Parallels and Paradoxes
Explorations in Music and Society
Chapter One
Ara Guzelimian: I want to begin by asking each of you: Where are you at home? Or
do you ever feel at home? Do you feel yourself in perpetual motion?
Daniel Barenboim: The used and abused clich? "I am at home wherever I make
music" is true. I say "used and abused" because many of my colleagues and I
have used this cliche on occasions when we didn1t know exactly how to answer
this very question or didn1t want to be rude in places that were very hospitable
to us yet didn't make us feel at home. Wherever I can play the piano-preferably
with a reasonably good instrument-or wherever I travel with the orchestras that
I lead, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or the Staatskapelle from Berlin, I feel
at home.
I feel at home in a certain way in Jerusalem, but I think this is a little bit
unreal, a poetic idea with which I grew up. We moved to Israel when I was ten
years old and lived in Tel Aviv, which is a city without any history to speak
of, a very modern city, not particularly interesting, but bustling and bubbling
with life. Wh ... read full excerpt from: Parallels and Paradoxes ebook
