Counterpoint: Buber, Barenboim, Said – and the Dialogical as Peace Work

 

I. A summer evening in Weimar

 

In the summer of 1999, a group of young musicians – Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Jordanians – sat in a rehearsal room in Weimar. The city was the European Capital of Culture that year. Goethe's spirit lay in the streets. Buchenwald lay twenty minutes away by car. The course was led by two men at the peak of their international activity: the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, born in Buenos Aires and raised in Jerusalem, and the literary theorist Edward Said, born in Jerusalem and raised in Cairo. One an Israeli. The other a Palestinian. They had become friends in the early 1990s and had discovered that they shared a conviction that surpassed most political analyses: that people who play music together cannot be reduced to being each other's opponents.

The orchestra they founded that summer was given the name West-Eastern Divan – after Goethe's collection of poems, in which the German poet tried to listen his way into the Persian poet Hafiz. The name itself is already a programme. Two worlds set in conversation, without one being absorbed by the other.

It is this small scene – Weimar, the rehearsal room, the two men, the young musicians – that is the opening image of this article series. Not because the series is about the West-Eastern Divan, but because what happened in that rehearsal room is the clearest and most vivid image I know of what this series is trying to think about: how dialogue can be practice, how music can be one of humanity's deepest exercises in being together, and what peace work can look like when it is not a matter of abstract reconciliation projects, but of who sits beside you in a rehearsal room.

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II. Three voices and an heir

 

Three voices hold this series up. The fourth is my own. I have no ambition to stand on a par with the other three, but I feel that I stand in their reverberation, and it is that reverberation I want the reader to hear.

The first voice is Martin Buber, born in Vienna in 1878, died in Jerusalem in 1965. Philosopher, translator, Zionist and critic of Zionism, the man who gave us the book Ich und Du in 1923 – the small work about how we can speak to another as Thou, not about another as It. Dialogical philosophy has since 1923 lain as a quiet undertone beneath large parts of the twentieth century's thinking about relation, ethics and human encounter.

The second voice is Daniel Barenboim, born in 1942 in Buenos Aires, moved with his parents to the newly established Israel in 1952, and in the decades since one of his generation's most significant pianists and conductors. In his autobiography A Life in Music (1992, p. 24) he himself names Buber as one of two philosophers who shaped him in his youth: "As a very young man in Israel I came under the influence of two philosophers who impressed me greatly – one was Martin Buber and the other Max Brod." About Buber he goes on to write that it was "a great privilege" to attend several of his lectures at the Hebrew University. There was no formal instruction, no master-pupil tradition. But the young musician sat in the lecture hall and heard the older philosopher speak, and something of what Buber said has stayed with Barenboim for the rest of his life.

The third voice is Edward Said, born in Jerusalem in 1935 into a Christian Palestinian-Arab family, raised in Cairo, educated at Princeton and Harvard, professor of comparative literature at Columbia, died in 2003 after several years with leukaemia. Said is perhaps best known for the book Orientalism from 1978 and the vast academic field it opened. In 1993 he published Culture and Imperialism, and it is there that he introduces what he calls contrapuntal reading as a method. He draws the concept directly from the music he loved and himself played: counterpoint as several melodic lines running simultaneously without absorbing one another.

The fourth voice is mine – violinist through an entire adult life, conductor, professor of violin, and now, from the summer of 2026, also a gestalt therapist. Barenboim has been a point of orientation for me since my student years; I have studied his recordings, read his books, followed the West-Eastern Divan for many years. Buber is required reading in gestalt therapy training. When I now set out to write a series of articles in which the phenomenological and dialogical foundations of gestalt therapy are illuminated through classical music, it is not because I have chosen the axis Buber → Barenboim → Said as a framework. It is because it has already chosen me. The line is biographically authentic, and that is one of the few things I dare to say with certainty.

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III. Buber: dialogue as philosophy and as action

 

Buber's great breakthrough as a thinker was, paradoxically, a book that is not philosophy in the strict sense. Ich und Du from 1923 is almost a poem, a meditation, or perhaps a series of aphorisms circling a single insight: that human life is lived in two fundamental attitudes, not in one. The first he calls I-It. It is the attitude in which the other, or the world, or an object, appears as an object of my observation, my analysis, my use, my utility. I-It is necessary. We cannot live without that fundamental attitude. Science lives there. Practical decisions live there. Much of our everyday life takes place there.

The second attitude he calls I-Thou. It is the moment in which the other appears as a whole being, as present, not as an object I can place and fix. In I-Thou it is the case that I too am whole; I am not split between observer and actor. I am there. The other is there. It is between us that something happens.

What is important in Buber is that I-Thou is not a method. It is not something I can learn in a course and then "carry out" on my next client or interlocutor. It is a fundamental attitude that comes and goes, that alternates with I-It, and for which we practise being available. It cannot be planned. It cannot be guaranteed. But it can be prepared for, and it can be honestly attempted.

When Barenboim received the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal in 2004, he did not speak first and foremost about dialogical philosophy as theory. He spoke of Buber as a figure who had dared to say difficult things about Zionism, about the relationship with the Arabs, about the possibility – and the obligation – of coexistence long before it was welcome. There is something beautiful in the fact that it is precisely this Buber-axis that Barenboim has internalised: not Buber as sweet religious philosopher, but Buber as uncomfortable contemporary voice.

In gestalt therapy training, Buber's I-Thou is required reading. It is often presented as a counterweight to the more individualistic, narcissism-oriented wing of humanistic psychology. It was Laura and Fritz Perls's generation who brought Buber into the gestalt tradition, and thereafter Yontef, Friedman, Hycner and Jacobs who further developed the dialogical perspective. When a gestalt therapist says that "the other is not an object", he or she is quoting, consciously or unconsciously, Buber.

One small reservation is nonetheless worth keeping open. Buber is a philosopher easy to misuse. The dialogical turn can, if we are not on guard, become a moral pose we put on in order to appear good. I-Thou can become a label we all hang on ourselves, and that is almost the surest way of being in I-It. Buber himself was very aware of this. It is why he returns, again and again, to the point that I-Thou is event, not state. It is something that happens between people, not something one person does. Every time we try to "be dialogical" as a technique, we are already back in It. Buber does not let us off cheaply. It is precisely this rigour that in my view makes him so interesting for therapy, for music, and also for politics.

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IV. Said's counterpoint: from the music to the way of reading

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Music was never foreign to Said. His home in Cairo, and later in New York, was full of music; he himself played at a high amateur level, and when I now read his writings on Wagner, Bach, Beethoven and Furtwängler, it becomes clear to me that his musical understanding is deep and technically competent in a way that few literary theorists have been.

In Culture and Imperialism (1993) Said does something surprising: he uses a technical musical term – counterpoint – as a frame for how text and culture can be read. Counterpoint is the art of setting several melodic lines against each other in such a way that they keep their independence, but form meaning together. Each voice has its path. No voice is absorbed. They serve one another, but not by becoming the other.

For Said, contrapuntal reading means that he cannot read, for example, a Jane Austen novel without at the same time reading the imperial reality that the novel's social world presupposes. The plantation in Antigua, which is barely mentioned in Mansfield Park, is not a trifle. It is one of the voices in the counterpoint, and without it the Austen melody becomes poorer, less true.

It is a way of reading that resists either/or. It refuses to let one narrative voice cover over another. It demands that several stories be held in the ear at the same time.

What interests me is how precisely the musical concept of counterpoint functions as method in Said's hands. Counterpoint is not harmony. It is not a pleasant compositional ideal in which everything melts together into beauty. On the contrary, the voices in a strict fugal composition can challenge each other, cross into each other's territory, hold fast to dissonances that by all harmonic rules "ought" to resolve. It is precisely by each voice holding to its own direction and its own logic, not by their agreeing, that the contrapuntal weaving finds its strength. When Said transfers this to a way of reading, he signals that the dialogical is not the same as the reconciliatory. It is not a call to "meet in the middle". It is a commitment to letting each voice be allowed to be what it is, even when that is uncomfortable.

When I now read Said together with gestalt theory, it strikes me again and again how close he lies to Buber. Buber says: the other is not an object, not a means for my self-understanding. Said says: the other's story is not a backdrop for my story, but an independent melody playing at the same time as mine. Polarity work in gestalt therapy says: opposites are not to be dissolved, they are to be held, and it is in their simultaneity that something genuinely new can emerge.

It is the same figure of thought in three different languages. Philosophically in Buber. In literary theory in Said. Clinically and phenomenologically in the gestalt tradition. And as musical practice – as experienceable practice, not as theory – in counterpoint itself, as it is lived in a Bach fugue or in a Beethoven string quartet.

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V. The West-Eastern Divan as situation and field

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When Barenboim and Said founded the orchestra in Weimar in 1999, it was not a peace-political project in any conventional sense. There were no negotiations, no declarations, no official solutions. There was a rehearsal room, and there was a score. The recruitment age was from eighteen to twenty-seven. There was a requirement that the young musicians should play well, and that they should be willing to sit and play beside someone who politically was their opponent.

What Barenboim and Said did was to construct a situation in which the dialogical attitude was no longer an ideal one was free to choose or not choose. This dialogical attitude was, quite simply, a practical necessity. An Israeli first violinist and a Syrian violist must listen to one another in order for, say, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony to come to life. There is really no way around it. The listener is not an idea about a listener; the listener is a specific person on a specific chair, and if I am not in contact with him or her, the phrase collapses, and the whole ensemble with it.

In gestalt-theoretical language, particularly as developed by Georges Wollants, this is a way of working with the situation itself as the unit. The dialogical does not arise in isolated individuals; it arises in a field in which specific people, a specific situation, a specific task and a specific time play together. Change one factor in the field, and the relationship changes. Barenboim and Said understood this. They constructed a field in which the dialogical could not be avoided – not because the musicians should become best friends, but because the music demands it.

I think this could also have been an experiment in the spirit of Perls. Fritz Perls, one of the founders of gestalt therapy, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany; he got out in 1933, via the Netherlands and South Africa, to the United States. His and Laura's work is woven through with exile, and with the question of how people who have been through extreme political violence can find their way back to a living contact with their own experience, and with others. It is no accident that gestalt therapy places such great emphasis on the here and now. When history has been so violent that the past threatens to engulf the future, the now becomes the only place from which it is possible to breathe.

The West-Eastern Divan stands in the same tradition. It is not the working-through of the past, nor the planning of the future. It is the rehearsal room of the present, where playing the phrase together is the only thing that exists. The Palestinian violist and the Israeli cellist may be politically at odds – many are. But for the four hours the rehearsal lasts, they exist in a shared field where the task is the same: let Mozart be Mozart.

It is important to be precise here, for the project can easily be romanticised. Many young musicians who have participated in the orchestra have since, in both interviews and books, been clear that the four hours in the rehearsal room did not necessarily change their political views. Elena Cheah's book An Orchestra Beyond Borders: Voices of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (2009) gathers many such testimonies. They changed something else, harder to name – a keynote in how the other existed for them. It is not political conversion. It is closer to what Buber calls being touched; the other stops being a category, and becomes a specific face, a specific sound, a specific set of movements on a chair beside one's own. Often it is no more than that. But no less, either. It is from such small shifts in keynote that peace work actually becomes possible – less often from grand declarations.

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VI. Gestalt therapy's foundation in the violence of the twentieth century

 

It is seldom said explicitly, but I think it is worth saying: the founders of gestalt therapy came from exile. Fritz and Laura Perls were both German Jews. Paul Goodman, the third of the tradition's founders, was an American anarchist, the son of Jewish immigrants. The European abyss that lies behind their work is, in my view, easily forgotten in more recent gestalt literature, which at times presents the field as a particularly soft and inclusive therapeutic craft without political content.

Fritz Perls had seen the war, antisemitism, exile, knew what it was to lose family. His book Ego, Hunger and Aggression from 1942 was written in South Africa during the Second World War. It is not a pure book of psychology; it is also a quiet reflection on a civilisation that had failed.

Buber's path was not dissimilar, though more privileged. He remained in Germany until 1938, when he was sixty years old; he helped Jewish students to study for as long as it was possible, and only moved to Jerusalem when his work in Germany had become impossible. In his Jerusalem years he became an increasingly uncomfortable voice for his own side. He argued for Arab-Jewish dialogue, for a binational state, and later for obligations of conscience toward the Palestinian refugee situation. He was both loved and opposed for it.

It is these two lines – Perls's clinical-practical and Buber's philosophical – that meet when gestalt therapy begins to speak of the dialogical attitude. It is not a mild method for comfortable therapy in peacetime. It is an attitude developed in the fragility of the twentieth century, by people who knew what is at stake when the other stops being Thou.

As I now begin practice as a gestalt therapist in the autumn of 2026, I enter a field with this history as its spine. It is an undertone I want to keep alive in my articles. Not as a political angle glued onto a clinical method, but as a deep recognition of what the method actually is.

 

VII. The dialogical as peace work in a polarised time

 

It is 2026 now. It is not necessary to spend many words describing what the public sphere looks like. There are polarisations in most Western democracies, there are new variants of war, there is an attention economy that profits from us not listening to each other. Every time a voice is absorbed by another in public – because one of them shouts louder, because one of them controls the platform, because one of them is portrayed as illegitimate – we lose something contrapuntal, and something dialogical. We lose, to put it in Buber's terms, a possibility of being.

It is tempting to speak of this in large words. Peace work sounds pompous. But what I mean by peace work in this connection is something rather modest: the work of keeping several voices alive at the same time, of refusing to let one absorb the other, of preparing for those moments in which the other may appear as Thou, and of building institutions, conversations and forms of work that make such moments more likely.

Understood this way, peace work is first and foremost something all of us can contribute to in everyday life. It is what a therapist does in the consultation hour, what a conductor does in the rehearsal room, what a teacher does with a pupil, what a conversation partner does with a friend in doubt. It is what Barenboim and Said did when they gathered young musicians in Weimar. And it is what this article series sets out to do.

I try honestly to be careful about turning this into grand words. There are too many ways in which peace work can turn into its opposite: when we grow too eager for reconciliation, we can press the other into losing his independent voice; when we grow too certain of our own dialogical virtue, we can lose the sense that we too stand in a field and that we too can be complicit in absorbing someone. The dialogical work contains its own continuous self-critique, or else it is not dialogical.

Said wrote about this with particular caution. He was sceptical of anything that smelled of humanistic self-satisfaction. When he spoke of contrapuntal reading, he did not mean a pleasant pluralistic ideal. He meant a constant refusal to let a voice die. When he and Barenboim started the orchestra together, my impression is that they did so not because they believed music had magical properties. In the light of their writings it seems reasonable to me to understand that they had seen, throughout their lives, that the most significant human encounters happened in concrete situations, not in abstract declarations.

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VIII. Why a series

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This text is the opening essay in a series of articles. That means it does not conclude; it opens. It sets the terrain. It names three voices that have held me in my own work, and it suggests where the coming articles will move.

Some of the coming essays will work closely with music itself: how a particular phrase in Brahms can teach the gestalt therapist to see the contact cycle as directly experienceable structure, how the silence between two movements is a living phenomenological event, how figure and ground relate in a Mozart aria. Others will work closely with the therapy room: how the conductor's practice can shed light on leading without dominating, how chamber music's listening can teach us something about group and dialogue, how Daniel Stern's present moment and musical time belong in the same conversation. Others still will work outward toward the political: how Said's contrapuntal thinking can be practised as a way of listening in an attention economy, how polarities can be held without being dissolved, how a European dialogical tradition can serve as a frame for the work I do in my own professional life.

Along the way the series will try to listen more than it lectures. That is what the dialogical attitude requires. It lets the reader be a reader, not a recipient. It lets the music be music, not illustration. It lets gestalt theory be living clinical work, not technique. And it lets Buber, Barenboim and Said be the voices they are, not names I sprinkle in to embellish an argument.

If I succeed, the reader will after a few years have walked through a collection of texts that is not a book, not a dissertation, not a blog, but something in between – perhaps what Said himself would have called a contrapuntal reading of his own professional life. A score in which several voices run simultaneously, keep their independence, and make something together that none of them could have made alone.

In Weimar in 1999, Barenboim and Said placed young people from enemy countries in the same rehearsal room and had them play Beethoven. Neither Beethoven, nor the war, nor history disappeared. But something else was added. A contrapuntal line was held open. It is that line I want to keep open in this series.