Papers by Rachel Beckles Willson
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, 2005
An Introduction to Music Studies, 2009
Tempo, 1998
... Only one vocal work of significance was both started and completed in the ensuing seven-year ... more ... Only one vocal work of significance was both started and completed in the ensuing seven-year ... hall, intoning horn-call-like figures normally associated with new arrival: a tragic gesture of hope ... The piece seems to end with guitar chords resounding in the aura of tam-tam, gong ...
Palestine and the West, 2013
Palestine and the West, 2013
Palestine and the West, 2013
Music Analysis and the Body: Experiments, Explorations and Embodiments, 2016
Against Value in the Arts, 2016
Orientalism and Musical Mission presents a new way of understanding music's connections with impe... more Orientalism and Musical Mission presents a new way of understanding music's connections with imperialism, drawing on new archive sources and interviews and using the lens of 'mission'. Rachel Beckles Willson demonstrates how institutions such as churches, schools, radio stations and governments, influenced by missions from Europe and North America since the mid-nineteenth century, have consistently claimed that music provides a way of understanding and reforming Arab civilians in Palestine. Beckles Willson discusses the phenomenon not only in religious and developmental aid circles where it has had strong currency, but also in broader political contexts. Plotting a historical trajectory from the late Ottoman and British Mandate eras to the present time, the book sheds new light on relations between Europe, the USA and the Palestinians, and creates space for a neglected Palestinian music history.
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra - founded in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim with the support of Edward... more The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra - founded in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim with the support of Edward W. Said in response to the Israel-Palestine conflict - brings together young Arabs, Jews and Spaniards for a workshop and concert tour every year. It displays a tension between repertoire (exclusively the Western classical tradition) and marketing (as an expression of inter-cultural dialogue). Drawing on fieldwork from 2006, the article analyses this tension as it evolves for players who shift repeatedly between the demands of Western orchestral playing and political discussion. It exposes the way the hierarchy of musical roles
and the discourse elaborated around them create an environment that erases the political identities of players; and discusses the ways in which this environment is punctured at certain moments by a discursive or practical intervention, causing political allegiances to rise back to the surface explosively (only to be subsumed once again into music). Although the orchestra is set up to oppose the violence of war in the Middle East, it can be seen to contain its own disconcertingly coercive regime, one emerging from its hierarchical constitution with
Barenboim as omnipotent leader, the professional ambitions of players, and the power that music can have in confounding the conceptual sphere.
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, described by its founder conductor Daniel Barenboim as a “utopi... more The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, described by its founder conductor Daniel Barenboim as a “utopian republic,” is a much publicized example of the contemporary trend for engaging western classical music with social concerns. In this article I situate it in the context of Richard Dyer’s reflections on musical utopia, and take the concerts that it presented in the summer of 2006 as case studies. I also explore the potential of Alfred Gell’s theory of art to problematize the singularity of the orchestra’s utopian projection (harmonious collaboration between Arabs and Jews) and expose a range of competing utopias that sustain it. As an epilogue, I contribute to the debate about how we can contextualize the orchestra within the thinking of its former intellectual figurehead, the late Edward W. Said.
In this article I address ideas underpinning the teaching of western classical music by European ... more In this article I address ideas underpinning the teaching of western classical music by European and North American musicians on Palestine’s West Bank. I introduce the establishment and growth of this teaching movement since the mid-1990s as a product of broader international investment in the region, and suggest that it can be approached tellingly through the lens of mission. My extensive interview material has indicated ideational echoes with nineteenth-century Protestant interventions into ‘the Holy Land’, and exposed how Orientalist tropes about social difference, western music’s beneficence and regional violence continue to underpin the thinking of foreign workers in the region. It has also revealed a structural similarity to earlier missionary impulses: foreign
musicians in residence focus on their music-aid work in Palestine, yet - just as were nineteenth-century missionaries - they are most often there as a result of perceived problems in their homelands.
The article analyses the reception of György Kurtág's The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza op.7 in Ger... more The article analyses the reception of György Kurtág's The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza op.7 in Germany in 1968 and Hungary in 1968 and 1974 in terms of cultural values and ambitions that were incommensurably divided in the Cold War era. Initially contextualizing The Sayings within Hungarian post-war musical society, it then explains the 'delegation' of Hungarians who travelled to Darmstadt to perform it (and other contemporary works) there. German reception reveals a sense of feeling in the cultural 'centre', and a tendency to exoticize the Eastern visitors. Hungarian reception back home reveals both a pretence that the German reception had been wildly successful, and a need to assert a positive future for Hungarian music that drew on mythical tropes of regeneration and redemption. When The Sayings was subjected to musicological study in 1974 this tendency was yet stronger, the work itself seen as a statement about a positive future and a rebirth for Hungarian music.
Responding to recent work on historical performance and to cultural anthropologies of music, this... more Responding to recent work on historical performance and to cultural anthropologies of music, this article presents a case study in performance practice within the Western classical tradition. It argues that the methods of performance preparation characteristic of the Hungarians György Kurtág and Ferenc Rados share underlying beliefs that, while by no means representative of a ‘school’, nonetheless indicate a common tradition of thought. Through observation and analysis, I demonstrate that this is characterized by a shared sense of ancestry, an emphasis on ‘nature’ and spontaneity, and a rejection of artifice and rationality.
Typical of a strand of post-Enlightenment thought (represented most prominently in musicology by Theodor Adorno), the belief system is yet more specifically congruent with modern ideas of ‘Central Europe’ as projected by Milan Kundera and subsequent writers from the former Eastern Bloc. In that it shuns rationalized commercialism (artifice, showbiz) it comes to celebrate imperfection. A celebrated, or ‘necessary’, failure emerges as a critique of modernity's reified slickness. In other words, performance practice equals social utopia.
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Papers by Rachel Beckles Willson
and the discourse elaborated around them create an environment that erases the political identities of players; and discusses the ways in which this environment is punctured at certain moments by a discursive or practical intervention, causing political allegiances to rise back to the surface explosively (only to be subsumed once again into music). Although the orchestra is set up to oppose the violence of war in the Middle East, it can be seen to contain its own disconcertingly coercive regime, one emerging from its hierarchical constitution with
Barenboim as omnipotent leader, the professional ambitions of players, and the power that music can have in confounding the conceptual sphere.
musicians in residence focus on their music-aid work in Palestine, yet - just as were nineteenth-century missionaries - they are most often there as a result of perceived problems in their homelands.
Typical of a strand of post-Enlightenment thought (represented most prominently in musicology by Theodor Adorno), the belief system is yet more specifically congruent with modern ideas of ‘Central Europe’ as projected by Milan Kundera and subsequent writers from the former Eastern Bloc. In that it shuns rationalized commercialism (artifice, showbiz) it comes to celebrate imperfection. A celebrated, or ‘necessary’, failure emerges as a critique of modernity's reified slickness. In other words, performance practice equals social utopia.
and the discourse elaborated around them create an environment that erases the political identities of players; and discusses the ways in which this environment is punctured at certain moments by a discursive or practical intervention, causing political allegiances to rise back to the surface explosively (only to be subsumed once again into music). Although the orchestra is set up to oppose the violence of war in the Middle East, it can be seen to contain its own disconcertingly coercive regime, one emerging from its hierarchical constitution with
Barenboim as omnipotent leader, the professional ambitions of players, and the power that music can have in confounding the conceptual sphere.
musicians in residence focus on their music-aid work in Palestine, yet - just as were nineteenth-century missionaries - they are most often there as a result of perceived problems in their homelands.
Typical of a strand of post-Enlightenment thought (represented most prominently in musicology by Theodor Adorno), the belief system is yet more specifically congruent with modern ideas of ‘Central Europe’ as projected by Milan Kundera and subsequent writers from the former Eastern Bloc. In that it shuns rationalized commercialism (artifice, showbiz) it comes to celebrate imperfection. A celebrated, or ‘necessary’, failure emerges as a critique of modernity's reified slickness. In other words, performance practice equals social utopia.