The terrorist shootings in Paris have brought a new round of attention to issues of immigration, political polarization, religious discrimination and threats to global security. Scholars at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies are following the developments and talking about the attacks.

Cécile Alduy, is an associate professor of French literature writing a book on France’s far-right National Front political party and is an affiliated faculty member of FSI’s Europe Center. She is in Paris, where she wrote an opinion piece for Al Jazeera America and spoke with KQED’s Forum. 

David Laitin is a professor of political science and also an affiliated faculty member of The Europe Center as well as FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His co-authored book, Why Muslim Integration Fails: An Inquiry in Christian-Heritage Societies, examines Muslim disadvantages and discrimination in Europe.

Christophe Crombez is a consulting professor at TEC specializing in European Union politics. And Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at FSI and CISAC, is an expert on political terrorism.

How are Parisians reacting to the tragedy?

Alduy: The mood here is of grief, disgust, anger, and fear. We were all in a state of shock: a sense of disbelief and horror, as if we had entered a surreal time-space where what we hear from the news happening in far away places—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria—had been suddenly catapulted here, on our streets, in our everyday. The shock has given way to mourning. Lots of crying, swallowed tears and heavy hearts. But there’s also revolt and determination to not let that get to us and to not let it succeed in reviving internal wounds.

I was surprised by the spontaneous quiet demonstrations and collective mourning happening all over France: that people would go out rather than hide in spite of the fact that two heavy armed gunmen were on the loose. It was such a naturally humane, human, compassionate response. It was a real consolation to witness this getting together, this flame of humanity and solidarity braving the fear and silencing the silencers.  

What can we say about the brothers who allegedly carried out the attack?

Crenshaw: Apparently they are French citizens of Algerian immigrant origin, who had moved into the orbit of French jihadist networks some years ago. They were both known to French and American authorities, just as the 7/7 London bombers were known to the British police.  One had spent time in a French prison for his association with a jihadist network that sent young men to fight in Iraq, and the other is said to have recently trained in Yemen.  In that case, he would almost certainly have come into contact with operatives of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (known as AQAP).  AQAP is an extremely dangerous organization in Yemen and abroad.  The U.S. has regarded it as a number one threat for some time – this is the group that sent the infamous Christmas or underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009.  Its chief ideologue, the American Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in an American drone strike in 2012. The fact that the terrorists were two brothers also brings to mind the case of the Tsarnaev brothers and the Boston Marathon bombing.  

What are the cultural and societal implications of the shooting?

Alduy: The event highlights a menace that had been rampant, and duly acknowledged by the French government: that of French-born radicalized Muslims going to Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq to be trained as jihadist and then coming back to conduct terrorist attacks on French soil (this was already the case for Mohammed Merah, but he was not part of an Al-Qaeda cell and acted all alone, as did the man who attacked the Jewish Museum in Bruxells). The cultural and societal implication is that we are now talking of being a country at war, with al-Qaida recruiting among us our potential enemies. In other words, France has to come to terms with the fact that its own values, its own political system, and its own people have been shot execution style in the name of the jihad by our own children.

Explain the extent to which Muslims are disenfranchised and discriminated against in France.

Laitin: Our book documents that Muslims, just for being Muslims, face rather significant discrimination in the French labor market. We sent out CVs to employers, comparing two identically qualified applicants, one named Khadija Diouf and the other Marie Diouf. Both were from Senegalese backgrounds but were French citizens and well educated. Marie received a significantly larger number of “call backs.” From a survey, we know that controlling for race, for gender, and for education, Muslims from one of the two Senegalese language communities we study have much lower household income than matched Christians. We connect this finding to that of the discrimination in the labor market. In our book, we search for the reasons that sustain discrimination against Muslims in France. Here we find that the rooted French population prefers not to have Muslims in their midst, and not to have a lot of Muslims in their midst. Tokens are O.K.

Meanwhile, Muslims exhibit norms concerning gender and concerning public displays of religious devotion that are threatening to the norms of the rooted French. We therefore see a joint responsibility of both the French and the immigrant Muslim communities in sustaining what we call a “discriminatory equilibrium”.

Can these shootings be attributed to those inherent tensions?

Laitin: There is no evidence that this discriminatory equilibrium is in any way responsible for the horrendous criminal behavior exhibited in the offices of Charlie Hebdo. There is a viral cult that is attractive to a small minority of young Muslims inducing them to behavior that is inhuman. The sources of this cult are manifold, but it would be outrageous to attribute it to the difficulties that Muslims face in fully integrating into France.

How will the shootings affect the standing of right-leaning political parties that have been gaining traction?

Crombez: I think the shootings in Paris will provide a further boost to the electoral prospects of France's extreme-right, anti-immigrant party, the National Front. Opinion polls in recent months already showed that it could emerge as France's largest political party at the departmental elections in March – as far as vote share is concerned – and that the Front's candidate for the Presidency in 2017 is likely to make it into, but lose, the second round run-off with the candidate of the moderate right, as was the case in 2002. The shootings will only have improved the Front's chances. Even if the election results are consistent with the polls taken prior to the shootings, and the Front doesn't do even better than the polls predicted, the dramatic results are likely to be attributed to the shootings.

And the long-term political fallout?

Crombez: The effects will reverberate throughout Europe. But as time passes and the shootings become but a distant memory, the effects will disappear. I would draw a parallel here with what happened after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan in 2011. In the following months Green parties did very well in elections in Europe at various levels, but after a year or so that effect seems to have dissipated. I would expect this to be the case with the shootings also, except if there are more such incidents to follow.

Appeared in Stanford Report, December 8, 2014.

German studies professor Adrian Daub examines the social mores of 19th-century Europe through a study of "four-handed monsters" - when the hands of two layers intermingled on the same piano.  It was a phenomenon that both fascinated and repelled.  

In 19th-century Europe – long before LPs, CDs or mp3s – there were only two ways to listen to, say, the latest Beethoven symphony: either you were lucky enough to hear it performed at the local concert hall, or you played it at home yourself.

Not with a full orchestra, of course, but in a piano transcription, an arrangement that compressed symphonic violins, oboes and tubas onto a single keyboard score. And, to really mimic the range of a whole orchestra, amateurs played "four-handed," with two pianists sitting side-by-side.

These close-contact duets took off among the nascent middle class. Historian Edward Cone dubbed the players "four-handed monsters," both for the style's raging popularity and for its scandalous stigma.

"Piano four hands represented a safe space in which touching and nearness were permitted or even desired – something that was unusual at the time," said Adrian Daub, associate professor of German studies and affiliated faculty of The Europe Center at Stanford

Daub takes Cone's descriptor as the title of his new book exploring this largely forgotten phenomenon, Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture.

Four-hand playing "bridged the divide between serious musicians and total amateurs," Daub said.

"This was a welcome vehicle for the greatest composers of the 19th century and at the same time it was the much-maligned party game – the equivalent of Twister – for the 'philistine' bourgeois."

Using a range of musical and literary sources, Daub's study is the first to examine the cultural valences of this strikingly intimate tradition.

Drawing from novels, memoirs and letters, Daub's survey reveals, for instance, how 19th-century anxieties surrounding creativity, industrialization, sex, virtue and politics were exercised through the act of four-hand piano playing.

Daub's previous research projects, one on Richard Wagner and sexuality, and another on the metaphysics of marriage in the 19th century, put him in a unique position to examine the phenomenon of four-hand playing and how "the dangers and the utopian promises it seemed to make … tell us much about the 19th century."

As Daub put it, "it's almost incredible how much people were able to read into what to modern eyes seems a pretty harmless pursuit." Whether this was a fear of moral dissoluteness or a "promise of a better way of engaging with the other sex or other people more generally," four-hand playing "was asked to do a lot, far more than comparable modes of performance."

Heather Hadlock, associate professor of music at Stanford, sees Daub's study as an important contribution to music scholarship. "Until recently, transcriptions and arrangements were dismissed as having little artistic value or historical significance," Hadlock said.

Daub's study, however, is the first step toward rectifying this oversight, revealing how four-hand piano duets in the 19th century resounded far beyond the parlor.

Romantic undertones

As pianos became increasingly affordable over the course of the century, more and more middle-class families made the instrument a centerpiece of domestic life. While solo piano playing never went out of style, the increased musical range and social interaction offered by four-hand playing caught on.

"Four-hand arrangements became the standard vehicle for the private, or semi-private, consumption of music of all kinds," said Daub. "Symphonies, operas, chamber music, dance music and so on, from trivial waltzes to apocalyptic Mahler symphonies."

"The collaboration of four hands across the whole range of the modern piano allowed two players to reproduce virtually any repertoire within the privacy of the home," said Stanford music Professor Thomas Grey.

Well-versed in both music and literature, Daub amassed a staggering number of allusions to four-hand playing from 19th-century sources. He also collected references from four-hand practitioners and mined digital databases.

From William Thackeray to Charles Dickens to Thomas Mann, four-hand playing makes appearances in famous novels of the period.

Even the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote on – and composed – four-hand pieces, saying that they "may be taken as a divining rod for a good marriage."

Cumulatively, Daub said, these "short, often banal episodes are transformed into fleeting glimpses of a larger phenomenon, which in itself was too quotidian and ubiquitous to merit discussion in its own day."

In large part, Daub said, the popularity of the activity was driven by the romantic undertones of four-hand playing.

Daub quotes the composer Robert Schumann, for instance, who reported, "a four-hand piece allows us reveries together with our beloved, provided she plays the piano."

"Togetherness on the keyboard was to become a symbol for togetherness in marriage," Daub said.

Forced intimacy

Four-hand playing, though, also had a dark side: the erotic possibilities created when fingers touched, bodies sidled and harmony was made.

Composers, well aware of the situation, took advantage of the forced intimacy by crafting pieces that caused the hands to overlap and interlock, generating as much contact as possible.

Daub quotes novelist William Thackeray, who wrote of a "pretty little duet à quatre mains, where the hands cross over, and hop up and down the keys, and the heads get so close, so close. Oh, duets. Oh, regrets."

At the same time, literary treatments of four-hand playing projected notions of propriety and virtue. Daub cites a telling passage in Dickens's David Copperfield to comment on how four-hand piano playing reflected such social mores.

The novel's eponymous narrator, watching a recital by two young women, begins to rethink his opinion of one's moral standing:

"The innocent beauty of her face was not as innocent to me as it had been; I mistrusted the natural grace and charm of her manner; and when I looked at Agnes by her side, and thought how good and true Agnes was, suspicions arose within me that it was an ill-assorted friendship."

In Daub's reading, the narrator's shifting perceptions of his beloved is mediated by watching her play four-hand piano, the music laying bare her "true" character.

Four-hand playing also emerged as a potent political symbol because of the collaboration and unity inherent in the practice.

Music scholar Hans Moldenhauer, writing in 1950 after having been exiled from Nazi Germany, looked back at four-hand playing wistfully: "Dictatorial practices have no place in [four-hand] pianism."

Daub comments on the writer's "clear sense that four-hand piano playing doesn't allow for a Führer principle." For Moldenhauer, there was something beautifully communal about the four-hand "republic."

But by the time Moldenhauer extolled its virtues, the practice was quickly losing popularity. The practice continues today (all of the Stanford scholars quoted in this article are four-hand players), but people no longer attach as much interest to it.

Still, Daub, who has attended a number of four-hand concerts, says that seeing two people at one keyboard "instills a surprising sense of intimacy."

"What other mode of performance has the onlooker asking themselves: 'Should I be watching this?'"

Nate Sloan is a doctoral candidate in musicology and writes about the humanities at Stanford.

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