The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine, are meant to be about Critical Theory, and up to now they have, for good or ill, been faithful (in their fashion) to that intention: but it was an enlivening idea to ask Edward Said to talk about music as well, or instead. Said is a good enough pianist to understand what the professionals are up to. He knows a great deal more about music than most amateurs, and argues persuasively that it should not be left entirely to the rigorous mercies of the musicologists. The result is this very interesting, excited, crammed little book, in which admirable and questionable propositions jostle one another so bewilderingly that it isn’t always easy to know exactly where one is, or what might come next, rather as in a late Beethoven quartet.

There are really two principal subjects, and they remain somewhat at odds with one another. The first is a dutiful act of loyalty to the fashionable notion that works of art must be removed from the sphere of aesthetics for subjection to cultural-historical analysis. The most illuminating sort of writing about music, Said says, is ‘humanistic’ rather than merely aesthetic or technical – it must have its various roles in society and in history, its relation to the discourses of political power, strenuously investigated, just as literature is nowadays primarily a matter for ‘cultural studies’ and routinely submits ‘to ideological or psychoanalytic analysis’. Many pages of the book politely argue with Adorno, who did that sort of thing, though before it became the vogue, with magisterial strength and gloomy inclusiveness. Said, deferential but still his own man, characteristically points out that to treat modern music as a reflection or portent of the world’s present or impending ruin is actually a Eurocentric view, taken, with unconscious colonialist arrogance, to apply universally.

He knows far too much about music to believe that the musical canon is, like the literary one, a white male bourgeois fraud, and the second subject of his transgressive sonata is, roughly, the experience of music in solitude, of private performance and properly creative listening. This is far more interesting, and it establishes the right of Said’s book to be taken more seriously than if it had offered nothing but a Foucauldian exercise in musical ‘archaeology’ or a New Historicist negotiation between musical and other discourses.

His views on world politics, and on literary and cultural history, are seriously held and already well-known, and he was of course under no obligation to put them aside when writing these lectures, even if they seem to have no very intimate connection with his personal experience of music. His most political moment occurs in a slightly apologetic digression on the life and work of Paul de Man. As everybody knows, de Man’s most notorious wartime article argued that to tidy the Jews away somewhere – say, into ‘a Jewish colony isolated from Europe’ – would not be much of a loss to European culture; and commentators have rightly been shocked at this perhaps juvenile but callous anti-semitism. Said’s point, however, is that at the time when de Man was writing there already was such a homeland, in which the indigenous population was already being expropriated. The youthful Nazi sympathiser was casually recommending Zionism; and Said, whatever he’s supposed to be discussing, will not lose his opportunity to point out the connection that existed between right-wing Zionism (now represented by Yitzhak Shamir) and ‘officials of the Third Reich’.