Cross-Rhythms, Across Cultures: Towards a Multi-Sensory Travel Literature

Cross-Rhythms, Across Cultures: Towards a Multi-Sensory Travel Literature Margaret Topping Daniel Barenboim opens the ‘Prelude’ to his 2010 book, Everything is Connected: The Power of Music, with the bold assertion that: [t]he beginning of a concert is more privileged than the beginning of a book. One could say that sound itself is more privileged than words. A book is full of the same words that are used every day, day after day, to explain, describe, demand, argue, beg, enthuse, tell the truth and lie. Our thoughts take shape in words; therefore, the words on the page must compete with the words in our minds. Music has a much larger world of associations at its disposal precisely because of its ambivalent nature; it is both inside and outside the world.1 Barenboim’s study meditates on how music has the psychological and phenomenological power ‘to speak to all aspects of the human being — the animal, the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual’;2 to teach us, in other words, that ‘everything is connected’. The very existence of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra that Barenboim established with Edward Said in 1999 is testimony to the ‘universal’, physical and metaphysical language of music, to the unmediated affect it produces in the listener. Yet this implied claim of ‘universality’ is not to be equated to a normalizing of a western classical canon and aesthetic, for the orchestra brings together young musicians from Israel, Palestine and the Arab countries to create a forum where they can express themselves freely and openly while at the same time, as Barenboim explains, ‘hearing the 1. Daniel Barenboim, Everything is Connected: The Power of Music (London: Orion Books, 2009), p. 3. 2. Daniel Barenboim, Music Quickens Time (London: Verso, 2008), p. 108. IJFrS 15 (2015) 62 TOPPING narrative of the other’. Moreover, this ‘narrative of the other’ is musical as much as it is social, for the repertoire of the orchestra encompasses canonical Western works (Barenboim is particularly associated with Beethoven), traditional and new works by Middle Eastern composers (Kareem Roustom’s Ramal and Ayal Adler’s Resonating Sounds were premiered alongside the orchestra’s performance of Mozart, Ravel and Bizet at the 2014 BBC Proms), and new soundscapes which combine both, as in the exhilarating improvisation which interwove excerpts from Bizet’s Carmen with Middle Eastern motifs in one of the five encores the orchestra played at this same Proms concert.3 Music, Barenboim argues, makes the West-Eastern Divan possible because it does not contain limited associations as words do. Music teaches us that there is nothing that does not include its parallel or opposite as the case may be; therefore no element is entirely independent because the relationship is by definition interdependent. […] In music we know and accept the hierarchy of a main subject, [but] we accept the permanent presence of an opposite and sometimes even of subversive accompanying rhythms (my emphasis).4 Barenboim identifies music as the ‘purest’ form of expression in a way that echoes Marcel Proust’s famous prizing of music over word in relation to the Vinteuil septet: ‘Mais qu’étaient leurs paroles, qui, comme toute parole humaine, me laissaient si indifférent à côté de la céleste phrase musicale avec laquelle je venais de m’entretenir?’5 But 3. For details of the two pieces premiered at the event, see <http://www.west-eastern- divan.org/news/composers-spotlight-ayal-adler-and-kareem-roustom/> [accessed 15 September 2015]. 4. Barenboim, Everything is Connected, p. 8. 5. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié and others, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89), III, 762. Edward Hughes has explored the narrator’s consequent search for a verbal equivalent to the ‘pliant, supple qualities of musical expression’ and thus for a reconciliation of what Proust terms ‘inanalysable’ sense-impressions and the intellectual activity required in creative expression. See Edward J. Hughes, Marcel Proust: A Study in the Quality of CROSS-RHYTHMS, ACROSS CULTURES 63 this transartistic ambition is also a transnational one in the case of the music performed by the West-Eastern Divan orchestra, for whom it provides a language that seeks to overcome political and ideological differences in the artistic domain and to transcend self/other binaries perpetuated by cross-cultural conflict in the Middle East and beyond. Replacing the politics of polarity with a transnational artistic community is not, however, to erase the acceptance or recognition of difference. As suggested in the italicized phrase above — a literal and metaphorical evocation of a cross-rhythm — Barenboim identifies music as a multi- faceted contact zone, but one grounded in a dynamic of relativism and equal exchange. Instead of a self-other relationship based on a Saidian relationship of power and dominance, he proposes the co-dependence of self and other, of the dominant rhythm and opposite or subversive cross-rhythm. Cross-rhythms — or the simultaneous combination of contrasting rhythms in a musical composition — are characteristic of many non- Western forms, and present, too, in those such as jazz which were progressively ‘de-othered’ in the course of the 20th century.6 From being perceived as ‘primitive’ and ‘un-European’, jazz has been gradually assimilated into the European cultural landscape in a process that, as Matthew F. Jordan has argued in Le Jazz, has entailed an, at times, vexed renegotiation of aspects of French cultural identity. With its suggestions of cultural forms ‘rubbing against’ one another in ways that may be perceived as conflict or harmony, depending on the listener’s own cultural positioning, the cross-rhythm offers a suggestive motif for an exploration of the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter and representation, borrowing and reinvention. It also opens up a space for considering the conventional ambitions of travel writing to capture the multi-sensorial experience of cross-cultural encounter. This article focuses on the significance of music, and specifically the cross- rhythm, both as a literal presence and as an interpretative framework in Awareness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 118. 6. Matthew F. Jordan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 64 TOPPING francophone narratives of travel. It then explores the possibility of cross- cultural ‘frictions’ being eased, resolved or, alternatively, consciously maintained by the cross-rhythms that are created through the co- presence of verbal, visual and musical aesthetics. These considerations will lead into a final, brief reflection on how a new sense of place might be imagined through a fusion of the senses in representation. Writers including Michel Leiris and Boris Vian have, of course, commented on music as a channel for cultural mobility, often citing jazz as a prime example,7 but the focus of the present discussion is Swiss traveller-writer, Nicolas Bouvier (1929 –1998), for whom music represented a multiple, productive ‘contact zone’ in ways that encompass Mary-Louise Pratt’s conception of the term ‘contact zone’ while also extending it into a ‘Third Space’ of democratic interplay and improvised encounter.8 Pratt’s ‘spaces where different cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in high asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’9 give way in Bouvier’s work to a space of evanescence, a frustrated desire on the part of the traveller/ reader to linger and make ‘sense’ of what one is experiencing, like the affective response of a reader to the destabilized metric of a cross- rhythm, or perhaps simply like the experience of listening to music. For Bouvier, music acted as a mediator in a very literal sense, facilitating contact with the cultures he visited. He obsessively collected recordings of non-Western musical forms on his travels, notably Japanese and Eastern European in which, interestingly, cross-rhythms are pervasive.10 7. Boris Vian’s role in nurturing the development of the Paris jazz scene is well documented, helping to bring American jazz musicians and singers to Paris, writing for jazz reviews such as Le Jazz Hot and Paris Jazz and, of course, performing himself. See James Campbell, Paris interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and others on the Left Bank, 1946–60 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994). Michel Leiris’s interest in jazz originates in his participation in the 1931–33 ethnographic mission, ‘La Mission Dakar-Djibouti’, led by Marcel Griaule and including the musicologist André Schaeffer. Leiris’s resulting work, L’Afrique fantôme (1934), begins to address the possibilities of music as a means of cultural encounter. 8. Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2007). 9. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 7. 10. Cross-rhythms are also notably present in the second movement of Debussy’s Quartet CROSS-RHYTHMS, ACROSS CULTURES 65 Textual and visual representations of musical performance and musical instruments reverberate throughout his work, and it is also in the musical textures of his writing — the cross-rhythms that characterize, in different ways, his poetry and his prose — that the possibility of a transmedial and transnational art emerges. Strikingly, music also provides a metaphorical vehicle to describe the sensation of plenitude and/or lack he experiences on his travels: ‘le manque’ for Bouvier is equated to ‘l’absence d’une note qui fait que vous n’avez pas accès à l’harmonie du monde’.11 The comment is made in an interview with Irène Lichtenstein-Fall who questions Bouvier’s use of the image of plenitude, prompting the following response from the traveller-writer: Il y a un très beau livre d’Alain Gheerbrant, Orénoque-Amazone, qui raconte une expédition qu’il a faite dans le blanc de la carte.

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