“Edward Said met the great French novelist only once, in Beirut in 1972. However, the presence (and absence) of the author haunts Said during the last decade of his life when he was battling with leukemia and obsessively preoccupied with questions of music. This was the period in which he founded the now-famous middle-eastern youth orchestra, The West-Eastern Divan, with the conductor Daniel Barenboim. The talk speculates as to how the strange meeting with Genet in 1972 might not have been the origin of this later middle-eastern music project.”