The Review as Bakhtinian Rejoinder: Edward W. Said as Music Reviewer

Abstract

The article reads the work of the postcolonial theorist Edward Said through a Bakhtinian lens. Although Said and Bakhtin engaged differently with the politics of their time and had different ideas on the relationship between ethics and politics, their wide-ranging writings have been adapted and their ideas appropriated by scholars in many different fields—often the same ones. They shared a passion for dialogue, for exploring otherness and outsidedness, and for believing in response-ability. What the novel was to Bakhtin, pianism was to Said, the music reviewer. Said never played the role of consumer guide or gate-keeper. He was more the peer reviewer or the grade-assigning professor. The multiple possible responses of the audience always conditioned his own. Said thought like Bakhtin all his musical life, perhaps without knowing it. Said’s music reviews are, by definition, responses or rejoinders. They are hybrid, double-voiced narrations and transmissions, but also appropriations, as was the novel, in Bakhtin’s eyes. Said’s writings on music are analyzed in light of several key Bakhtinian concepts: dialogism, addressivity, response-ability, and the role of context.