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09/25/2003: "edward said"

The latest in a series of beloved punk rock icons (see also Stan Brakhage, Johnny Cash) who gave up the ghost this year: Edward Said died of cancer today. Professor at Columbia, dissident intellectual, author of Orientalism, impassioned activist for unpopular political causes, but also -- and this part often gets overlooked -- an accomplished pianist, and a music critic's music critic. I had just been reading his review of three new books about Beethoven in a recent issue of The Nation, where he used the review to discuss, among other things, 'late style', a great interest of his (and Adorno's too -- everyone's fave crotchety German intellectual wrote an essay once called 'Beethoven's Late Style' in which he described Beethoven's later years as being informed by a fragmentary aesthetic, a wrinkly patchwork of idiosyncratic ideas.)

It's sorta eerie to read Said's words on late style now that he's died, cuz the following could describe his life, too: "There is first of all the artist's connection to his or her own time, or historical period, society and antecedents, how the aesthetic work, for all its irreducible individuality, is nevertheless a part -- or paradoxically, not a part -- of the era in which it was produced. This is not simply a matter of sociological or political synchrony but more interestingly has to do with rhetorical or formal style. Thus Mozart expresses in his music a style much more intimately related to the worlds of court and church than Beethoven or Wagner...So not only can one often see an easily perceptible connection between, say, a realistic artist like Balzac and his social milieu; there is also an antithetical relationship in the case of artists whose work challenges the aesthetic and social norms of their eras and is, so to speak, too late for the times, in the sense of superseding or transcending them."