Daniel Barenboim calls for ‘music once more to be taught in schools on a par with literature, mathematics or biology’. Music forces us to listen to contrapuntal voices – a practice Barenboim places on a par with the democratic right to vote. In the Q&A, Barenboim addresses his own development as a musician, his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the BDS movement, and the success of the West-Eastern Divan orchestra.
Filmed at the Southbank Centre, London. Introduced by Jacqueline Rose.
ABOUT THE LRB
Since 1979, the London Review of Books has stood up for the tradition of the literary and intellectual essay in English. Each issue contains up to 15 long reviews and essays by academics, writers and journalists. There are also shorter art and film reviews, as well as poems and a lively letters page.
A typical issue moves through political commentary to science or ancient history by way of literary criticism and social anthropology. So, for example, an issue can open with a piece on the rhetoric of war, move on to reassessing the reputation of Pythagoras, follow that with articles on the situation in Iraq, the 19th-century super-rich, Nabokov’s unpublished novel, how saints got to be saints, the life and work of William Empson, and an assessment of the poetry of Alice Oswald.
