
We have seen how Said referred to the performances of Glenn
Gould to illustrate the complex and worldly engagements that could
take place between an aesthetic object and society. However, there
is another aspect to Said’s interpretation of Gould, which emphasizes
the performer’s exile from the concert platform, thereby constituting
a form of transgression. Said writes that this exile created an abstract
musical space wherein the pianist seemed to be enacting a ‘stepping
beyond the platform into a strange world beyond it’ (ME, 24).
Whereas, in The World the Text and the Critic, Said used Gould to
criticize Paul Ricoeur’s notion of a textual space suspended from
circumstantial reality, in On Late Style, he uses Gould to confirm
precisely this suspended space of ‘unreality’. Said describes the way
in which Gould could ‘apparently disappear as a performer into the
work’s long complications, thereby providing an instance of the ecstasy
he characterized as the state of standing outside time and within an
integral artistic structure’ (ME, 31). Kierkegaard has reflected upon
how ‘music has, namely, an element of time in itself, but it does
not take place in time except in an unessential sense’, and that ‘the
historical process in time it cannot express’.13 In Said’s descriptions of
Gould and Messiaen, a similar distinction between musical time and
historical process exists as a means of confirming the purely abstract
quality of a particular musical space. But such an abstract space of
subjective musical time also has a utopian quality for Said, illustrated
more explicitly when Said writes of Gould’s transmutation ‘into the
utopia of an infinitely changeable and extendable world where time
or history did not occur, and because of which all expression was
transparent, logical, and not hampered by flesh-and-blood performers
or people at all’ (ME, 30).
In an essay on Gould in On Late Style, Said suggests some
implications of such a utopia of extended musical space for critical
thinking. This connection between the musical performance and the
act of criticism is made through a comparison of the musical and
rhetorical etymology of the term invention. Said explains how in its
rhetorical meaning, as it is found in Vico’s view of human history,
invention is the cyclical, elaborative and repetitive unfolding of a
process. In musical logic, invention is the unfolding and development
of a theme contrapuntally, ‘so that all of its possibilities are articulated,
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expressed and elaborated’ (LS, 128). For Said, Gould’s performances
present a convergence of both Vicean and musical invention in the
form of an endless and inconclusive interpretative process. In the
continual reinterpretation and development of musical works, Gould
symbolizes for Said the ‘virtuoso as intellectual’, who constantly
challenges the existing order through elaboration and invention. Said
envisages this musical invention as a model for the humanist critic:
What [Gould’s performances] try to present (. . . ) is a critical model for a type
of art that is rational and pleasurable at the same time, an art that tries to show
us its composition as an activity still being undertaken in its performance (. . . ).
[I]t elaborates an alternative argument to the prevailing conventions that so deaden
and dehumanize and rerationalize the human spirit. This is not only an intellectual
achievement but also a humanistic one. (LS, 132–3)
For Said, the sense of incompletion and possibility in Gould’s
musical invention always resists semblance and staticity and as such
provides a model for critical discourse. In Humanism and Democratic
Criticism, Said describes this present-centred process of continually
incomplete invention as a major constituent of his notion of
humanism:
So there is always something radically incomplete, insufficient, provisional,
disputable, and arguable about humanistic knowledge that Vico never loses sight
of and that ( . . . ) gives the whole idea of humanism a tragic flaw that is constitutive
to it and can never be removed.14
This ‘tragic flaw’ in humanistic practice is a subjective element that
gives the process of acquiring knowledge its continually impermanent,
inconstant and incomplete character. As an aesthetic ideal, therefore,
elaboration has quite different connotations from its Gramscian
formation in relation to civil society. In an aesthetic sense, it becomes
the act of laying bare this subjective element by drawing attention
to the present-centred nature of elaborative processes. In this respect,
Said’s aesthetic of musical elaboration functions as a critical model for
challenging the objectivity and permanence of historical knowledge,
interpretation and identity.
We can locate this present-centred process within Said’s literary
criticism as well:
Traditionally the temporal convention in literary study has been retrospective.
We look at writing as already completed. But how much more challenging is a
theoretic for study that takes writing as being produced for something formed in
the writing; this was Mallarmé’s discovery.15
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The idea of musical invention in Gould as an ‘activity still being
undertaken in its performance’ becomes a form of textuality in a
literary context, wherein the act of writing itself is a digressive,
elaborative and performative process. The parallels between an
aesthetic of musical elaboration and this textuality bring to light the
significance of music in Said’s emphasis on the critical potential of
formal processes over representation and ideology in artworks.16

5
Coupled with his reflections on Così fan tutte, Said’s notion of the
utopian potential of multiplicity and musical time approaches a more
specific and complex ideology of the aesthetic, quite distinct from
the more straightforward view of the autonomy of the aesthetic
in relation to late-style Strauss. In this ideology of the aesthetic,
it is the formal and temporal capacity of music to elaborate an
essentially irresolvable, changeable and unnameable body of tensions
that constitutes its utopian potential. At the end of Musical
Elaborations, following the discussions of temporality in Messiaen and
Metamorphosis, Said confirms the utopian potential of the aesthetics of
musical elaboration, counterpoint and transgression:
In the perspective afforded by such a work as Metamorphosis, music thus becomes
an art not primarily or exclusively about authorial power and social authority,
but a mode of thinking through or thinking with the integral variety of human
cultural practices, generously, non-coercively, and, yes, in a utopian cast, if by
utopian we mean worldly, possible, attainable, knowable. (ME, 105)
Jacques Rancière has noted that the ‘definitional capabilities’ of
the word utopia have been ‘completely devoured by its connotative
properties’.17 Thus, when Said refers to the utopian cast in music as
something ‘worldly, possible, attainable, knowable’, is it possible to
elucidate a specific political implication in his aesthetic of musical
elaboration and transgression? Or is Said rather confirming, through
a more connotative use of the word utopia, an infinite expansion of
possibilities as a means of resisting any form of totalizing closure or
resolution? In the essay ‘Travelling Theory’, parallels can be found
between Said’s discussion of critical thinking and his utopian thinking
on the transgressive in music: ‘What we (. . . ) need over and above
theory, however, is the critical recognition that there is no theory
capable of covering, closing off, predicting all the situations in which
it might be useful.’18 For Said, the location of criticism is outside of
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278 Paragraph
theory, leaving it, like the transgressive in music, resistant to totalization
and continually open to possibility and multiplicity.
Aijaz Ahmad has criticized Said’s Orientalism for its multiple
theoretical ambivalences and contradictions. For Ahmad, Said’s
utopian view that criticism can remain open to all kinds of divergent
ideas and theories closes off the potential in developing a particular
form of thinking such as Marxism:
Having access to a ‘great deal of things’ always gives one the sense of opulence,
mastery, reach, choice, freedom, erudition, play. But resolution of the kind of
ambivalences and self-cancelling procedures which beset Said’s thought requires
that some positions be vacated, some choices be made, some of these ‘great deal
of things’ be renounced.19
Understood as a connotatively utopian realm of infinite possibilities
and transgressions, Said’s musical thinking on counterpoint, multi-
plicity and transgression becomes problematic as it seems to impute an
aesthetic view to a theoretical space. In musical counterpoint, disso-
nance and conflict can function meaningfully and without leading to
incomprehension. However, theoretical conflicts concerning divergent
philosophies of history, such as those of Gramsci and Adorno, must
surely resolve in order to avoid a state of contradiction and staticity.
Perhaps the very musicality of Said’s thinking on theory, aesthetics
and society is suggestive of a sort of aesthetic world-view that is
somewhat detached from the material history of socio-political and
moral responsibility. This is a criticism that Habermas has levelled
against Nietzsche’s continual recourse to the aesthetic, particularly
music, to question the objectivity of morality, identity and knowledge.
According to Habermas, Nietzsche’s aesthetic view presents a ‘chasm
of forgetfulness against the world of philosophical knowledge and
moral action, against the everyday’.20 When Said writes, with
regard to the musical example of Così fan tutte, that what we need
over and above the project of identity is a ‘state of forgetfulness’,
perhaps Said can be accused of a similar dissociation from the material
actualities of political, social and moral conflict that Habermas reads
in Nietzsche.21 Yet to accuse Said simply of an over-estimation of the
aesthetic at the expense of material history deflects attention away from
the project Said seems to envisage when he draws upon music as a
means of complicating the mediation between history, society and the
aesthetic.
Elucidating from Said’s criticism a defined rather than connotative
form of the utopian potential of music and criticism will not arise from
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Elaboration, Counterpoint, Transgression 279

the binary separation of an aesthetic realm of multiplicity and a social
realm of fixed rational truths. In those discussions of music in which
Said suggests that a particular temporality or multiplicity in musical
content provides a model for challenging authoritative linear narratives
and fixed identity, the aesthetic does not lose its connection with
politics and society. Thus Così fan tutte suggests a destabilizing of natural
and singular identity; the continual incompletion in Gould’s musical
invention provides a model of continual possibility in approaching
history and knowledge, whilst non-linear temporality in Messiaen
suggests an anti-narrative aesthetic of digression, contemplation and
reflection. The elaboration, counterpoint and transgression inherent
in these musical ideals suggest a disruption and traversal of dominative
identities, boundaries and histories. It is through these specific relations
between musical form and critical consciousness that Said comes
closest to a ‘worldly, possible, attainable, knowable’ cast for utopian
thought.

NOTES
1 Edward Said, Musical Elaborations (London, Vintage, 1991). Hereafter referred
to as ME.
2 Edward Said, On Late Style (London, Bloomsbury, 2006), hereafter referred
to as LS.
3 Theodor Adorno, ‘Late Style in Beethoven’, Essays on Music, translated
by Susan H. Gillespie, edited by Richard Leppart (Berkeley and London,
University of California Press, 2002), 567.
4 Theodor Adorno, The Philosophy of Modern Music, translated by Anne
G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster (London, Sheed and Ward, 1987), 131.
5 Edward Said, ‘American “Left” Literary Criticism’ in The World, the Text, and
the Critic (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1983), 170–1.
6 The World, the Text, and the Critic, 35.
7 ‘American “Left” Literary Criticism’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic,
169.
8 Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York and Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 63.
9 Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 23.
10 Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 63.
11 ‘Edward Said talks to Jacqueline Rose’, in Edward Said and the Work of the
Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, edited by Paul A. Bové (Durham and London,
Duke University Press, 2000), 25.
12 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Vintage, 1993), 59.
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280 Paragraph
13 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Volume 1, translated by David F. Swenson and
Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971), 55.
14 Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 12.
15 ‘On Originality’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 138–9.
16 For an interpretation of ‘contrapuntal reading’ as a form of aesthetic
mediation see Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and
Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota
Press, 2003).
17 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, translated by Gabriel Rockhill
(London and NewYork, Continuum, 2006), 40.
18 ‘Travelling Theory’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 241.
19 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location
in the Work of Edward W. Said’ in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Contexts
(London and New York, Verso, 1994), 219.
20 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Polity,
1990), 94.
21 See note 11 above.