Using the West-Eastern Divan orchestra as a central referent, this essay outlines a modest utopian claim for music in our times. Set against the postmodern belief that music can only be understood responsibly by contextualizing it within the densely particularized networks of its specific localities, the essay argues for musical labor as a productive site for overcoming dangerously ossified sets of social relations. The essay detects in the late work of Edward Said a new vigilance toward the limits of ‘worldliness’, a conceptual orientation with which Said had become widely associated. Instead of merely indicating another site of cultural production, musical performance in the West-Eastern Divan orchestra, also becomes a site of productive forgetting. Against the identity-based forms of belonging and origin characterizing the stalemate of Israeli–Palestinian relations, Said found in music a mechanism for setting adrift identity from its contextualized locale.
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