[In the review below, Bowie praises Said's diverse insights and ideas about music in Musical Elaborations, concluding that the book enriches yet further problematizes music criticism.]

Let it not be said that writers on music cannot write, for some of them certainly can. Here is Gerald Abraham, for example, discussing Chopin as melodist in A Hundred Years of Music:

He had an instinct amounting to genius for inventing melodies that would be actually ineffective if sung or played on an instrument capable of sustaining tone but which, picked out in percussive points of sound each beginning to die as soon as born, are enchanting and give an illusion of singing that is often lovelier than singing itself.

The contrast between the continuous cantilena of, say, Bellini's melodies and the broken continuity of Chopin's has found its way into Abraham's syntax and given his sentence its own tune. He works hard to combine the technical description of sound-production with a lively account of musical pleasure being sought and found. But writing about music often goes awry when this sort of equilibrium is lost. Music criticism as a humanistic discipline is threatened on the one hand by technical analysis far in excess of its occasion and, on the other, by an empty striving for expressive effect.

Edward Said, in [Musical Elaborations, a] lecture series originally delivered at the Irvine campus of the University of California, is extraordinarily good at getting the balance right and at enlisting new rhetorical tools for the description of musical composition and performance. The lectures offer a set of trenchant notes towards a new kind of interpretative criticism. What writers on music most need, according to Professor Said, is an active awareness of what has been going on recently in neighbouring fields of interpretation, including feminism, cultural sociology and deconstruction, and a greater willingness to reconnect the quasi-autonomous musical work to the social and political force-fields in which it is produced, heard and studied. The new critical discourse that Said envisages is not, however, designed simply to create a public envelope for private artistic experiences. Said has much grander ambitions for it: to find ways of building bridges between the intimate, note-by-note unfolding of structured musical argument and the ambient structures of society, and, in due course, to do this systematically, without resorting to a trivial play of analogy between the two realms.

In producing his provisional sketch of this new, wide-ranging yet integrated approach, and in beginning to map an acoustic space that is also a social space, he is greatly assisted by the semi-technical term announced in his title: elaboration. This, it soon emerges, is a matter of working out and working through, of bringing complex structures to birth from simple-seeming initial motifs, and of allowing the labour and the laboriousness of musical craft to be commemorated by the critic even as he relives the easeful rapture that listening to music can bring. For music to be elaborate in Said's sense—which is derived in part from Gramsci—it has to be multiform, occupy the realm of transformational process and produce its effects of complexity, plenitude and completeness by an arduous espousal of the temporal dimension. And there is no real point in trying to cheat your way out of your time-boundedness, for music that refuses to be elaborate and temporal rapidly becomes shallow.

Said writes brilliantly about the musical works that for him best exemplify the self-delighting "elaborative" imagination at work. Bach's canonic variations on "Von Himmel hoch" are the supreme emblem of this creative furor. This work is

an exercise in pure combinatorial virtuosity. The melody is set first in the bass, then in the soprano, then in middle voices, all the time that the figural elaborations imitate each other in strict canon writing at different chordal intervals. Yet the overall impression communicated by the work is of something plastic and benign: the fearsomely problematic contrapuntal difficulties negotiated by Bach are, as it were, completely disguised. Moreover, the chorale melody itself is displaced so often from one register to the other that we sense Bach's ability to dislodge even the chorale's pious technical sententiousness with polyphonic manipulations that testify to a demonic power.

By skilful use of notions drawn from modern literary study, writing of this kind speaks with appropriate energy and nuance about qualities of Bach's counterpoint that could easily have been allowed to ebb away in a well-behaved technical analysis. Even the unexplained side-step from "benign" to "demonic", in describing the general potency of a single piece, has its own contribution to make: Bach's inventiveness can indeed strike the hearer as obliging at one moment and disruptive the next—or by turns supremely sane and almost mad. Glenn Gould caught something of the same terrifying uncertainty when he spoke of the great fugues as belonging both to the civilized intercourse of human beings and to the unpeopled Northern wastes.

Baroque fugal and variation forms suit Said's argument well when he needs to characterize the ordered multifariousness of musical thought, for these forms allow many things to happen at once and do not drive over-zealously towards a pre-ordained harmonic goal. Over and against this vision of creative freedom, he sets the actual or potential rigidities of sonata form. For Said, the trouble with this celebrated organizing device, especially in its long-lived Viennese incarnation, is that it encourages a cult of wilfulness and control among composers. If they fail to take precautions, their chosen structure can make them: dominative, coercive, authoritative, combative, overtly administrative and executive….

These and other adjectives, as they rain upon the sonata principle during the final pages of the book, seem to be gate-crashers from another kind of polemic altogether. They are charges that a gentle university humanist might be goaded into making against a particularly offensive Dean, but they have little aesthetic or political force when directed at Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, or even at their imitators. Said caricatures the role of the sonata development section—it is "the space opened up between two strongly marked poles, the inaugural declarations, which is where the theme first gets stated, and at the end, which is where a final cadential formula winds things up"—and has nothing to say about the extremes of tonal uncertainty and waywardness that the great Viennese composers discovered there. The very longevity of sonata form can be explained in terms very different from those that Said deploys with such relish. Could it not be that the centrally placed zone of uncertainty in sonata movements remained fascinating for so long precisely because it introduced an asymmetry between the "strongly marked poles" of exposition and recapitulation, made it impossible for the one simply to repeat the other and provided an ironic counter-weight to the rhetoric of authority and control?

This is a wonderfully alert and audacious book, and one that, inhabiting border territory, has a proper readiness to be speculative and to take risks. Said is one of those major scholars who can bring a new comparative discipline into view before our eyes without appointing himself as its founding mandarin or its proprietor. He never loses sight of the fact that there is still much shared work for literary and musical scholars to do if the project sketched here is to bear fruit. And the book has an informing tension that other border-dwellers will immediately recognize. The pleasure principle draws Said back to an enraptured intimacy with the work of art, and an astute anthropological intelligence draws him away again to the highly organized social world that composers, patrons, performers, entrepreneurs and concert goers inhabit. The book is full of insights into matters that fall in the transitional region between "pure" musicality and music as social act: from the pianist or composer as superstar, to the rise of audio culture and to the role of personal reminiscence in the listener's experience of musical time. Said proceeds with zest and demythologizing acerbity.

At the end of the final lecture, the elegiac self-referentiality of Richard Strauss's last works brings Said to his own profession of faith. What the humane study of music now most requires is "a mode for 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". It is perhaps rather strange that the inward and backward-looking intensities of Strauss's Metamorphosen should bring us so abruptly to a progressive, public-spirited and outward-looking research programme such as this, and stranger still, when we remember the author's earlier exhortations, that nothing should be said about the ruined fabric of German society at the time. The pursuit of musical pleasure has won the day, in the present book at least. But as a whole, Professor Said's pioneering work makes possible a richer and more problematic view of Metamorphosen, and of much else.