Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 46

THE BARENBOIM CASE: HOW TO LINK MUSIC AND DIPLOMACY STUDIES
1. A Claim for Autonomy in Public Space
Music exercises power on human bodies but also on hearts. That is why it was
used by political leaders, whatever the nature of the political regime. From the
birth of the opera in the Italian peninsula (Alazard 2002) to the chanson révolutionnaire,
music accompanies the life not to say the ritual of a political organization
at large (as Pasler (2009) convincingly demonstrated for the Third French Republic).
This process is intrinsically connected to war and militarization more generally (Ramel
and Roche 2017). On the one hand, music illustrates symbolically a victory, which promoted
the outbreak of a full-fledged programmatic genre like the “battle music” of the
Renaissance On the other hand, music offers a resource of energy in combat: from the
sound of drums to techno music, rhythmic and sonorous elements are accompanying
soldiers during warfare since centuries (a contemporary example, the Iraq war, has been
examined by Pieslak 2009). All these phenomena highlighted manipulations of musical
art by the political elites.
“I am a musician, not a politician”
Daniel Barenboim’s position is radically different in two ways. First of all, his action is
not sponsored by a protagonist in the Israel–Palestine conflict and the created musical
structures do not receive any subsidies from Israelis or Palestinians. Furthermore, he
considers his action as “outside” the realm of politics. In an interview with Al-Jazeera in
2013, Barenboim clearly stated: “I am a musician, not a politician” (Barenboim 2013a).
This qualification is a leitmotif in the discourse produced on the Divan. It is based on
two main distinctions:
Politics versus Music. First of all, Barenboim opposes musical and political spheres because
both refer to spaces governed by conflicting logics. Performing music is a search
of the absolute which does not suffer from any concessions. To serve the aesthetic work
supposes a form of devotion which prohibits any concession, any arrangement. To do
politics, on the contrary, lies in compromise: “The politician is the master of the compromise.
In music, you can accept everything except the compromise” (Barenboim 2013a).
Behind this assertion, Barenboim denounces connivance.
Orchestra versus Normalization. The second distinction concerns the position of the
orchestra. On many occasions, Barenboim stressed that the Divan cannot be described
as an orchestra of “normalization” following the official Israeli standpoint, namely the
maintenance of the status quo, which presupposes the de facto recognition of illegal
settlements as an integral part of Israeli territory. On the contrary, Barenboim does
not intend to translate the musical experience of the orchestra into political terms. If
it enables indeed complete equality between the members project (Barenboim 2013a;
Tribot Laspière 2013c), this equality is limited to the musical area.
However, this claim for autonomy does not result from celebrity diplomacy of whom
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