Today's Stories

February 20 / 22, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

February 12, 2009

P. Sainath
Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History

Jean Bricmont
French Echoes of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Michael Hudson
Trying to Revive the Bubble Economy: Obama's Awful Financial Recovery Plan

Peter Lee
Pakistan, Not Afghanistan, is the Main Event

Dave Lindorff
Judges Nabbed, Jailing Kids for Kickbacks

February 11, 2009

Neve Gordon
Few Peacemakers in the New Israeli Knesset

Peter Morici
Anatomy of a Hemorrhage

Andy Worthington
Who's Running Guantánamo?

Marjorie Cohn
A Call to End All Renditions

Fred Gardner
Change We Can Smoke?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The G & O (Geithner and Obama) Bank

Zoe Blunt
Vancouver Island Hippies: Top Security Threat for 2010?

Belén Fernández
Politics on the Panamericana

Martha Rosenberg
Don't Breathe the Meat

Website of the Day
George Dyson on Project Orion

Blues of the Day
David Vest on the CBC

February 10, 2009

Kathy Kelly
How Do People Keep Going?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Stimulus Imbroglio

Uri Avnery
Dirty Socks

Michael J. Berg
Will South Carolina be the Center of the Nuclear Revival?

Russell Mokhiber
Et Tu, Atul?

Joe Bageant
A Commodity Called Misery

Gareth Porter
Petraeus' Subterfuge

Dave Lindorff
Seek Truth, But Prosecute Liars

Rannie Amiri
The Implications of Recognizing Israel's "Right to Exist"

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes and the Stimulus

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What We Didn't Learn at Obama's Press Conference

Website of the Day
RIAA Takes Over DoJ Under Obama

February 9, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Why Sanjay Gupta is the Wrong Man for Top US Health Job

Paul Craig Roberts
Driving Over the Cliff

Julio Sanchez /
Feliz de Bedout
The Threat of Peace in Colombia: an Interview with Hollman Morris

National Lawyers Guild
Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes

Jonathan Cook
Israeli University Welcomes "War Crimes" Colonel

Alana Smith
The Nightmarish Case of Fahad Hashmi

Binoy Kampmark
Taking the Bong

Sam Bahour
End the Occupation First

Nicole Colson
Can You Afford College?

Ron Jacobs
Remembering the Second Intifada

Website of the Day
The Legacy of Ed Grothus and the Black Hole

February 6-8, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's First Bad Week

Ishmael Reed
Saint Thelma's Book

James Abourezk
Obama, Mitchell and the Palestinians

William Blum
Obama and the Empire

Patrick Cockburn
Maliki's Triumph

Henry A. Giroux
Educating Obama

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Darwin's Living Legacy

Mouin Rabbani
A New Low on Gaza?

David Yearsley
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Springsteen!

Saul Landau
The Wrestler: an American Tragedy

Jules Rabin
Israel's Disproportionate Responses

Raymond J. Lawrence
A Country Awash in Money But Going Broke

Janette Habel
Castro's Socialism in Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Economy on a Thread

Missy Beattie
Blackout at the Gaza Zoo Massacre

Dale Gieringer
The Opium Exclusion Act of 1909: Marking 100 Years of Failed Drug Prohibition

John Ross
Davos vs. Belem; Swine vs. Pearls

Richard Rhames
Jobs is a Four Letter Word

Bob Wing
Obama, Race and the Future of U.S. Politics

Robert Bryce
Corn Dog Update: Another Study Exposes Bio-Fuel Scam

David Macaray
AFL-CIO and Change to Win in "Re-Wed" Talks

James L. Secor
Inaugural Questions Nobody Asks: Notes from Kuala Lumpur

Jason Flom /
Anthony Papa
The Scourging of Michael Phelps

Norm Kent
Ten Reasons to Get High About Pot in 2009

Kim Nicolini
When Utopia Crumbles: Why Revolutionary Road was Shut Out of the Oscars

Lorenzo Wolff
Ridiculous Flow: How Cee Lo Green Sells Soul

Poets' Basement
Emily Dickinson (with Commentary by Daniel Wolff)

Website of the Weekend
S.J. Gould: Darwin's Untimely Burial

February 5, 2009

Michael Mandel
Self-Defense Against Peace

Saul Landau /
Philip Brenner
Killing the Monroe Doctrine

Ralph Nader
Tax the Speculators!

Robert Bryce
The Unraveling of the Ethanol Scam

Russell Mokhiber
Occupied Territory

Sameh Habeeb /
Janet Zimmerman
Innocents Lost

Dave Lindorff
Small Change

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Beyond Green Capitalism

George Ochenski
A Blow to Big Coal in Montana

Website of the Day
Putting CEO Pay in Context

February 4, 2009

Arno J. Mayer
On Corruption

Paul Craig Roberts
The War on Terror is a Hoax

Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi Elections

Jonathan Cook
An IDF Jihad?

Fred Gardner
Obama's Mixed Messages on Marijuana

Stan Cox
Slumwrecking Millionaires: India's Fragile New Temples

Margaret Kimberley
The Deepening Economic Crisis

Lawrence Velvel
Agony & Desperation: Madoff's Victims

Dave Lindorff
A Generals' Revolt?

Doug Giebel
A Helping of Bitter Beltway Baloney

Serge Quadruppani
Student Protests Sweep Italy

Website of the Day
The San Francisco 8

February 3, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency & Anthropology: Roberto Gonzalez on Human Terrain Systems

Bill Moyers
Obama's Wars: an Interview with Pierre Sprey and Marilyn Young

Kirkpatrick Sale
Obama's Lincoln Thing

Conn Hallinan
When Mind Wounds Don't Count

Peter Morici
The Slippery Slope of Stimulus

George Ciccariello-Maher
From Oakland to Santa Rita: "Fired Up, Can't Take It No More"

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
The BBC's Nadir

Allan Nairn
What Does It Take to Get a Meal Here, an Earthquake?

Norman Solomon
Why are We Still at War?

David Macaray
The Late, Great UAW

Website of the Day
The Bloody Cove

February 2, 2009

Uri Avnery
Under the Black Flag: Israeli War Crimes

Ralph Nader
What to Do About Wall Street

Gareth Porter
Generals Move to Obstruct Obama's Iraq Withdrawal Orders

Paul Craig Roberts
The Death of American Leadership

Harvey Wasserman
The Nuclear Industry's Latest Money Grab

Rannie Amiri
Gaza and the Crimes of Mubarak

Cal Winslow
Stern's Gang Seizes UHW Union Hall

Steve Early
Checking Out of Stern's Hotel California

Alan Farago
Superbowl as Panopticon

Diane Farsetta
Banning Domestic Propaganda

January 30 / February 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama and the Oddsmakers

Michael Hudson
Obama's New Bank Giveaway

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
"Too Big to Fail:" a Bailout Hoax

Dave Lindorff
The Ugly Truth: the American Economy is Not Coming Back

Saul Landau
Freedom Fighters, Terrorists or Schlemiels?

Andy Worthington
Blame the Chef: How Cooking for the Taliban Can Get You Life in Gitmo

Subcomandante Marcos
Gaza Will Survive

Robert Jensen
Future Farming: an Interview with Wes Jackson

Ron Jacobs
Return of the Democrats

Gareth Porter
Is Gates Undermining Another Opening to Iran?

Allan Nairn
Hope for the Dump Cities?

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA's Dangerous Security Agenda

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Feelings of a Stranger

Christopher Brauchli
From Gitmo to Supermax?

Jules Rabin
Israel and the Bomb

Col. Dan Smith
Thoughts From an Inauguration Refugee

Missy Beattie
The US Garden of Evil

Tom Barry
Obama's Immigration Challenge

J. Michael Cole
The Downfall of an Academic

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Burning the First Amendment

Dan Bacher
How Dam Removal Can Save the Klamath River

David Rosen
Last Gasp of the Culture Wars?

Don Monkerud
Religion in the American Bedroom

Binoy Kampmark
Updike: Apostle of the Middlebrows

Lorenzo Wolff
Playing Down a Bad Reputation: the Lovin' Spooful's Near Perfect Record

David Yearsley
When Orfeo and Euridice Lived Happily Ever After in Upstate New York

Poets' Basement
Valentine and Rihn

January 29, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Tom Paine's Birthday

Paul Craig Roberts
Is It Time to Bail Out of America?

Riz Khan
The Future of Gaza: an Interview with Jimmy Carter

M. Reza Pirbhai
Pakistan: a New Cambodia?

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Al-Arabiya Interview

Gregory Vickrey
What About the Environment? Cap and Trade and Selling Out

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
Whither the Two State Solution?

Alison Weir
Killing Palestinians Doesn't Count: Fact-Checking Ceasefire Breaches

Alan Farago
Economy Without Escape Routes

Walter Brasch
Taxing a House of Cards

Website of the Day
Madoff Inc.

January 28, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza

Noam Chomsky
Obama's Emerging Policies on Israel, Iraq and the Economic Crisis

Patrick Cockburn
Is Mitchell's Mission Already Doomed?

Rob Larson
The Clinton Foundation Donors

George Wuerthner
Who Will Speak for the Forests?

Allan Nairn
South-East Asian Groups Threaten Retaliation Over Gaza Invasion

M. Junaid
Levesque-Alam
A Muslim's Memo to Obama

Stefan Simanowitz
The Silent Trade

Charles R. Larson
The Autumn of the Patriot

Website of the Day
Veggie Love: PETA's Banned Superbowl Ad

January 27, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Save the Economy by Cutting the Defense Budget

Yigal Bronner /
Neve Gordon
Fueling the Cycle of Hate

Joshua Frank
Obama's Neocon: the Curious Case of Richard Holbrooke

Jordan Flaherty
Torture at a Louisiana Prison

Ralph Nader
Access to Economic Justice

Rev. José M. Tirado
How Iceland Fell: a Hundred Days of (Muted) Rage

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Looking Forward

Russell Mokhiber
What If Israel Were in Your Neighborhood?

Martha Rosenberg
Who Says Technology Transfer Doesn't Pay?

C. G. Estabrook
The Inaugural Address: the Digested Read

Website of the Day
Who Profits From the Occupation?

January 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Speaking the Truth is a Career-Ending Event

Deepak Tripathi
The BBC's Day of Shame

Vijay Prashad
The India Lobby: Drunk with the Sight of Power

Peter Lee
Geithner's Pop Gun Volley at China

Allan Nairn
The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture

Uri Avnery
On the Wrong Side of History

John Sayen
The Next Shoe to Drop

Dave Lindorff
Afghanistan is No Threat to America

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff

David Macaray
Obama vs. Labor

Roger Burbach
Winds of Change in Cuba

Norman Solomon
The Ghost of LBJ

Website of the Day
Landscapes of Occupation

January 23 / 25, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ghosts at Obama's Side

P. Sainath
The Freefalling Economy

Patrick Cockburn
In Israel, Detachment From Reality is the Norm

Saul Landau
Reasons for War?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Our Current Economic Crisis: the Monks' Cure

Alan Farago
The Problem with the Stimulus

Christopher Brauchli
When Due Diligence is a One-Way Street

Andy Worthington
Return to Law?

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pentagon: Bowing to the Masters of War?

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Four)

Henry A. Giroux
The Audacity of Educated Hope

David Yearsley
The Music That Wasn't There: Chamber Music for Obama's Masses

Raymond F. Gustavson
Here We Go Again: General Shinseki and Veterans

Dave Lindorff
The Way Forward

Roberto Rodriguez
Fighting for Migrant Justice in the Desert

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
The Struggle of an Un-People

Fidel Castro
Meeting Cristina

J. Michael Cole
Can Obama's Shift on Terror Succeed?

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
It's Time to Free Leonard Peltier

Ramzy Baroud
Breaking Gaza's Will

Mohammad Ali Shabani
The Aftermath of the War on Gaza

Richard Rhames
Panning for Pyrite on a Cold Day at the Mall

Stephen Martin
Voices in the Mirror

Lorenzo Wolff
Jurassic Radio

Kim Nicolini
Katrina's Endless Loop

Poets' Basement
Fleming, Henson, First, Jaramillo and Glendinning

Website of the Weekend
Cartoon Love

January 22, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Another Real Estate Crisis is About to Hit

Kathy Kelly
Worse Than an Earthquake

Allan Nairn
US Intel Nominee Lied About Church Murders

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Three)

Andy Worthington
Halting the Gitmo Trials

Peter Morici
How to Fix the Banks

Joseph G. Davis
The First MBA Presidency and the Business Academy: a Damage Assessment

Adriana Kojeve
The Democrats on Israel: a Brief Oral History

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Poised for Historic Vote

Website of the Day
Support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program

January 21, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Understanding Gaza

Harry Browne
Obama's Work Ethic

Michael Colby
Ready. Aim. Organize.

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience

Audrey Stewart
Starting Over in Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Obama and the Muslims

Binoy Kampmark
The Marketing of Hope

David Kεr Thomson
Abolition

John Ross
In My Own Bones

Allan Nairn
Killer in Chief: Will This President Murder Civilians?

Sheldon Richman
The Peaceful Transfer of Violent Power

Website of the Day
Globistan

January 20, 2009

Chuck Spinney
Hosing Obama Israeli Style

Kathy Kelly
The Strongest Weapon of All

Raymond Deane
The EU, Gaza and the Lisbon Treaty

Ralph Nader
State Terrorism Against Gaza

Audrey Stewart
Why I am in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Doctrine of Destruction

Harvey Wasserman
A Ten-Point Solar Agenda for Obama

Christopher Ketcham
Inauguration Ad Nauseam

Robert Jensen
A Citizen's Oath of Office

Dave Lindorff
Commie Chorus on the Mall: This Land Really is Made for You and Me

David Macaray
SAG Watches It All Slip Away

Weekend Edition
February 20 / 22, 2009

The Musical Patriot

Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

By DAVID YEARSLEY

"Music at the Limits", the recently published  posthumous collection of Edward Said’s music journalism, is a monument to a dying breed: the intellectual whose humanistic range extends not only to the fringes of music, where the art can be enjoyed as entertainment or flaunted as the necessary finish on a well-rounded education, but deeply into its techniques and meanings, its possibilities and perils. On every page the writing moves beyond the more circumscribed goals of much criticism concerned merely with the quality and effectiveness of performance to engage and to move an audience; while these aspects are important to Said, his journalism repeatedly reminds us that music is more than artful sound and elaborate display.

In unexpected ways one learns here of music’s potency as a cultural practice, its capacity for meaning (even if indefinite), its power to resist the sometimes suffocating weight of the modern institutions of concert life, and, crucially, the connectedness of music and politics. It is not that these pieces, edited by Said’s widow Mariam Said and introduced by an occasionally awkward but still useful preface by Said’s friend Daniel Barenboim, are without moments of humor. But throughout these diverse and always-engaging reviews, music and its performance are held to the highest standards, judged by a man who not only had a profound knowledge of his beloved art, but of culture and politics. Many are the illuminating parallels he draws between music and literature, yet the range and depth of his cultural references do not daunt, but rather elevate, the reader. The book is a tribute to a man for whom music was essential, as necessary a part of culture and as it was of himself.

In his 1999 memoir, Out of Place, Said complains of the stifling piano lessons he was subjected to in the Cairo of his boyhood. This tuition was dominated by endless exercises of Czerny and Hanon and mediocre repertoire thought to be the appropriate diet for children, though it was in fact for the most part malnourishing. Recalling the young Bach’s copying of forbidden music by moonlight, Said’s clandestine sessions at the piano, sight-reading off-limits works by Mendelssohn and Handel, but most important of all, Beethoven dramatize the youngster’s insatiable thirst for music beyond that forced on him by his pedagogical regime.

Opera broadcasts by the BBC and his parents’ record collection allowed him access to a world of real and compelling “adult” music. In the first years after World War II trips to the Cairo opera house and to concerts by visiting European orchestras -- most formatively for Said, that of the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler -- brought the disembodied sounds heard over the gramophone and the wireless into a living reality that itself takes on a mythic cast in Said’s memory. That sense of youthful excitement remains in his account’s of the many concerts recounted in Music at the Limits.

Not surprisingly, the piano recital and the opera remained throughout Said’s life his main forms of musical consumption and dominate Music at the Limits. Said is unapologetic about what might be thought now of as his conservative tastes. One will find no glib references to pop culture in this volume; jaunty sarcasm  and sly asides are not part of his style.

Like all of those obsessed with music as a children, Said was powerfully formed by the musical experiences of his youth, and one can’t help but think that his attachment to his core repertory, is anchored not only by Bach and Beethoven but by a nostalgia for a vanished world post-war Cairo and Palestine, even though, as the title of his memoir emphasizes, he felt out of place there.
 
Said’s mature music criticism is animated by a sense of that same childhood thrill at the unlimited riches of Great Music and its power to break free from containment by cultural and societal authority. Often held to be the most conservative, not to say stultifying, cultural realm, classical music offers Said not only uplift, even escape, but seems also to provide a mode of resistance.  That combination of childhood wonder and possibility often bobs up through the surface of Said’s fluent and carefully-argued prose.

Though confirmed, even entrenched, in his tastes, Said is not closed-minded. In one of the many overviews of a New York concert season that appeared in the Nation magazine, where he was music critic from 1986 until 2003, he admits that he is “no [fan of] early-and authentic-performance.”  Yet that will not stop him from attending a performance of the 17th-century opera, Atys, by Jean-Baptiste Lully under the direction of William Christie at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1992.  While Said’s account of the performance revels in the spectacle and superficiality of the production, what emerges is a rare sense of relaxed enjoyment and recognition of other modes of music and its presentation. Said uses the bright exuberance of the event to contrast with the sodden, predictable opera productions he’d been subjected to at the Met.

Said can be devastating, but  he is rigorously fair-minded, even when wading into divisive and for him highly personal issues having to do with Palestinine. There is a searching review of the John Adam’s Death of Klinghoffer which Said saw in 1991. Said launches a unsparing  critique of those who dismiss the opera as “ideological”, while these very same forces accept other equally political cultural work without reservation. Bluntly put: Palestinians do not deserve an opera. Said condemns the terrorism portrayed on stage, but shows how persistent charges of anti-Semitism, which dogged the opera back than and even more so in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, are unsustainable and self-serving. Yet even while he applauds aspect of the music and production, especially the genius of Peter Sellars, whom Said returns to in an excellent essay on the director’s important cycle of Mozart/DaPonte operas, Said is incisive in his diagnosis of the score’s musical weaknesses, particularly its tendency towards sentimental lyricism, and libretto’s often schematic characterization.

Among its many rewards Music at the Limits offers a vivid panorama of Said’s concert-going life over his last two decades from 1983 to 2003, the year in which he died. Music at the Limits begins with a kind of obituary of Glenn Gould that appeared Vanity Fair in 1983, the year after Gould died at the age of fifty. Three other essays are dedicated exclusively to Gould; his entry in the index is longer than Beethoven’s, Said’s greatest musical hero. Gould is for Said a model not only of pianism and the greatest advocate of performance as research into Bach’s complex contrapuntal works, but the first example of the way an artist can and should develop over the course of a career. In his eccentric and obstinate way, Gould brought Bach to the center of piano culture even while he explored other more distant terrain, from Bizet’s Variations chromatique to Sibelius’s sonatas, from Elizabethan virginal music to his own ruminating transcriptions of Wagner and Beethoven.

A later essay from 1987 on musical middle-age warns with gentle, self-referential irony on the part of the then middle-aged critic, of the dangers of losing direction and retreating to the comforts of an obvious and, in the case of the leading piano virtuosos, lucrative career path. Alfred Brendel (by then already, late middle-age, but still called in by Said to serve as a negative example) and Valdimir Ashkenazy are Said’s prime disappointments for failing to pursue a meaningful and unexpected artistic goal. Instead they offer up the same old stuff, or try new things but without direction or dedication. Maurizio Pollini, whom Said greatly admires, here hangs onto to a sense of mission before falling from critical grace for lax programming, off-putting and unreliable virtuosity, only to climb again in Said’s estimation for finally returning to form and departing from the usual repertoire and ingrained attitudes.

Said seems both to admire and to be suspicious of Gould’s early rejection of the concert stage for the recording studio. The super-controlled environment of the studio allowed Gould to convert himself from virtuoso to intellectual, or better, to be both things a the same time.  For Said, great musical moments and careers are built not just on heightened emotion on stage and towering demonstrations of technical prowess, but on deep thought and sustained efforts both to expand the repertoire and to shed new light on the old.

As Said points out in one of the book’s later essays, the Gould phenomenon paradoxically embodies the rejection of a modern concert life even while his success was made possible by it.  Said often confronts the tension between the tremendous excitement of modern, highly artificial musical performance and the debilitating sameness of a concert life; he decries the crushing machinery of the culture industry that limits possibility and experimentation, and that works to thwart creativity not to foster it.  Along these lines, Said complains of the industrialized fodder churned out by summer festivals, proliferating like so many cultural strip malls across North America and Euopre. But the descent of the Sante Fe summer opera season into the “conventional and soporific” does not discourage him from visiting the carefully conceived and creatively, if inconsistently, executed Bard Festival a couple of hours up the Hudson from his home in Manhattan. Here again, Said’s watchword is purpose: the pursuit of a musical and intellectual goal, sound and thought together.

In all of this there is a desire for both high-standards, along with a yearning for lingering the warmth and informality of the drawing room, the intimate, the personal. In spite of dominant steely sameness concert life in the later 20th century, Said criticism finds those moments of rare beauty and exhilarating life that even corporate institutions and attitudes cannot stamp out.

Having begun with a tribute to Gould’s artistic life, Music at Its Limits ends with what could be read as a rumination on Said’s own impending death. Late style was the central concern Said’s literary and music criticism in his last years, and is the theme of his final Nation piece, of September, 2003. The essay appeared just three weeks before his death later that month. Said’s own soon-be-lost battle with leukemia is not mentioned, though perhaps alluded to in the piece’s title, “Untimely Meditations.” Reflecting Said’s canonic tastes, this review of Maynard Solomon’s Late Beethoven ranges widely across the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, and Brahms but also touches on Nietzsche, Adorno, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Sophocles, among other pillars of what one, writing now in the shadow of Said’s legacy, would hesitate to describe with the confining term “Western” culture. In this his final column, Said writes of the way late style “can convey a sense not of resignation but of an unusual rebelliousness, a sense of breaking, barriers, transgressively the basic element of the arts anew.”

It is this danger and daring undertaken within the very temple of decorous high culture that makes this book, and indeed Said’s life, so memorable, instructive, and moving.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu   

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