This open access book considers Edward Said's work on music as a site of debate between musicology and postcolonial studies.

According to Said, thinking musically can challenge the normative and colonial principles of knowledge formation in the humanities, which conventionally manifests as written text. He therefore proposed to read the cultural archive “polyphonically” to articulate alternative voices that are silenced by the dominating discourse. In this book, Wouter Capitain presents a polyphonic reading of Said's work itself, including thousands of unpublished documents, interpreting his texts as dynamic performances that tell multiple stories simultaneously.

The music-related documents of the unpublished material from Columbia University's Edward Said collection have not previously been discussed. Here, Said's writing on music is established as multivocal, where “Edward Said” performs several voices that interact in his work and its reception; as an intersecting site of Said's multiple professional activities; and as polyphonic interplays, through the comparison various versions and iterations of his writings.

Edward Said on Music is a musicological intervention in postcolonial studies, positioned within debates that take place in both fields, and in relation to this previous scholarship on Said. Here, Said's texts are used as a vehicle to delineate the intersections between musicology and postcolonial studies that also resonate in debates far beyond the legendary scholar's work.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Niedersachsen Fund, University of Gottingen, Germany.