In Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West, Rachel Beckles Willson charts a genealogy of recurrent attempts at teaching ‘Western classical music’ to Palestinians in the name of edification – religious at first, then secular – and intercultural communication, which she deems to have failed in fundamental ways. Combining historical research with interviews, observation, and cultural critique, she gives a partial account in two rather different senses: she rejects ‘balance’ in her approach to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and skips nearly four decades between ‘Part I: Holy Land, 1840–1948’ and ‘Part II: State(s), 1987 Onwards’. Willson is candid about both in her introductory chapter.Footnote ¹ Nonetheless, readers will likely divide, on the first count, according to their views of current Middle East politics, into sceptics and the choir to which Willson preaches. Many may also wonder whether something of relevance to the book's concerns might have occurred in the intervening years.

In addition to Said's critique of Orientalism – the book is appropriately shot through with that – two main theoretical frameworks shape the argument and the way in which the author selects and evaluates her evidence. One derives from Michel Foucault's writings on disciplining subjects and governmentality. Music's power to discipline, civilize, and create followers of the Christian Church and its teachings, motivates the principal actors – missionaries, diplomats, and travellers – that occupy the stage in the first half. The capacity of musical education and performance to civilize, provide an alternative to violence, and give hope in the face of oppression, motivates the European, American, and Palestinian music educators and performers who are the principal actors in the second half. Willson argues that a strikingly similar missionary impulse unites the two periods and demonstrates that they are, in fact, linked by a direct genealogy of people and institutions. Postcolonial studies constitutes another theoretical thread, and centres on Dipesh Chakrabarty's work,Footnote ² in particular his concept of the ‘waiting room’. Many other authors are cited, bringing numerous additional theoretical perspectives to the book.

The introductory chapter offers the reader a guide to the book's main argument. Here, Willson first makes the case that Orientalism (European and American) and the post-Enlightenment spread of music education and consumption in Europe shaped the musical activities of missionary projects in the Middle East beginning in the 1840s. The ensuing chapters are grouped into two large sections.

Part I discusses select European and American Christian emissaries who brought aspects of Western music and musical instruction to Palestine from the 1840s to 1948; that is, the last seventy-five years of Ottoman rule and the ensuing thirty years of the British Mandatory period. It does so in five chapters: ‘Revelation’, ‘Distinction’, ‘Education’, ‘Separation’, and ‘Provincialising mission’. Willson brings Foucauldian tools to bear on Western Christians' attitudes expressed upon arrival in Palestine and their responses to the people and musical practices encountered there, mainly as conveyed in the writings of a handful of English, German, and American Protestants of various sects who came to live in the Holy Land and took the musical uplift of some portion of its inhabitants as a mission. These writings are supplemented by observations made by others present at the time, both natives and foreigners, and by recent scholarship such as Jehoash Hirshberg's history of the musical life of Jews in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel (1995) and Tom Segev's anecdotal history of the British Mandatory period (2000).Footnote ³ Given the extensive French Christian impact in Lebanon – predating the post-World War I institution of French rule over Lebanon by many decades – one wonders whether there was any influence of French churches and missions in Palestine, which are not mentioned.

In the second chapter, ‘Distinction’, Willson takes up ‘difference, ethnicity and race’ and contends that ‘the Palestinian case makes a particular contribution … precisely because such ideas were combined not only with European possessiveness but also with European obsessions about the biblical status of the region’ (76). Willson offers a detailed, multisource examination of nineteenth-century English-language writings on Palestinian life, usually presented as evidence of, or in relation to, biblical passages. Willson is also cognizant of German writings of the time and draws on secondary scholarship. She continues to develop the theme of difference and religion, relying on traveller and missionary accounts which offer contrasting opinions on how to improve the ‘natives’ through music.

Music has been promoted as a means for aesthetic and moral uplift at different times and places, in accordance with various philosophies and religious beliefs. In ‘Education’, the third chapter, Willson locates this concern in the early nineteenth century, but leads with a lengthy quotation from a mid-twentieth-century pamphlet by the Palestine Music Teachers' Club, a Quaker-based association. Building on Timothy Mitchell's research on modern schooling in EgyptFootnote ⁴ Willson asks: ‘did missionaries try to “produce” individuals?’ (118). Her answer rests on case studies of German, English, and American missions. She sets the ground for these studies, quite literally, with a discussion of ‘territories for music’ (118–37) that is preceded by a short overview of Martin Stokes's seminal writing on transformation of space through music (117).Footnote ⁵ The discussion moves from the rise of music education in Europe (Britain trailing the continent, according to Willson) with contrasting secular and religious manifestations, to the establishment of schools in Ottoman Palestine by the government and by organizations both religious (mosques, churches) and secular (European-style academies established by immigrant Jews), and finally to a broader consideration of musical life under British rule.

In Chapter 4 (‘Separation’), the Palestine Broadcasting Service offers Willson a case study of ‘the management of people through music’ because it was ‘the one institution through which we can observe musical negotiations between the three main groups – Arab, British, and Jewish’ (160). The final chapter of Part I, bearing the ambiguous title ‘Provincialising mission’, discusses three Palestinian musicians ‘with a broader range of experiences than the missions wished to see’ (182). All three were trained in Western classical music, via church schools. Willson forestalls the criticism that her choices are hardly representative – all three were Christian, and from privileged backgrounds – by arguing that no three individuals would be representative and admits that the evidence is anecdotal, drawn from diaries and memoires. The connections she will subsequently draw in the second part of the book ultimately legitimate her choices. Building the foundation for that argument, Willson introduces Chakrabarty's concept of the ‘waiting room’,Footnote ⁶ glossed as ‘the apparent gap between native and coloniser’ (183), and combines it productively with the ‘contact zone’ theorized by Mary Louise Pratt.Footnote ⁷

‘Culture’, ‘Dialogue’, and ‘Musical missionaries’ are the three main chapters constituting Part II; these are followed by a brief conclusion. Chapter 6, ‘Culture’, offers detailed coverage of Western (primarily European) involvement in cultural projects in the West Bank and Israel. Stories of several individuals who were key to the founding of the National Conservatory in Ramallah are relayed in a section titled ‘Beyond the waiting room’, with the most important point perhaps being that the founders all had strong links to the missionary schools and Anglican church documented and analysed in Part I, with all that such links meant in terms of musical training and values. Willson concludes by pointing to paradoxes inherent in the political complexity of the situation: ‘the occupation is erased by the cultural narrative, but the occupation is actually what provides the very conditions of possibility for the cultural investment’ and politically motivated cultural work by foreigners ‘must develop in explicit denial that it has any political significance’ (258). The section on Western classical music and Israeli Arabs is patchy. Major changes in public taste and the styles of music heard on radio, in festivals, and in concert halls occurred after 1995, when the sociologist Motti Regev wrote on the near absence of Arab music from Israeli airwaves.Footnote ⁸ Over the past few decades, prejudices against Arab and other Middle Eastern music have lost dominance, replaced by outright embrace of such music in many venues.Footnote ⁹

Willson turns to concerts of Western art music by and for Palestinians in Chapter 7, ‘Dialogue’. She proposes that the widespread view that music can be separated from politics (professed by Edward Said, among others) can be reconciled with inherently political projects such as these concerts (promoted by Said, among others) because they serve as the ‘projection of utopia in performance’ (260). She notes the intensive efforts sponsoring organizations devote to controlling image and argues that concerts are to be read as simulacra that are incompatible with the reality of life in the West Bank. An opera aimed at children, created and performed with the Barenboim-Said Foundation's support, offers a rich case study here, read through the views of Palestinians in Ramallah and an Israeli newspaper critic in Tel Aviv. This leads to a discussion of border crossings, both figurative and real, as experienced and hindered by diverse actors, elided in particular representations and highlighted in others. A discussion of the contrasting responses of two English choirs to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel closes the chapter. Citing Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson's ‘visions of postmodernity’ (272), Willson concludes that while simulations become indistinguishable from realities in a late capitalist economy saturated by cultural representations, reality is too pressing for Palestinian society to enable it to occupy such a world.

Willson closes the circle in Chapter 8, ‘Musical missionaries’, where she argues that contemporary European musicians' faith or belief in the power of music is akin to the religious conviction that motivated the European and American actors discussed in Part I. A sense of mission, she argues, similarly motivates these foreigners to use music, despite the deep political and cultural differences that have unfolded from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. She shifts from analysis of institutions and media to ‘work on the ground’ by analysing interviews she conducted with twenty-five European and American musicians who travelled to the West Bank to teach Palestinian children music. It may surprise many to learn that she found these musicians to be motivated initially by the cultural decline and ensuing economic difficulties they felt at home, rather than by Palestinian need. She points to Daniel Barenboim's version of this narrative, which seeks to regenerate Western classical music through early education. In reference to the ‘music Kindergarten’ he helped found in Ramallah, Barenboim says: ‘[y]ou can't expect someone born into a family with no music … to understand when I'm conducting the Schönberg Variations. Therefore you have to go to the process from the beginning’ (295). While Willson encountered differences of opinion, she found a common desire to improve on the situation of classical music in Europe and North America, an attitude that left little room for Palestinian input. She then enumerates the difficulties foreign teachers encountered in the West Bank: experimenting with new approaches was not encouraged; most pupils were very wealthy rather than the refugee camp dwellers that teachers had expected to help; and teachers often felt exploited and disempowered. Willson again draws a link to the nineteenth-century missionaries who were thwarted in their attempts to convert Jews and Muslims. She points to yet another parallel: where missionary work stoked inter-Christian sectarian rivalry before, now competing efforts have led to a ‘cold war’ between two music schools in Ramallah (299). Most music teachers had no prior knowledge of Arab music or other aspects of local culture. Willson points to an extreme contrast between one of the few who did have such training and therefore taught Arab music, which she felt was more appropriate, and teachers who took the position that Western art music was pedagogically superior; she also encountered more nuanced views. On the topic of music as an alternative to violence, thematized at the organizational and promotional levels, teachers found their initial assumptions mistaken, coming to view Israel as the source of violence and often feeling ill-equipped to use music to combat the impact of that violence on children. When she encounters a teacher who feels that the musical instruction she offers has helped children to transform themselves, Willson reduces that to ‘Orientalist constructions of the region as primitive, conflict-driven, religiously fanatical … [and] that Palestinian children need rescuing’ (309). It's a cynical critique that stops at tropes rather than probing actual experience. Again she reduces the contemporary to a repeat of the nineteenth century: ‘the pattern of dissatisfaction at home, perception of problems (and thus opportunities) elsewhere, desire combined with interpolation, and then an experience of opposition are very similar’ (309). The fit is almost too neat and one cannot help but feel that this argument should have been tested by comparison with both early missionaries and contemporary aid workers in other strife-torn regions of the world.

Willson concludes by suggesting that her book makes two particular theoretical interventions: it functions as a history of musical Orientalism that offers a way of moving beyond questionable interpretations of representation; and it serves as an archaeology of Western classical music in ‘(trans)mission’, which she articulates as a parallel to the archaeology of difference offered by Bernard McGrane (311).Footnote ¹⁰ The wide array of theory that has informed the book continues to broaden as she elaborates on this proposal, encompassing transnational movements, neoliberal development, George Yúdice's work on the expedience of culture, and Judith Butler's writing on loss, to name a few.Footnote ¹¹ She raises several challenging questions, such as: ‘What would it mean to those who love and work with Western classical music, to insist that it be thoroughly divested of its discourses of elevation?’ (315). She points cogently to the precarity of Western classical music outside the academy, invoking the loss that Butler theorizes. Building on another Butlerian statement regarding the impossibility of imposing ‘a language of politics developed within First World contexts on women who are facing the threat of imperialist economic exploitation and cultural obliteration’ (316), Willson suggests that the export of Western classical music is increasingly problematic and foresees the possibility that the ‘missionary strategy … will be revoked’ (317).

This is a compelling argument, one that would be even more convincing had it not been made solely through critique that holds its subjects at arm's length. The author's dispassionate analysis and constant critical distance rob the book of force. Given the enormous theoretical base already mobilized by Willson, one hesitates to suggest other references, but the analysis would have gained by engaging with recent thinking on embodied cognition. This body of scholarship, which is very different from writings on postcoloniality and Orientalism, raises provocative questions about music making as a form of intersubjective embodied experience and, as such, could serve as an antidote to overt and implicit universalist assumptions. An attentiveness to this literature might, for example, offer a different basis for thinking about the children who learned songs from missionaries more than a century ago, as well as those who have received instruction from foreigners in recent years. Despite the author's conversations with children – ‘Early on in my research I spent considerable time chatting with groups of children at music workshops and at music schools’ (31) – children appear in the book almost exclusively as coerced subjects of discipline or foreign aid, their voices largely absent. I am also left wondering how to reconcile the author's pervasive top-down analytical gaze with the bottom-up tales of individual discovery and formation, often in the face of adversity, so cogently analysed by RacyFootnote ¹² and corroborated in my research with Palestinian musicians.Footnote ¹³

Partisan scholarship also mars this theoretically smart book. The author is as guilty of a partial view as the many Israelis and Europeans she critiques. She offers a problematic summary of the complex history of Israel/Palestine in the Introduction. Admittedly, this is not an easy task, but one can accomplish it without being so pervasively biased. Her summary includes an unsubstantiated parallel between British Mandate and German Nazi divisions between Jews and non-Jews (19) that betrays a politically induced blindness incommensurate with the far more nuanced and sophisticated distinctions that Willson makes elsewhere. The critique she levels later in the book against a German author, noting the ‘apparent invisibility of Dalman's political position’, is mirrored in her own extremely odd circumlocution that follows: ‘the new situation driving mass Jewish migration’ (102). Rarely have Nazi rule, repression, and genocide been so completely occluded. Sometimes Willson's bias is simply a matter of phrasing: ‘718,000 died or became refugees in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria’ (20), referring to the 1948 conflict, gives the uninformed the sense that more than half of those 718,000 died (as death is mentioned before refugee) but that is wildly off-target.Footnote ¹⁴ At the end of Chapter 7, the border crossings between Israel and the occupied territories are a central topic. The impact of these crossings on Palestinian lives and dignity is undeniable, but nowhere does Willson mention the reason for their profusion: the wave of suicide bombers crossing into Israel in the 1990s who blew up themselves along with many innocent bystanders (including Arabs as well as Israeli Jews and foreigners); the hopes that the Oslo Accord had accorded Palestinians and Israelis; and the concomitant willingness of a majority of the Israeli public to negotiate with the newly constituted Palestinian Authority over withdrawal from most of the occupied territories. However one may feel about the suicide bombers' motivations and actions, the blossoming of far more numerous and, yes, repressive controls on Palestinian movement was a direct outcome. Similarly, Israeli attacks on Gaza are mentioned only through the eyes of Palestinians, without any reference to the intensive Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza at civilian targets in Israel that set off those attacks (273).

Arab musical practices are not the concern of this book. When they do enter the discussion, it is on the briefest of terms, and the discussion is marred by various inaccuracies; for example, the ‘double flute’ mentioned on page 43 surely refers to a mijwiz, a reed instrument with two tubes, and a peasant in the fields was likely to have played a rababa, not a rebec (194), a term applied only to medieval European instruments. Several of the people and institutions in Willson's account also figure in my research on Israeli/Palestinian musical interactionsFootnote ¹⁵ as well as in research by others.Footnote ¹⁶ The brief reference to such studies (22) summarizes them incorrectlyFootnote ¹⁷ and fails to recognize that this field of activity intersects the one studied by Willson in numerous ways.

These concerns aside, Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West is an important contribution to ongoing debates over the current state and future of Western art music and education, the use of music as a means of resolution or amelioration of conflict, the expedience of culture in the current neoliberal moment, and numerous related topics. It should be central to any discussion of musical missions, whether these be religious, humanitarian, or explicitly political in orientation.