Benson, B.L. in the Beginning, There Was Improvisation. Responding to the Call

8/13/2019 Benson, B.L. in the Beginning, There Was Improvisation. Responding to the Call.

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In the Beginning, There WasImprovisation: Responding to the Call

BRUCE ELLIS BENSON

Ex nihilo nihil t. From nothing comes nothing. That would seem to be the collective wis-dom of the ancients, whether Babylonian, Greek, or Hebrew. Thus, the creation accountsfound in various ancient Mesopotamian texts are always from something. It is likewise theview of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who believes nothingness or non-beingmakes no sense and so one cannot even say it is or it is not. On his account, one can onlysay it is or . . . , since nothing makes no sense. It is not. It is no thing. Indeed, even thatgreat songwriting team Rogers and Hammerstein reminds us that nothing comes fromnothing, nothing ever could.

And yet this is not the orthodox Christian version of creation, despite what some con-sider to be biblical evidence in favor of it. Early Christian theologians generally were infavor of the from something account and probably would have considered the fromnothing account to be simply nonsense. Of course, as one might guess, things are some-what more complicated than this. But one thing is sure. The German theologian GerhardMay is certainly right when he states: church theology wants through the propositioncreatio ex nihilo to express and safeguard the omnipotence and freedom of God acting inhistory (May 1994, 180). At issue, then, are power and freedom. The God who can create exnihilo is simply more powerful and free than the God who merely creates from that whichalready exists. How we interpret the rst few verses of the book of Genesis depends very

much upon what kind of God we think is being depicted here. A truly powerful God hasno need of existent matter.

Correspondence:[email protected]

Verge: a journal of the arts and Christian faith, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 2011www.vergearts.com


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In the Beginning, There Was Improvisation Bruce Ellis Benson

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Not surprisingly, these aspects of power and freedom are very much part of our con-ception of the creations wrought by human beings. Our views of the genesis of art havebeen heavily shaped by our views of the nature of divine creation. Just as we can distin-guish between a strong creator and a weak creator of the cosmos, so we can distin-guish between strong and weak creators of arts. In what follows, I intend to accomplish

three tasks. First, I brie

y consider the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and bring thoseconsiderations to bear on how we think about the artistic creation. Second, I return to thebiblical text to provide an alternative conception of artistic creation, one that moves fromthe idea of creation to that of improvisation. In so doing, the artist is seen in a signi cantly dif-ferent light. Third, I relate this idea of improvisation to the call and the response structureas put forth by Jean-Louis Chrtien.

Creatio ex nihiloThe writer of Genesis chapter one opens the text by saying the following:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless voidand darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the

waters. Then God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw that the lightwas good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and thedarkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the rst day.

(Gen. 1:1-5, NRSV )

What exactly is God doing here? Further, what is this beginning [ resit] and wheredoes it begin? One can say this is a basic question regarding any kind of genesis: at whatpoint can we say that something begins? It is signi cant that the OED de nes genesis asthe action of building up from simple or basic elements to more complex ones. 1 For some-thing like that seems to be described here. The earth is described as a formless void anddarkness covered the face of the deep [ tohu vabohu, or the depth in the dark]. And thenGod creates [ bara]. On this account, things are already in medias resor into the middleof affairs. That is, there is already something going on and then God enters the picture.

Yet, even though Ian Barbour claims that creation out of nothing is not a biblicalconcept, there exists evidence to the contrary (Barbour 1971, 384). In II Maccabees 7:28,a mother implores her son to recognize that God did not make them out of things thatexisted (as the NRSV has it) or we could translate this phrase simply as realize that Godmade them [the world] out of nothing. Gerhard von Rad claims quite simply that the con-ceptional formulation creatio ex nihilo is rst found in this passage (von Rad 1962, 142n).But one can also point to Psalm 148, in which the psalmist writes: Let them praise thename of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created (v. 5). Further, one can pointto New Testament passages in which God or Christ is claimed by Paul to be the creator ofall things. Romans 11:36 tells us that from him . . . are all things. Colossians 1:16 says thatin him [or by him, i.e. Christ] all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visibleand invisible. Paul is very clearly attempting to establish Christ as a very powerful gure.An even more telling quotation is from the rst-century rabbi, Gamaliel. In effect, a phi-losopher attempts to paint a diminished picture of God by saying: Your God was indeeda great artist, but he had good materials to help him. To this, Gamaliel responds: All ofthem are explicitly described as having been created by him (Neusner 1991 , 41-2). Finally,Augustine wrestles with the opening verses of Genesis, but then concludes (speaking ofGod): You cannot have gone to work like a human craftsman, who forms a material object


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elseworks that are derivative in one sense or anothercount more as secondary texts oras commentaries on the primary texts provided by the genius. Thus, we have a conceptionof the artist that is remarkably like that of the God who creates ex nihiloan artist who isboth powerful and free.

Now, there is something rightabout Kants idea of the genius: one somehow gets ideas.

And it is not always clear where those ideas come from. The literature on creativity or inno-vation (and whether they are one phenomenon or two) is vast and, understandably, contra-dictory. For creativity is hardly easy to explain. At least as far back as Plato, in the dialogueIon, there has been the question of exactly where artists (or, in this particular case, poets) gettheir ideas. Speaking to the poet named Ion, who has just returned from Epidaurus hav-ing just won rst prize for reciting Homer, Socrates suggests that his skill really resultsfrom him being out of his mind. Socrates says: This gift you have of speaking well onHomer is not an art; it is a power divine . . . . so the lyric poets are not in their senses whenthey make these lovely lyric poems (Plato 1961, 533d-534a). Ion is not at all convinced thatSocrates is right (Ibid. 536d-e), but this idea that poets are divinely inspired has been widelyheld, as has been the notion that somehow artists just get ideas in some sort of magical way.

No more in

uential expression of this idea of creation exists than that from a famous letterattributed to none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791).

Concerning my way of composing . . . I can really say no more on this subject than the fol-lowing; for I myself know no more about it, and cannot account for it. When I am, as it were,completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheersay, travelling in a carriage, or walkingafter a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that myideas ow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I forcethem. . . . When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out of the bag of my memory . . .what has previously been collected into it. . . . For this reason the committing to paper is donequickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already nished; and it rarely differs onpaper from what it was in my imagination.

(Quoted in Solomon 1988, 129)

There is something so gloriously romantic about this account that it is almost pain-ful to discover that it is a pure fabrication by Friedrich Rochlitz, who was both a fan of Mo-zart and had been in uenced by Kants notion of the genius. Rochlitzs account of Mozartscomposition process is how he wantedit to go. It is as if we wantour artists to be capable ofsomething like magical power. The contemporary philosopher of music Jerrold Levinsongoes so far as to say that

the whole tradition of art assumes art is creative in the strict sense, that it is a godlike activ-ity in which the artist brings into being what did not exist beforehandmuch as a demiurgeforms a world out of inchoate matter. . . . There is a special aura that envelops composers, aswell as other artists, because we think of them as true creators.

(Levinson 1990, 66-7)

While it is far too much to say that the whole tradition of art has held this view, itclearly has held sway for more or less the last couple of centuries (that is, during the mod-ern or romantic period).

Seeing the true artist as genius has consequences, and quite problematic ones. First,the genius myth has promoted the myth of the artist as some sort of lone creator whoneither needs nor wants the in uence of or interaction with othersthe artist off alonein a garret. Second, whereas artists had generally been seen as craftsmen (Bachs view ofhimself was largely the view held throughout western history), now they become god-like. For instance, the Germans Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798) and Ludwig


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Tieck (1773-1853) speak of artists as a few chosen men whom [God] has anointed as Hisfavorites (Wackenroder and Tieck 1975, 59). Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in his biography ofBach, suggests that some of Bachs works could be mentioned only with a kind of holy wor-ship. (a claim that Bachwho wrote the initials S.D.G. standing for Soli Deo Gloria [For Godsglory alone] on his scorescould never have imaginedmaking) (Forkel 1970, 12). George Bizet

(1838-1875) goes so far as to say that Beethoven is not a human, he is a god (Quoted inSalmen 1983 , 269). And Carl Maria von Weber demands that the composer become freeas a god (Quoted in Blume 1970, 91). So artists become either special agents of God or elsesimply gods themselves. Its one thing to say that god is the giver of talents that allow usto make art; its quite another thing to say that the artist is thereby somehow like or equalto God.

Of course, the problem was that artists wanted it both ways in terms of being under-stood and appreciated. On the one hand, a lack of understanding or appreciation by theaudience came to be interpreted as a sign of greatness: according to the myth which wasthen just starting to take shape, innovative artists were those whose genius was not suf- ciently appreciated. Thus art that was immediately and universally enjoyed came to be

seen as somehow inferior aesthetically. Today this myth of the unappreciated genius hasgained such a hold that we tend to assume that it was the norm for great artists not to havebeen suf ciently appreciated by their contemporaries, despite the fact that there is ampleevidence to suggest that this was only true in certain exceptional cases. 5 We tend to assumethatalmost by de nitiona truly great work of art is one that initially meets with greatresistance. Again, van Gogh is a prime example for that idea. In any case, such a mythnomatter how far from reality it actually wasproved an extremely useful one for artists.Those who were not popular (or at least felt that they did not receive the attention whichthey deserved) could always take solace in the fact that such was the lot of great geniusesand that popular arts were selling out.

As should be clear from the account Ive given so far, the rise in status of the artist was

all about both power and freedom. In that respect, it strongly mirrors the conception of Godas creator ex nihilo. Further, I realize that I am painting with a rather broad brush and thatany of the points I have made could be contested. However, I think that the general con-tours of my argument are correct, even if one can always nd exceptions.

Yet what if we were to return to the creation account and mold a very different sort ofconception of artistic activity?

Creatio ex improvisatioTheologian Catherine Keller speaks of the mystery of the missing chaos (Keller 2003, 1).How, she asks, have theologians simply forgotten about that chaos? Her goal in her bookFace of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming is to deconstruct ex nihilo theology and return to thatforgotten chaos. Writing as a feminist theologian, she claims that the ex nihilo account is ahighly masculineone. As we have seen, it belongs to a discourse of power. In its place, Kellersuggests a theology of becoming in which we rethink the very notion of beginning. In thisrespect, she is indebted to Edward Said, who distinguishes between beginning and ori-gin. Whereas beginnings are secular, humanly produced and ceaselessly re-examined,origins are divine, mythical and privileged (Said 1985, xii-xiii). In effect, the problem withex nihilo is that it erases the deep and the past. It speaks only of a moment. And it passesover the chaos out of which creation takes place. Yet, to quote Keller, what if we begininstead to read the Word from the vantage point of its own fecund multiplicity, its ux into


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esh, its over ow? (Keller 2003, 19)Keller reminds us that we begin amidst the chaos and the ux. In this respect, the

verb means something other than at least one de nition that the OED provides for the verbbegintake the rst step. One never truly begins, for there is always a step that hasalready been made. Keller wants to make this point not merely for human beings but even

for God. She quotes theologian William P. Brown approvingly: by and large God does notwork de novo or ex nihilo, but ex voce and per collaborationi(Brown, 41). To understand whatBrown means by this statement, we must return to the Genesis account and note that Godworks with the earth and the waters in a collaborative way so as to produce animals andsea monsters. God says: Be fruitful and multiply and ll the waters in the seas and Letthe earth bring forth living creatures of every kind (Gen. 1:22, 24).

The second-century church father Justin Martyr writes that God in the beginning didof His goodness, for mans sake, create all things out of unformed matter (Martyr 1903,165). On this account, God orders that which already exists. And that is precisely the prob-lem for the third-century church father Athanasius:

If this be so, God will be on their theory a Mechanic only, and not a Creator out of nothing;

if, that is, He works at existing material, but is not Himself the cause of the material. For Hecould not in any sense be called Creator unless He is Creator of the material of which thethings created have in their turn been made.

(Athanasius 1885, II.3.4)

Yet Athanasius gives us what is surely a false dilemma: we must choose between aGod who acts as a mechanic or else a God who is a full-blown creator ex nihilo. Is there nomiddle ground? While working on this article, I was delighted to discover that a colleagueof minean Old Testament scholar named John Waltonhappens to have provided whatI consider to be a very helpful interpretation. He insists that we must consider the ques-tion what is the text asserting that God did in this context? And his answer to that ques-tion is that God brings heaven and earth, or the cosmos, into existence by assigning rolesand functions (Walton 2001, 71). In other words, the text isnt about where does the cos-mos come from? but why does the cosmos have the order and structure that it has? Ofcourse, it also gives us a different idea of creationeven God works with material that isalready there. And Walton makes the point that this is exactly what is meant by the Hebrewword [ bara] that we translate as create. So the issue is not existence vs. non-existencebut order .

As to the theological debate, I have no horse in the race. Ultimately, I feel no need toplant a ag on either side, so I neither repudiate ex nihilo nor embrace its opposite. Yet Ido think that, on either view, God is an improviser. For creationhowever we de ne itis precisely God setting in motion a reality of ceaseless alterations (Milbank 1991, 227).Thus, the very being of life is improvisatoryby which I mean that it is a mixture of bothstructure and contingency, of regularity and unpredictability, of constraint and possibility.Further, if God is indeed still at work in the world, then God is likewise part of that impro-visatory movement. Living in such a reality means that we take part in that improvisatorymovement in all that we do. Since we are creatures embedded in multiple and ever-chang-ing historical and cultural milieus, our identities and very being arise from our relations toothers and the world which we inhabit. 6

So how would this view of God translate into an account of artistic creation? On myview, we end up with creatio ex improvisatio [a Latin term that only rarely occurs and only


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after the fteenth century]. Artistic genesis, then, always begins somewhere. Consider thefollowing example. It was at a baseball game, when someone handed him a pair of binocu-lars, that Andrew Stanton suddenly got the idea for what the character WALL-E shouldlook like. He spent the entire next inning looking at the binoculars backwards, twistingthem this way and that to simulate various expressions of sadness and joy. Stanton, the

director of the

lm WALL-E, had been thinking for years about the idea of a lone robotleft to clean up an uninhabitable earth, but it was only in that moment that he gured outhow the animated robot should look. That idea came in an instant, but it took quite sometime to realize that watching the songs Put on Your Sunday Clothes and It Only Takesa Moment from the movie version of Hello, Dolly! would be just the right songs to teachWALL-E emotion. Figuring out the voices of the robot characters took even longer andit basically required working with Ben Burtt for a year, during which they kept trying outdifferent sounds until they found the ones that worked. Stanton compares the process totrying out paint swatches on the wall. And those were only some of the myriad details thathad to be put in place to make the lm a reality. 7

Many artists will instinctively resonate with the process that Stanton went through.

Some ideas come in a moment, but many aspects have to be worked out over days, weeks,monthseven years. And those ideas dont usually come by being isolated but by beingconnected: with other artists, the history of art, friends who inspire you, and the world ofeveryday life. Often what happens is that you see somethingperhaps as mundane as apair of binocularsand you suddenly realize how it could be painted or reworked intosomething thats both similar and different. Or perhaps you hear somethingthe chirp of abird, a musical chord, a mechanical device that has a certain rhythmand you imagine thebeginning of a piece of music. That last example was the inspiration for Dr. Seuss to writehis rst book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street!8 Those are just two possibilitiesof the multifarious ways of improvisation.

Romantic music celebrates the original innovative artist. In contrast, Baroque music

does virtually the opposite. For Baroque music is much more of a community affair, some-thing one did not alone but with others. This was true of how both composers and per-formers worked, in true improvisatory fashion. The musicologist David Fuller describesthe situation as follows: A large part of the music of the whole era was sketched ratherthan fully realized, and the performer had something of the responsibility of a child with acolouring book, to turn these sketches into rounded art-works (Fuller 1989, 117-8) Fullercompares the scores of Baroque music to the charts or fake books one nds in jazz. 9 The composer provided some idea of how the piece was to go, but a substantial portion ofthe shape of the musical piece as heard was up to the performer.

Yet it was not merely the performer who was improvising; it was likewise the com-poser. Here it is helpful to juxtapose the notion of creation with that of improvisation. By

using the term improvisation instead of creation, I mean to stress that artists fabricateout of what is conveniently on hand rather than create in the sense of to produce wherenothing was before. 10 In making art, we always start with something. The extreme side ofsuch borrowing would today come under the rubric of plagiarism. It may come asrather a surprise that Bach was in the habit of starting with a melody appropriated fromeither himself or someone else. A well-known example of his creative borrowing is how thepopular song Innsbruch, ich mu dich lassen [Innsbruch, I must leave you] morphedinto O Welt, ich mu dich lassen [Oh World, I must leave you] that became part of hisSt. Matthew Passion. Of course, this was standard practice at the timea time when the idea


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of ownership of intellectual property didnt really exist. It raises the very question of thenotion of ownership and copyrightwhich has become truly problematic in our time anddesperately needs addressingthough that is something I cannot address here. GeorgeFrederick Handel was downright proli c in his recycling of both his own and otherswork. 11

Such a conception of artistic creation is strikingly at odds with that of the modern/Romantic paradigm. Now, I admit that many modern artists both have been and are cur-rently committed to pushing the envelope. What Im questioning is just how originaleven the most supposedly original pieces of art actually are. I fully admit that, say, PabloPicassos painting Les Desmoiselles dAvignon (1907) and the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper (1967)are landmarkeven in ways originalartistic contributions. Yet it strikes me that these ex-amples are nothing like a complete departure from their respective genres but instead asigni cant advance within them. That is to say that they are still part of a recognizable genreand not something entirely new. Which is to say that they all represent ways of rework-ing what already existed in semi-new ways. Thus, I am contending that the old wisdomof Ecclesiastes still holds: there is nothing new under the sun (Ec. 1:9). Without doubt,

there is reworking, revision, rethinking, and renewalbut there is no true revolution. HereI side with the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer who writes: Even where life changesviolently, as in ages of revolution, far more of the old is preserved in the supposed trans-formation of everything than anyone knows, and it combines with the new to create a newvalue (Gadamer 1989, 281). Rock n Roll may be a new genre, but it could never have comeinto existence without heavy borrowing from the blues.

Gadamers concept of play [ Spiel] also goes a good way toward helping us thinkabout how artistic improvisation takes place. Play might seem to be merely something wedo as recreation, but Gadamer suggests that play gives us a clue to human activity in gen-eral. Note that the German term Spiel can be translated into English as either play orgame. If we take the latter meaning, we can say that to play is to take part in an activity

that exists apart from the single player. Gadamer thinks of the making of art as beginningin the to and fro of play but ending in what he calls transformation into structure (Ibid.110). At some point, what was the play of experimentation starts to become more stableas a structure. The beginning of a musical phrase turns into a full melody. Some lines hast-ily sketched on a canvas get more and more de nition as other lines are drawn. A piece ofstone moves from being a square block to an increasingly de ned shape. But how does allof this happen? Here there can be no simple answer, for pieces of art come into existence indifferent ways over varying lengths of time. Gustav Mahlers (1860-1911) First Symphonyis interesting in this respect. While Mahler wrote the bulk of it in 1888, parts of it come frommaterial dating back to the 1870s and he revised it more than once. The nal version datesto 1906.

While it is dif cult to present anything like the model for artistic improvisation,consider the following story. Malcolm Cowley gives us what are in effect two descriptionsof the process of how Hart Crane (1899-1932) wrote his poetry that can be blended into one.According to the rst description, a Sunday afternoon party at which everyone was laugh-ing, playing croquet, and having a good time was often the backdrop for his writing. Cranewould be among those laughingand drinkingthe most until he would disappear tothe next room. With a Cuban rumba or torch song or Ravels Bolero in the background, thepartygoers would hear the keys of a typewriter busily banging away. Then, about an hourlater, Crane would appear with a poem and have the partygoers read it. At least, that is


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the way in which Cowley had originally told the story. It certainly makes for an intriguingstory and ts rather well with the artistic genius myth we noted earlier. Yet Cowley laterrealized that this story was really only part of the story. For usually Crane had actually beenthinking about that poemseemingly produced in an hourfor months or years and writ-ing bits and pieces along the way. Then he would use the occasion of the party to try to get

inspired. But the process of writing the poem wouldnt end there. More from Cowley:As for the end of the story, it might be delayed for a week or a month. Painfully, persever-inglyand dead soberHart would revise his new poem, clarifying the images, correctingits meter and searching for the right word hour after hour. The seals wide spindrift gavetoward paradise, in the second of his Voyages, was the result of a search that lasted forseveral days. At rst he had written, The seals ndrinny gaze toward paradise, but someonehad objected that he was using a non-existent word. Hart and I worked in the same of ce thatyear and I remember his frantic searches through Websters Unabridgedand the big Standard,his trips to the libraryon of ce timeand his reports of consultations with old sailors inSouth Street speakeasies. Findrinny he could never nd, but after paging through the dic-tionary again he decided that spindrift was almost as good and he declaimed the new lineexultantly. Even after one of his manuscripts had been sent to Poetry or the Dial and perhapshad been accepted, he would still have changes to make.

(Cowley 1951, 229-30)

It strikes me that Cranes experience in writing poetry is probably rather similar tothat of the process of how many or even most artistic pieces come into existence. One getsperhaps an inchoate idea and then begins to see it take shape (by either writing some pre-liminary lines or putting together chords and melodic motifs or taking some pictures or try-ing out some dance steps). Slowly, not infrequently with painstaking decision-making andtrial and error, something is transformed into a kind of structuresomething that starts tohave its own identity. Kay Ryan, a former US Poet Laureate, claims that she writes her po-etry in one sitting, but that the ideas have been swirling around in her head for months. Ofcourse, sometimes one simply gets the whole thing at once. That is supposedly the story ofColeridges Kubla Khan. But that, I am arguing, is the exception rather than the rule.

It is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who (in)famously insists that life itself is essential-ly a process of appropriating . . . . Exploitation does not belong to a corrupted or imperfect,primitive society: it belongs to the essence of being alive (Nietzsche 2002, 259). Certainlyall art making is essentially appropriation. The Oxford English Dictionary de nes appropria-tion as taking as ones own or to ones own use. 12 A simple example of this is that poetryand novels rely upon you appropriating words from some language. Since language isowned by no one in particular, you are quite free to do so. Go right ahead. But improvisingart requires more than just borrowing from language. It requires appropriating from life,from the world of ideas, and from the language of painting or lm or sculpture or music.Indeed, it is so basic to artistic improvisation that the novelist Margaret Drabble (1939- )boldly admits that appropriation is what novelists do. Whatever we write is, knowingly orunknowingly, a borrowing. Nothing comes from nowhere (Drabble 2004, x).

The question, then, is simply: how much does any given piece of art depend upon an-other? The answer is: it all depends. For appropriation and dependency represent a ratherwide spectrum that has representatives all along the way. Even if one tries to come upwith examples that are truly original, one inevitably can nd in uences and sources forsuch examples. A typical example of an original piece of art is Igor Stravinskys (1882-1971) The Rite of Spring [La Sacre du Printemps], which rst premiered in 1913. Consider thefollowing description of it from 1927: Harmonic tradition collapsed; everything becamepermissible and it was but necessary to nd ones bearings in these riches obtained by this


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unexpected license. . . . Stravinsky broke down everything at one blow (Quoted in Tar-uskin 1996, 847). The musicologist and Stravinsky scholar Richard Taruskin quotes thesewords and then says the following:

Minus the rampant animus, this is more or less how The Rite of Spring is still viewed today.The usual account of the work places almost exclusive emphasis on its putative rupture withtradition; and despite all his subsequent disclaimers, that is the view the composer chose toabet, increasingly alienated as he was from the cultural milieu in which the ballet was con-ceived. It was, however, precisely because The Rite was so profoundly traditional, both as tocultural outlook and as to musical technique, that Stravinsky was able to nd through it avoice that would serve him through the next dif cult phase of his career. Precisely becauseThe Rite was neither rupture nor upheaval but a magni cent extension, it revealed to Stravin-sky a path that would sustain him through a decade of unimaginable ruptures and upheavalsbrought on by events far beyond his control.

(Taruskin 1996, 847)

Taruskins point is that what soundsso new and different is actually very stronglygrounded in the tradition of Russian music that Stravinsky inherits. The Rite is thus markedby its fusion of traditional and modern elements. And Taruskin points out that Stravinsky,

although wavering back and forth, generally chose to promote the revolutionary inter-pretation of the piece, since that made The Rite (and thus Stravinsky himself) seem all themore remarkable. Yet this kind of rhetoric is just that: ways of talking that make pieces ofart seem more extraordinary than they really are by overemphasizing the new aspectsand downplaying the more traditional ones. However innovative a piece of art mightbe, it is always still very strongly dependent upon tradition. The avant-garde composerPierre Boulez (1925- ) captures this quite nicely when he says:

The composer is exactly like you, constantly on the horns of the same dilemma, caught inthe same dialecticthe great models and an unknown future. He cannot take off into theunknown. When people tell me, I am taking off into the unknown and ignoring the past, itis complete nonsense.

(Boulez 1986, 454)Indeed, what could taking off into the unknown possibly look (or sound) like?

Improvisation on what is available to an artist can take many different forms. Thepainter and sculptor George Braque (1882-1963) began to experiment with making collagesout of newspaper fragments, ticket stubs, pieces of wood, fabric, stamps, and other items.Here we have a kind of improvisation that takes the detritus of human life and makes itinto something artistic. In turn, lm directors often look to novels for their material. Thereare various versions of Jane Austen novels that attempt to be as faithful as possible tothe original. The photographer Sherrie Levine (1947- ) has made a career of photograph-ing photographs of other photographers and then presenting the results as her own. She isknown for an exhibition titled After Edward Weston (1980) in which she presented herphotographs of Walker Evanss photographs.

Or, to take another example, folk music likewise relies on borrowing and remixingstrands from other pieces of music that can result in either something that is very close to anexisting song or something quite different from anything that already exists. Folk music isso strongly intertextual that, if such borrowing ceased, so would the very genre. For thisreason, the musicologist Charles Seeger writes: The attempt to make sense out of copy-right law reaches its limit in folk song. For here is the illustration par excellence of the Lawof Plagiarism. The folk song is, by de nition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a


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product of plagiarism (Seeger 1962, 93-101). As I mentioned earlier, rock music would beunthinkable without the very direct in uence of the blues. It was not just that rock musi-cians were listening to blues musicians and getting ideas; it was that they were actually rip-ping them off. For example, Led Zeppelins eponymous debut album is heavily indebted toWillie Dixons songs You Shook Me, I Cant Quit You Baby, and You Need Love. Of

course, once such pieces of art start to generate huge revenues, creative borrowing becomesquestionable. Thus, Dixon sued Led Zepplin and the family of African composer SolomonLinda, who wrote the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight that was used by Disney in The LionKing, led suit against Abilene Music. And Picasso and others appropriated from Africanart back when such borrowing seemed perfectly acceptable. More recently, Bob Dylan bor-rowed from the Confederate poet Henry Timrod. Dylans When the Deal Goes Down hasthe line more frailer than the owers, these precious hours, whereas Timrods Rhapsodyof a Southern Winter Night goes: A round of precious hours . . . And strove, with logicfrailer than the owers.

Perhaps we need to be more honest and simply recognize that borrowing is whatmakes art possible. Back in 1876, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) had already noted:

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or privateaddition so rare and insigni cant,and this commonly on the ground of other reading orhearing,that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote.

(Emerson 2010, 94)

Of course, there has long been something like a consensus on what kind of borrow-ing is permissible. The poet John Milton (1608-1674) gives us the formula in brief: if it benot bettered by the borrower, among good authors it is counted Plagiar (Milton, 1887,458). Johann Mattheson (1681-1784) expands on this idea: Borrowing is permissible; butone must return the thing borrowed with interest, i.e. one must so construct and developimitations that they are prettier and better than the pieces from which they are derived

(Mattheson 1981, 298).It shouldnt be dif cult to see that de ning the role of artists in terms of improvisa-tion changes pretty much everything. If artists are indebted to one another, there can be nolone genius, disconnected from the community. Instead, we are all improvisers together,quoting one another, saying the same thing in different ways, and giving different perspec-tives on the same things. There is an ever-shifting balance between quotation and original-ity, between old and new, between you and me. Some of what I say is more mine; someis more yours; some is more tradition. Getting the exact ownership right may only bepossible to a certain extent.

Responding to the CallHow might one think about this kind of improvisatory movement? What sort of structuredoes it take? And how might we rethink the idea of genesis? As the subtitle of my paper hasit, we are responding to the call. But what call is this? Certainly, there is nothing like onecall. Instead, the call and response structure is basic to our very existence. If youve neverread the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in terms of the call and response structure,you may never have noticed just how frequently it occurs. Its virtually everywhere. Wehave already seen how the world comes into existence by Gods call let there be light.God calls to Adam and Eve in the Garden. Then, God calls Abraham to go to a foreign landwhere he will make Abrahams descendants into a new nation (Genesis 12). But it is in


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Exodus, when God calls to Moses from the burning bush, that we get both the call and theclassic form of the response. God says: Moses, Moses! To that call, Moses gives the stan-dard biblical reply: Here I am (Ex. 3:4). Similarly, God calls to Samuel and he responds:Speak, for your servant is listening (I Sam. 3:9). The ultimate call in the Hebrew Bible is:Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone (Deut. 6:4). We are constantly being

called by God to give the reply here I am, which means I am at your disposal.Even though this pattern of call and response goes back at least as far as creation, thereis no onecall, even in the creation narrative. Instead, there are multiple callscalls uponcallsand thus responses upon responses, an intricate web that is ever being improvisedwith the result being a ceaseless reverberation of call and response. Yet what structures thisrelation of call and response? Here I am following Jean-Louis Chrtiens account as laidout in his book The Call and the Response. There Chrtien reminds us just how central thisstructure of call and response is to creaturely existence, and how intimately connected togoodness and beauty it is. Chrtien says that things and forms do not beckon us becausethey are beautiful in themselves, for their own sake, as it were. Rather, we call them beautifulprecisely because they call us and recall us (Chrtien 2004, 3, my italics).

Here we have a surprising reversal. Chrtien is clear regarding the relation of call,beauty, and goodness. But it is the orderof them that he puts into question. Beautiful, kalon,is what comes from a call, kalein (Ibid. 7 ), he says. So the call is what constitutes the beauti-ful, rather than the other way around. Things are beautiful precisely because they call outto us. Or, we might put this the other way around: Gods call precedes the pronouncementof beauty. Let there be light, says God, and only aftercalling it into being does he thenre ect on its goodness (Gen. 1:3-4). In this sense, kale [to call] is more primordial than kalon.Or, as Chrtien puts it: The word beautiful is not primary, but responds and correspondsto the rst call, which is the call sent by thought construed as a power to call and to name(Chrtien 2004, 7).

Yet the creation of light lacks the dimension of a human call. Light may respond by

illuminating, but a person called by God responds both by a readiness to hear and a readi-ness to act. Earlier, we noted how similar the calls and responses are in the Old Testament.What takes place in these exchanges is a crucial reversal. Emmanuel Levinas puts it as fol-lows: here I am ( me voici)! The accusative here is remarkable: here I am, under your eyes, atyour service, your obedient servant (Levinas 1996, 146). In other words, the subject is nowtruly subject to the Other, the one who calls, and so stands in the accusative case.

Yet how does beauty call and what is its attraction? While the Hebraic priority of thevoice has often been contrasted with the Hellenic priority of sight, the call can come ineither form, or another form altogether. Relating his enlightenment from Diotima in theSymposium, Socrates speaks of moving from an erosfor the body to an erosfor the soul toan eros for beauty itself. Ultimately, this eros foror, we might well say, call tobeauty is

disconnected from both sight and sound. So it would seem that the call may be deliveredthrough sight or sound, or even something else. However, Chrtien points out that, evenin the Socratic dialogue Symposium, vision, at every step, produces speech in response[e.g., the very speech that Socrates is making at the banquet] and so concludes that vis-ible beauty calls for spoken beauty (Chrtien 2004 , 11). What exactly, though, is beautysallure? In commenting on Plato, the neo-Platonist philosopher Proclus makes the insight-ful etymological observation that beauty calls ( kalein) because it enchants and charms(kelein) (Plato 1961, 210a-e). Chrtien concludes that the charm beauty exerts results invoice, speech, and music (Chrtien 2004 , 12). Of course, Chrtien is overstating his case.


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No doubt beauty often results in speech and music, but it can likewise move us to paint orsculpt. Further, Chrtien may sound like he is guilty of putting forth a conception of beautythat is too sweet and precious. Yet his essay on Jacobs wrestling with the stranger/angel/God titled How to Wrestle with the Irresistible in his book Hand to Hand: Listening to theWork of Art gives us a very subtle, nuanced account of beauty that is violent and unsettling

(Chrtien 2003). Whatever beauty isand beauty is not really the subject of this paperitis, at least in this world, often broken and awed. At times, it is more like Kants sublimeraw and unnerving. It may be soothing, but it may just as well be biting and uncomfortable.So the call may be aggressive and even violent.

In any case, Proclus does more than de ne beauty in terms of enchantment and charm,for he likewise connects this enchantment with God. In his Platonic Theology, he writes:beauty converts all things to itself, sets them in motion, causes them to be possessed bythe divine, and recalls them to itself through the intermediary of love (Proclus 1988, 77). We nd this same connection of beauty and God in Dionysiusor Pseudo-Dionysiusagainby way of the call: Beauty calls all things to itself (whence it is called beauty), writesDionysius, who makes it clear that Beauty here is another name for God (in his text titled

The Divine Names).13

So beauty enchants and this enchantment ultimately comes from God. But how do weparticipate in the call? In one sense, that participation is possible because God both tran-scends the world and yet is re ected by it. One canon this pointagree with John Mil-bank, who writes that participation can be extended also to language, history and culture:the whole realm of human culture precisely because human making participates in a Godwho is in nite poetic utterance (Milbank 2003, ix). While it seems to me that Milbank hereunduly limits participation to poiesis (i.e., the ancient Greek term for artistic making)andI would want to broaden it to include phronesis (i.e., the ancient Greek term for practicalwisdom)the context for these re ections certainly makes poiesis an appropriate way inwhich to participate in the divine beauty. Of course, there are different ways of thinking

poiesis. Let me develop that notion here in terms of black spirituals and jazz.Black spirituals and jazz well illuminate what takes place in the call and the response.As will become clear, my principal points are that: 1) the call always precedes me; 2) in re-sponding, I do not speak entirely on my own behalf but on my behalf and the behalf of oth-ers; and 3) that the improvised response is always a repetition and an improvisation.

The rst characteristic, then, is that the call always precedes me. It is not just that theresponse is a response to a prior call; it is that even the call in these songs echoes a priorcall. That call can be spelled out in terms of the previous performance of these pieces. But itcan likewise be traced back to earlier calls. This is why Chrtien speaks of it being alwaystoo late for there to be an origin (Chrtien 2004 , 5), for the origin of the present call far pre-cedes it. Thus, responding to the call is both a responding to a present callone here and

nowand to the calls that have preceded it. We do not rst call; rather, we call because wehave already been called. To improvise in jazz, then, is to respond to a call, to join in some-thing that is always already in progress. One becomes an improviser by becoming part ofthe discourse of jazz.

While it would take considerably deeper analysis than we have time for here to ex-plain what is involved in becoming a jazz musician and learning how to improvise, wecan brie y summarize what happens as follows. Speaking with Pierre Bourdieu, we mightsay that one must cultivate a habitus, a way of being that is both nurtured by and resultsin what Bourdieu terms regulated improvisations (Bourdieu 1977, 78). They are regu-


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lated precisely by the constraints that make jazz jazzand not something else. Onebecomes habituated into this habitus by listening, and learning to listen is the preconditionfor all future improvisationespecially when one improvises with others. So we can saythat each improvisation is like a response to improvisations of the past. To become an im-proviser, one must have an intimate knowledge of past improvisations and the possibility

conditions for those improvisations (i.e., the conventions of improvising). To be able to im-provise means one is steeped in the tradition and knows how to respond to the call of otherimprovisers. Although we tend to think of jazz improvisation in terms of spontaneity, thatquality of improvisationwhile undoubtedly presentis usually greatly exaggerated. It isalso remarkably paradoxical. Not only are many improvisations often heavily scriptedbut also spontaneity is only possible when one is well prepared. It takes a great deal ofwork to be spontaneous.

Being spontaneous is not something one simply wills. Keith Johnstone notes thatit is the decision not to try and control the future that allows for spontaneity (Johnstone1979, 32). The implication here is that one opens oneself up to the future to allow somethingto happen. But, of course, opening oneself up to the future is only possible by being fully

prepared and that requires a thorough grounding in the tradition. In jazz, knowing thepast is what makes the future possible. Of course, in realizing the debt to and dependencyupon the past, the jazz musician is aware that any response to the call is made possible bya gift. The call is a gift to me, something that comeslike life itselfultimately unbiddenand simply disseminated. There is, of course, a long tradition (both inside and outside ofthe Christian tradition) in which the ability to paint or sculpt or improvise has been seenas a gift, something simply bestowed upon one that calls for responsibility on the part ofthe receiver to cultivate, nurture, and exercise. 14 In this sense, both the ability and the prod-ucts that arise from that ability are gifts. If one takes their gift character seriously, then onesenses a kind of responsibility for exercising artistic gifts. Although it is theatrical ratherthan jazz improvisers who speak in these terms, the call is like an offer that can be either

accepted or blocked.15

To accept the call is to respond in kind, to say yes to what isbeing offered and thus develop the call.Second, my response is never mine alone, as we noted earlier. To be sure, I speak for

myself, yet also for others and in their name. To improvise is always to speak to others, withothers (even when one improvises alone), and in the name of others. Given that the call pre-cedes me, I do not begin the discourse, nor do I bring it to a conclusion. For instance, if Implaying one of the perennial standards of jazz, I do so along with so many otherswhetherthose playing alongside me, or those playing the tune in some other corner of the world,or all of those who have played it before. Moreover, when I play a tune, I am never simplyimprovising on that tune alone. I am improvising on the tradition formed by the improvisa-tions upon that tunewhat literary theorists call its reception history. Whereas in regard

to literature, Harold Bloom has spoken of the anxiety of in uencewhich is the desire tobe new, fresh, and originaljazz musicians would rather speak of the joy of in uence. 16 Blooms talk of anxiety stems from the idea of genesis as sheer originality. But, as wehave already seen, jazz provides a very different model for the artist.

This question of identity naturally leads to my third point, which is that my responseis always both a repetition and an innovation. Chrtien writes of the strange logic of im-provisation (even though he is hardly thinking explicitly of improvisation, let alone jazz):Our response can only repeat. It starts by repeating. Yet it does not repeat by restating(Chrtien 2004 , 25). Chrtien goes on to explain this enigmatic claim by saying that there


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NotesThe Oxford English Dictionary1. , 2nd ed. s.v. genesis.This is a quotation attributed to Bach.2.As the quotation from Kant makes clear, genius is a3. talent according to Kant. Ifwe were to pursue this carefully de ned conception of genius, then Kants viewmight be less problematic. However, elsewhere Kant speaks of the genius not asa talent but as a person (the product of a genius . . . is an example that is meantnot to be imitated, but to be followed by another genius, Critique of Judgment 49). Moreover, I am less interested in explicating exactly what Kant thought andmore in how Kant has normally been interpreted.I should point out that Kant often uses phrases like on this point everyone agrees4.precisely when he is putting forth ideas on which everyone doesntagree.For example, see Hans Lenneberg, The Myth of the Unappreciated (Musical) Ge-5.nius, Musical Quarterly 80 (1. 980): 219-231.

Hegel may be the rst to show how intersubjectivitythe interconnected nature6. of human personsis constitutive of human subjectivity, though he is certainlynot the last. See Hegel, 1977, 178-196.Most of this information comes from a fascinating interview between Stanton7.and Terry Gross titled Animations from Life on the program Fresh Air (July 10,2008).Theodore Geisel (a.k.a. Seuss) was aboard a ship sailing from France to the States8.and became entranced by the thrum of the boat engine. The anapestic tetrameterrhythm (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable) of the motorbecame the rhythm of the book.A fake book provides the performer with chords and melody, with the expec-9.tation that the performer fake the rest.See10. Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (Spring eld, Mass: Merriam-Webster, 2003) s.v. improvise and The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v.create.For more on Handels composing, see Winemiller, 444-70.11.The Oxford English Dictionary12. 2nd ed. s.v. appropriation.Pseudo-Dionysius,13. The Divine Names701c-d, in The Complete Works, trans. ColinLuibheid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist, 1987). The English translation usesbids in place of calls. But, since the verb is kaloun in the Greek text, callsseems a more accurate translation.

is a kind of space that is opened up in ourselves that gives us a voice so that we are able topass on the call without mere repetition. We hear the call and we translate it into an idiomof our own.

Thus, to return to Said, we can say that artistic improvisation has no origin, even if ithas a beginning. For a beginning in this sense is one that has always already begun. Artistic

genesis happens within the

ux and the chaos. When God says let there be light, to whomor what is God speaking? On the ex nihilo account, it would seem that there is no one there.Yet, on an improvisatory account, it makes perfect sense that God is asking that the light,which already exists, to separate itself from the darkness. It likewise makes sense that thecall is always an echo of a previous call. And it is only in being called that we respond.


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Documents

Benson, B.L. in the Beginning, There Was Improvisation. Responding to the Call