West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

If you missed last night's prom by Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan youth orchestra you can still catch it for a week on the BBC's iPlayer. It wasn't so much the concert that riveted my attention but the conversation broadcast in the interval, in which two people brought together in friendship by the orchestra, a female Israeli violinist and a male Lebanese Arab cellist, discussed with Sara Mohr-Pietsch what membership of the orchestra meant to them.

To hear the conversation go to iPlayer, select Radio 3, select BBC proms 2009, open up the "other proms" pane and click on prom 48, the Berlioz. Use the slider to advance about 67 minutes. The conversation started after Daniel Barenboim didn't make a speech (and if that sounds Gilbertian, it isn't - he turned to the audience and said "No speech.")

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There is plenty on the Web about the orchestra, a joint vision of Daniel Darenboim and the Palestinian Arab scholar Edward Said that has been in existence since 1999, so I won't say anything here. But you can hear something of the vision and its realisation from Barenboim's own mouth when he talked to Ed Stourton on the Today programme here.

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But being a word-bloke, I was curious about the use of the word Divan in the orchestra's name, and while googling yielded references aplenty to Goethe, which looked promising, he being, or rather he having been, a scholar of Arabic languages and literature and author of a book of pomes with Divan in the title, not surprisingly, since one meaning of the Arabic word is "collection of poems by one author", it also generated thousands of other hits which mostly repeat each other or try to flog me a sofa, leaving me none the wiser.

The best I can come up with as a translation of divan is "assembly", with its underlying meaning of "council chamber in which differing views are resolved" (and excuse my hollow ho-ho-hos, for most council chambers I have known are places where differing views become even more cemented as differing views.)

Any scholars out there who can help?

PS, and a most unworthy aside. Assiduous readers will know that I enjoy accidental associations of ideas, so try this one. Day 1 - start reading Hannah Arendt, after British public library system yields The Human Condition (thank you, Camden) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (thank you, Cheshire), as instructed by the intellectually delectable Monika Maria Trost. Day 2 - listen to the Divan prom. Day 3 - spend six hours singing Graham Kendrick stuff to the accompaniment of an enthusiastic gee-tar in a church designed by a Mason.

Enough there for another book by Koestler, I would think. Or Freud.

PPS. Oh God! Not another book by Dawkins? Must cancel The Times and subscribe to The Sun instead. Thinking is such hard work.