by Bruce Ellis Benson
Ex nihilo nihil fit. From nothing comes nothing. That would seem to be the collective wisdom of the ancients, whether Babylonian, Greek, or Hebrew. Thus, the creation accounts found in various ancient Mesopotamian texts are always from something. It is likewise the view of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who believes nothingness or non-being makes no sense and so one cannot even say “it is or it is not.” On his account, one can only say “it is or . . . ,” since nothing makes no sense. It is not. It is no thing. Indeed, even that great songwriting team Rogers and Hammerstein reminds us that “nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.”
And yet this is not the orthodox Christian version of creation, despite what some consider to be biblical evidence in favor of it. Early Christian theologians generally were in favor of the “from something” account and probably would have considered the “from nothing” account to be simply nonsense. Of course, as one might guess, things are somewhat more complicated than this. But one thing is sure. The German theologian Gerhard May is certainly right when he states: “church theology wants through the proposition creatio ex nihilo to express and safeguard the omnipotence and freedom of God acting in history” (May 1994, 180). At issue, then, are power and freedom. The God who can create ex nihilo is simply more powerful and free than the God who merely creates from that which already exists. How we interpret the first 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 has no need of existent matter.
Not surprisingly, these aspects of power and freedom are very much part of our conception of the creations wrought by human beings. Our views of the genesis of art have been heavily shaped by our views of the nature of divine creation. Just as we can distinguish between a “strong creator” and a “weak creator” of the cosmos, so we can distinguish between strong and weak creators of arts. In what follows, I intend to accomplish three tasks. First, I briefly consider the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and bring those considerations to bear on how we think about the artistic creation. Second, I return to the biblical text to provide an alternative conception of artistic creation, one that moves from the idea of creation to that of improvisation. In so doing, the artist is seen in a significantly different light. Third, I relate this idea of improvisation to the call and the response structure as put forth by Jean-Louis Chrétien.
Creatio ex nihilo
The 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 void and 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 light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
(Gen. 1:1-5, NRSV)
What exactly is God doing here? Further, what is this “beginning” [re’sit] and where does it begin? One can say this is a basic question regarding any kind of genesis: at what point can we say that something begins? It is significant that the OED defines “genesis” as “the action of building up from simple or basic elements to more complex ones.”1 For something like that seems to be described here. The earth is described as “a formless void” and “darkness covered the face of the deep” [tohu vabohu, or “the depth in the dark”]. And then God creates [bara]. On this account, things are already “in medias res”—or “into the middle of 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 biblical concept,” 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 that existed” (as the NRSV has it) or we could translate this phrase simply as “realize that God made them [the world] out of nothing.” Gerhard von Rad claims quite simply that “the conceptional formulation creatio ex nihilo is first found” in this passage (von Rad 1962, 142n). But one can also point to Psalm 148, in which the psalmist writes: “Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created” (v. 5). Further, one can point to New Testament passages in which God or Christ is claimed by Paul to be the creator of all things. Romans 11:36 tells us that “from him . . . are all things. Colossians 1:16 says that “in him [or by him, i.e. Christ] all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible.” Paul is very clearly attempting to establish Christ as a very powerful figure. An even more telling quotation is from the first-century rabbi, Gamaliel. In effect, a philosopher attempts to paint a diminished picture of God by saying: “Your God was indeed a great artist, but he had good materials to help him.” To this, Gamaliel responds: “All of them 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 of God): “You cannot have gone to work like a human craftsman, who forms a material object from some material in accordance with his imaginative decision. . . . Is there anything that exists at all, if not because of you? Clearly, then, you spoke and things were made. By your word you made them (Augustine 1997, XI.5.7).
Let us leave aside the theological case for the moment and ask a different, though very closely related, question. What would a strong artistic account of bara [creation] look like? Here it is helpful to turn to the philosopher Immanuel Kant. A phrase we can use to unpack his account is his claim that “fine art is the art of genius” (Kant 1987, § 46).
But, first, a couple points of comparison on the notion of “genius.” In 1746, the French theorist Charles Batteux (1713-1780) had argued that art was all about imitating nature and the “genius” is the one who is a superb imitator. This conception of genius is easy enough to understand, for such a genius is essentially someone who has learned the techniques of a given type of art form and has become a highly developed craftsman. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) would seem to have held such a view, given his reported comment: “I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results.”2 Yet consider how different the following description of the genius is given by William Duff (1732-1815) in 1770.
A man of genius is really a kind of different being from the rest of the species. The bent of his disposition, the complexion of his temper, the general turn of his character, his passions and his pursuits are for the most part very dissimilar from those of the bulk of mankind. Hence partly it happens that his manners appear ridiculous to some and disagreeable to others.
(Duff 1770, 339)
Here, in contrast, we have a portrait of the artist as rather different from you and me. The artist is some rather strange person—either “ridiculous” or “disagreeable”—who isn’t like “the rest of the species.” Someone like Vincent van Gogh comes to mind.
Kant’s Critique of Judgment appeared in 1790. In that text, Kant gives us a picture of the genius that is a lot closer to Duff than to Batteux. The Kantian artist clearly counts as a “strong creator” and thus is powerful. According to Kant, “genius is a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given . . . . hence the foremost property of genius must be originality” (Kant 1987, §46). Whereas Batteux had stressed being a good imitator, Kant goes in the radically opposite direction: being as original as possible. You might say that the “rules” don’t apply to the genius, meaning that the Kantian artist is likewise free.3 As Kant puts it, “on this point everyone agrees: that genius must be considered the very opposite of a spirit of imitation” (Ibid. §47).4 Thus, the genius’s art works become examples for lesser artists (poor saps!) to imitate, while great artists somehow just come up with great ideas because, as Kant puts it, they are “nature’s favorite and so must be regarded as a rare phenomenon” (Ibid. §49). Kant’s concept of genius gets even more interesting when he claims that “if an author owes a product to his genius, he himself does not know how he came by the ideas for it” (Ibid. §46). This clearly separates the genius artist from the scientist, at least for Kant. Whereas the genius artist has absolutely no idea of how she came up with her ideas, says Kant, a scientist like Newton can explain each of the steps that led him to his theory. So creating for the genius is a kind of mysterious process that even she does not understand, unlike Bach’s view in which it can be explained by the techniques of a craftsman who’s at the top of his game. To sum up Kant’s account: 1) true geniuses are original, 2) what they create is exemplary for everyone else, and 3) they are unable to explain how they created their masterpieces. Accordingly, their creations are both original and exemplary. What distinguishes the art of the genius is that it is innovative. Everything else—works that are derivative in one sense or another—count more as secondary texts or as commentaries on the primary texts provided by the genius. Thus, we have a conception of the artist that is remarkably like that of the God who creates ex nihilo—an artist who is both powerful and free.
Now, there is something right about Kant’s idea of the genius: one somehow gets ideas. And it is not always clear where those ideas come from. The literature on creativity or innovation (and whether they are one phenomenon or two) is vast and, understandably, contradictory. For creativity is hardly easy to explain. At least as far back as Plato, in the dialogue Ion, there has been the question of exactly where artists (or, in this particular case, poets) get their ideas. Speaking to the poet named Ion, who has just returned from Epidaurus having just won first prize for reciting Homer, Socrates suggests that his “skill” really results from him being “out of his mind.” Socrates says: “This gift you have of speaking well on Homer is not an art; it is a power divine . . . . so the lyric poets are not in their senses when they make these lovely lyric poems (Plato 1961, 533d-534a). Ion is not at all convinced that Socrates is right (Ibid. 536d-e), but this idea that poets are divinely inspired has been widely held, as has been the notion that somehow artists just get ideas in some sort of magical way. No more influential expression of this idea of creation exists than that from a famous letter attributed 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 following; 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 cheer—say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. . . . 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 done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper 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 painful to discover that it is a pure fabrication by Friedrich Rochlitz, who was both a fan of Mozart and had been influenced by Kant’s notion of the genius. Rochlitz’s account of Mozart’s composition process is how he wanted it to go. It is as if we want our artists to be capable of something like magical power. The contemporary philosopher of music Jerrold Levinson goes so far as to say that
the whole tradition of art assumes art is creative in the strict sense, that it is a godlike activity in which the artist brings into being what did not exist beforehand—much as a demiurge forms a world out of inchoate matter. . . . There is a special aura that envelops composers, as well 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, it clearly has held sway for more or less the last couple of centuries (that is, during the “modern” 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” who neither needs nor wants the influence of or interaction with others—the artist off alone in a garret. Second, whereas artists had generally been seen as craftsmen (Bach’s view of himself was largely the view held throughout western history), now they become “godlike.” For instance, the Germans Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798) and Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) speak of artists as “a few chosen men whom [God] has anointed as His favorites” (Wackenroder and Tieck 1975, 59). Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in his biography of Bach, suggests that some of Bach’s works could be mentioned “only with a kind of holy worship.” (a claim that Bach—who wrote the initials S.D.G. standing for Soli Deo Gloria [For God’s glory alone] on his scores—could never have imagined making) (Forkel 1970, 12). George Bizet (1838-1875) goes so far as to say that “Beethoven is not a human, he is a god” (Quoted in Salmen 1983 , 269). And Carl Maria von Weber demands that the composer become “free as a god” (Quoted in Blume 1970, 91). So artists become either special agents of God or else simply gods themselves. It’s one thing to say that god is the giver of talents that allow us to make art; it’s quite another thing to say that the artist is thereby somehow like or equal to God.
Of course, the problem was that artists wanted it both ways in terms of being understood and appreciated. On the one hand, a lack of understanding or appreciation by the audience came to be interpreted as a sign of greatness: according to the myth which was then just starting to take shape, innovative artists were those whose genius was not sufficiently appreciated. Thus art that was immediately and universally enjoyed came to be seen as somehow inferior aesthetically. Today this “myth of the unappreciated genius” has gained such a hold that we tend to assume that it was the norm for great artists not to have been sufficiently appreciated by their contemporaries, despite the fact that there is ample evidence to suggest that this was only true in certain exceptional cases.5 We tend to assume that—almost by definition—a truly great work of art is one that initially meets with great resistance. Again, van Gogh is a prime example for that idea. In any case, such a myth—no matter how far from reality it actually was—proved an extremely useful one for artists. Those who were not popular (or at least felt that they did not receive the attention which they deserved) could always take solace in the fact that such was the lot of great geniuses and that popular arts were “selling out.”
As should be clear from the account I’ve 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 God as creator ex nihilo. Further, I realize that I am painting with a rather broad brush and that any of the points I have made could be contested. However, I think that the general contours of my argument are correct, even if one can always find exceptions.
Yet what if we were to return to the creation account and mold a very different sort of conception of artistic activity?
Creatio ex improvisatio
Theologian 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 book Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming is to deconstruct ex nihilo theology and return to that forgotten chaos. Writing as a feminist theologian, she claims that the ex nihilo account is a highly masculine one. As we have seen, it belongs to a discourse of power. In its place, Keller suggests a theology of becoming in which we rethink the very notion of beginning. In this respect, she is indebted to Edward Said, who distinguishes between “beginning” and “origin.” Whereas beginnings are “secular, humanly produced and ceaselessly re-examined,” origins are “divine, mythical and privileged” (Said 1985, xii-xiii). In effect, the problem with ex nihilo is that it erases the deep and the past. It speaks only of a moment. And it passes over the chaos out of which creation takes place. Yet, to quote Keller, “what if we begin instead to read the Word from the vantage point of its own fecund multiplicity, its flux into flesh, its overflow?” (Keller 2003, 19)
Keller reminds us that we begin amidst the chaos and the flux. In this respect, the verb means something other than at least one definition that the OED provides for the verb “begin”—“take the first step.” One never truly begins, for there is always a step that has already 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 not work de novo or ex nihilo, but ex voce and per collaborationi (Brown, 41). To understand what Brown means by this statement, we must return to the Genesis account and note that God works with the earth and the waters in a collaborative way so as to produce animals and sea monsters. God says: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas” and “Let the 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 did of His goodness, for man’s 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 problem 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 He could not in any sense be called Creator unless He is Creator of the material of which the things 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 a God who acts as a “mechanic” or else a God who is a full-blown creator ex nihilo. Is there no middle ground? While working on this article, I was delighted to discover that a colleague of mine—an Old Testament scholar named John Walton—happens to have provided what I consider to be a very helpful interpretation. He insists that we must consider the question “what is the text asserting that God did in this context?” And his answer to that question is that God brings heaven and earth, or the cosmos, into existence “by assigning roles and functions” (Walton 2001, 71). In other words, the text isn’t about “where does the cosmos come from?” but “why does the cosmos have the order and structure that it has?” Of course, it also gives us a different idea of creation—even God works with material that is already there. And Walton makes the point that this is exactly what is meant by the Hebrew word [bara] that we translate as “create.” So the issue is not “existence vs. non-existence” but order.
As to the theological debate, I have no horse in the race. Ultimately, I feel no need to plant a flag on either side, so I neither repudiate ex nihilo nor embrace its opposite. Yet I do think that, on either view, God is an improviser. For creation—however we define it—is precisely God setting in motion a reality of “ceaseless alterations” (Milbank 1991, 227). Thus, the very being of life is improvisatory—by which I mean that it is a mixture of both structure 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 improvisatory movement. Living in such a reality means that we take part in that improvisatory movement in all that we do. Since we are creatures embedded in multiple and ever-changing historical and cultural milieus, our identities and very being arise from our relations to others and the world which we inhabit.6
So how would this view of God translate into an account of artistic creation? On my view, we end up with creatio ex improvisatio [a Latin term that only rarely occurs and only after the fifteenth century]. Artistic genesis, then, always begins somewhere. Consider the following example. It was at a baseball game, when someone handed him a pair of binoculars, that Andrew Stanton suddenly got the idea for what the character WALL-E should look like. He spent the entire next inning looking at the binoculars backwards, twisting them this way and that to simulate various expressions of sadness and joy. Stanton, the director of the film WALL-E, had been thinking for years about the idea of a lone robot left to clean up an uninhabitable earth, but it was only in that moment that he figured out how the animated robot should look. That idea came in an instant, but it took quite some time to realize that watching the songs “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment” from the movie version of Hello, Dolly! would be just the right songs to teach WALL-E emotion. Figuring out the “voices” of the robot characters took even longer and it basically required working with Ben Burtt for a year, during which they kept trying out different sounds until they found the ones that worked. Stanton compares the process to trying out paint swatches on the wall. And those were only some of the myriad details that had to be put in place to make the film 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, months—even years. And those ideas don’t usually come by being isolated but by being connected: with other artists, the history of art, friends who inspire you, and the world of everyday life. Often what happens is that you see something—perhaps as mundane as a pair of binoculars—and you suddenly realize how it could be painted or reworked into something that’s both similar and different. Or perhaps you hear something—the chirp of a bird, a musical chord, a mechanical device that has a certain rhythm—and you imagine the beginning of a piece of music. That last example was the inspiration for Dr. Seuss to write his first book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street!8 Those are just two possibilities of 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, something one did not alone but with others. This was true of how both composers and performers worked, in true improvisatory fashion. The musicologist David Fuller describes the situation as follows: “A large part of the music of the whole era was sketched rather than fully realized, and the performer had something of the responsibility of a child with a colouring book, to turn these sketches into rounded art-works” (Fuller 1989, 117-8) Fuller compares the “scores” of Baroque music to the “charts” or “fake books” one finds in jazz.9 The composer provided some idea of how the piece was to go, but a substantial portion of the 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 composer. 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 “fabricate out of what is conveniently on hand” rather than create in the sense of “to produce where nothing was before.”10 In making art, we always start with something. The extreme side of such “borrowing” would today come under the rubric of “plagiarism.” It may come as rather a surprise that Bach was in the habit of starting with a melody appropriated from either himself or someone else. A well-known example of his creative borrowing is how the popular song “Innsbruch, ich muß dich lassen” [“Innsbruch, I must leave you”] morphed into “O Welt, ich muß dich lassen” [“Oh World, I must leave you”] that became part of his St. Matthew Passion. Of course, this was standard practice at the time—a time when the idea of ownership of intellectual property didn’t really exist. It raises the very question of the notion of ownership and copyright—which has become truly problematic in our time and desperately needs addressing—though that is something I cannot address here. George Frederick Handel was downright prolific in his “recycling” of both his own and others’ work.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 currently committed to “pushing the envelope.” What I’m questioning is just how “original” even the most supposedly “original” pieces of art actually are. I fully admit that, say, Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper (1967) are landmark—even in ways original—artistic contributions. Yet it strikes me that these examples are nothing like a “complete departure” from their respective genres but instead a significant advance within them. That is to say that they are still part of a recognizable genre and not something entirely new. Which is to say that they all represent ways of reworking what already existed in semi-new ways. Thus, I am contending that the old wisdom of Ecclesiastes still holds: “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ec. 1:9). Without doubt, there is reworking, revision, rethinking, and renewal—but there is no true revolution. Here I side with the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer who writes: “Even where life changes violently, as in ages of revolution, far more of the old is preserved in the supposed transformation of everything than anyone knows, and it combines with the new to create a new value” (Gadamer 1989, 281). Rock ’n’ Roll may be a new genre, but it could never have come into existence without heavy borrowing from the blues.
Gadamer’s concept of “play” [Spiel] also goes a good way toward helping us think about how artistic improvisation takes place. Play might seem to be merely something we do as recreation, but Gadamer suggests that play gives us a clue to human activity in general. Note that the German term Spiel can be translated into English as either “play” or “game.” 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 beginning in 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 “stable” as a structure. The beginning of a musical phrase turns into a full melody. Some lines hastily sketched on a canvas get more and more definition as other lines are drawn. A piece of stone moves from being a square block to an increasingly defined shape. But how does all of this happen? Here there can be no simple answer, for pieces of art come into existence in different ways over varying lengths of time. Gustav Mahler’s (1860-1911) First Symphony is interesting in this respect. While Mahler wrote the bulk of it in 1888, parts of it come from material dating back to the 1870s and he revised it more than once. The final version dates to 1906.
While it is difficult to present anything like “the” model for artistic improvisation, consider the following story. Malcolm Cowley gives us what are in effect two descriptions of the process of how Hart Crane (1899-1932) wrote his poetry that can be blended into one. According to the first description, a Sunday afternoon party at which everyone was laughing, playing croquet, and having a good time was often the backdrop for his writing. Crane would be among those laughing—and drinking—the most until he would disappear to the next room. With a Cuban rumba or torch song or Ravel’s Bolero in the background, the partygoers would hear the keys of a typewriter busily banging away. Then, about an hour later, Crane would appear with a poem and have the partygoers read it. At least, that is the way in which Cowley had originally told the story. It certainly makes for an intriguing story and fits rather well with the artistic genius myth we noted earlier. Yet Cowley later realized that this story was really only part of the story. For usually Crane had actually been thinking about that poem—seemingly produced in an hour—for months or years and writing 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 wouldn’t end there. More from Cowley:
As for the end of the story, it might be delayed for a week or a month. Painfully, perseveringly—and dead sober—Hart would revise his new poem, clarifying the images, correcting its meter and searching for the right word hour after hour. ‘The seal’s wide spindrift gave toward paradise’, in the second of his ‘Voyages’, was the result of a search that lasted for several days. At first he had written, ‘The seal’s findrinny gaze toward paradise’, but someone had objected that he was using a non-existent word. Hart and I worked in the same office that year and I remember his frantic searches through Webster’s Unabridged and the big Standard, his trips to the library—on office time—and his reports of consultations with old sailors in South Street speakeasies. ‘Findrinny’ he could never find, but after paging through the dictionary again he decided that ‘spindrift’ was almost as good and he declaimed the new line exultantly. Even after one of his manuscripts had been sent to Poetry or the Dial and perhaps had been accepted, he would still have changes to make.
(Cowley 1951, 229-30)
It strikes me that Crane’s experience in writing poetry is probably rather similar to that of the process of how many or even most artistic pieces come into existence. One gets perhaps an inchoate idea and then begins to see it take shape (by either writing some preliminary lines or putting together chords and melodic motifs or taking some pictures or trying out some dance steps). Slowly, not infrequently with painstaking decision-making and trial and error, something is transformed into a kind of structure—something that starts to have its own identity. Kay Ryan, a former US Poet Laureate, claims that she writes her poetry in one sitting, but that the ideas have been swirling around in her head for months. Of course, sometimes one simply gets the whole thing at once. That is supposedly the story of Coleridge’s “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 essentially 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). Certainly all art making is essentially appropriation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “appropriation” as “taking as one’s own or to one’s own use.”12 A simple example of this is that poetry and novels rely upon you “appropriating” words from some language. Since language is owned by no one in particular, you are quite free to do so. Go right ahead. But improvising art requires more than just borrowing from language. It requires appropriating from life, from the world of ideas, and from the “language” of painting or film 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 or unknowingly, a borrowing. Nothing comes from nowhere” (Drabble 2004, x).
The question, then, is simply: how much does any given piece of art depend upon another? The answer is: it all depends. For appropriation and dependency represent a rather wide spectrum that has representatives all along the way. Even if one tries to come up with examples that are truly “original,” one inevitably can find influences and sources for such examples. A typical example of an “original” piece of art is Igor Stravinsky’s (1882-1971) The Rite of Spring [La Sacre du Printemps], which first premiered in 1913. Consider the following description of it from 1927: “Harmonic tradition collapsed; everything became permissible and it was but necessary to find one’s bearings in these riches obtained by this unexpected ‘license’. . . . Stravinsky broke down everything at one blow” (Quoted in Taruskin 1996, 847). The musicologist and Stravinsky scholar Richard Taruskin quotes these words 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 with tradition; and despite all his subsequent disclaimers, that is the view the composer chose to abet, increasingly alienated as he was from the cultural milieu in which the ballet was conceived. It was, however, precisely because The Rite was so profoundly traditional, both as to cultural outlook and as to musical technique, that Stravinsky was able to find through it a voice that would serve him through the next difficult phase of his career. Precisely because The Rite was neither rupture nor upheaval but a magnificent extension, it revealed to Stravinsky a path that would sustain him through a decade of unimaginable ruptures and upheavals brought on by events far beyond his control.
(Taruskin 1996, 847)
Taruskin’s point is that what sounds so new and different is actually very strongly grounded in the tradition of Russian music that Stravinsky inherits. The Rite is thus marked by its fusion of traditional and modern elements. And Taruskin points out that Stravinsky, although wavering back and forth, generally chose to promote the “revolutionary” interpretation of the piece, since that made The Rite (and thus Stravinsky himself) seem all the more remarkable. Yet this kind of rhetoric is just that: ways of talking that make pieces of art seem more extraordinary than they really are by overemphasizing the “new” aspects and downplaying the more “traditional” ones. However “innovative” a piece of art might be, it is always still very strongly dependent upon tradition. The avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez (1925- ) captures this quite nicely when he says:
The composer is exactly like you, constantly on the horns of the same dilemma, caught in the same dialectic—the great models and an unknown future. He cannot take off into the unknown. When people tell me, ‘I am taking off into the unknown and ignoring the past’, it is 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. The painter and sculptor George Braque (1882-1963) began to experiment with making collages out 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 it into something artistic. In turn, film directors often look to novels for their material. There are various versions of Jane Austen novels that attempt to be as “faithful” as possible to the original. The photographer Sherrie Levine (1947- ) has made a career of photographing photographs of other photographers and then presenting the results as her own. She is known for an exhibition titled “After Edward Weston” (1980) in which she presented her photographs of Walker Evans’s photographs.
Or, to take another example, folk music likewise relies on borrowing and “remixing” strands from other pieces of music that can result in either something that is very close to an existing song or something quite different from anything that already exists. Folk music is so strongly “intertextual” that, if such borrowing ceased, so would the very genre. For this reason, the musicologist Charles Seeger writes: “The attempt to make sense out of copyright law reaches its limit in folk song. For here is the illustration par excellence of the Law of Plagiarism. The folk song is, by definition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a product of plagiarism” (Seeger 1962, 93-101). As I mentioned earlier, rock music would be unthinkable without the very direct influence of the blues. It was not just that rock musicians were listening to blues musicians and getting ideas; it was that they were actually ripping them off. For example, Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut album is heavily indebted to Willie Dixon’s songs “You Shook Me,” “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and “You Need Love.” Of course, once such pieces of art start to generate huge revenues, creative borrowing becomes questionable. Thus, Dixon sued Led Zepplin and the family of African composer Solomon Linda, who wrote the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” that was used by Disney in The Lion King, filed suit against Abilene Music. And Picasso and others appropriated from African art back when such borrowing seemed perfectly acceptable. More recently, Bob Dylan borrowed from the Confederate poet Henry Timrod. Dylan’s “When the Deal Goes Down” has the line “more frailer than the flowers, these precious hours,” whereas Timrod’s “Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night” goes: “A round of precious hours . . . And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers.”
Perhaps we need to be more honest and simply recognize that borrowing is what makes 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 private addition so rare and insignificant,—and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing,—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 borrowing is permissible. The poet John Milton (1608-1674) gives us the formula in brief: “if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors it is counted Plagiaré” (Milton, 1887, 458). Johann Mattheson (1681-1784) expands on this idea: “Borrowing is permissible; but one must return the thing borrowed with interest, i.e. one must so construct and develop imitations that they are prettier and better than the pieces from which they are derived” (Mattheson 1981, 298).
It shouldn’t be difficult to see that defining the role of artists in terms of improvisation changes pretty much everything. If artists are indebted to one another, there can be no “lone” genius, disconnected from the community. Instead, we are all improvisers together, quoting one another, saying the same thing in different ways, and giving different perspectives on the same things. There is an ever-shifting balance between quotation and originality, between old and new, between you and me. Some of what I say is more “mine”; some is more “yours”; some is more “tradition.” Getting the exact ownership right may only be possible to a certain extent.
Responding to the Call
How might one think about this kind of improvisatory movement? What sort of structure does it take? And how might we rethink the idea of genesis? As the subtitle of my paper has it, we are “responding to the call.” But what call is this? Certainly, there is nothing like “one call.” Instead, the call and response structure is basic to our very existence. If you’ve never read 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. It’s virtually everywhere. We have already seen how the world comes into existence by God’s call “let there be light.” God calls to Adam and Eve in the Garden. Then, God calls Abraham to go to a foreign land where he will make Abraham’s descendants into a new nation (Genesis 12). But it is in Exodus, when God calls to Moses from the burning bush, that we get both the call and the classic form of the response. God says: “Moses, Moses!” To that call, Moses gives the standard 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, there is no one call, even in the creation narrative. Instead, there are multiple calls—calls upon calls—and thus responses upon responses, an intricate web that is ever being improvised with the result being a ceaseless reverberation of call and response. Yet what structures this relation of call and response? Here I am following Jean-Louis Chrétien’s account as laid out in his book The Call and the Response. There Chrétien reminds us just how central this structure of call and response is to creaturely existence, and how intimately connected to goodness and beauty it is. Chrétien says that “things and forms do not beckon us because they are beautiful in themselves, for their own sake, as it were. Rather, we call them beautiful precisely because they call us and recall us” (Chrétien 2004, 3, my italics).
Here we have a surprising reversal. Chrétien is clear regarding the relation of call, beauty, and goodness. But it is the order of 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 beautiful, rather than the other way around. Things are beautiful precisely because they call out to us. Or, we might put this the other way around: God’s call precedes the pronouncement of beauty. “Let there be light,” says God, and only after calling it into being does he then reflect on its goodness (Gen. 1:3-4). In this sense, kaleô [to call] is more primordial than kalon. Or, as Chrétien puts it: “The word ‘beautiful’ is not primary, but responds and corresponds to the first call, which is the call sent by thought construed as a power to call and to name” (Chrétien 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 readiness 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 follows: “here I am (me voici)! The accusative here is remarkable: here I am, under your eyes, at your service, your obedient servant” (Levinas 1996, 146). In other words, the subject is now truly 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 the voice has often been contrasted with the Hellenic priority of sight, the “call” can come in either form, or another form altogether. Relating his enlightenment from Diotima in the Symposium, Socrates speaks of moving from an eros for the body to an eros for the soul to an eros for beauty itself. Ultimately, this eros for—or, we might well say, call to—beauty is disconnected from both sight and sound. So it would seem that the call may be delivered through sight or sound, or even something else. However, Chrétien points out that, even in 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 “visible beauty calls for spoken beauty” (Chrétien 2004, 11). What exactly, though, is beauty’s allure? In commenting on Plato, the neo-Platonist philosopher Proclus makes the insightful etymological observation that beauty calls (kalein) “because it enchants and charms (kelein)” (Plato 1961, 210a-e). Chrétien concludes that the charm beauty exerts results in “voice, speech, and music” (Chrétien 2004, 12). Of course, Chrétien is overstating his case. No doubt beauty often results in speech and music, but it can likewise move us to paint or sculpt. Further, Chrétien may sound like he is guilty of putting forth a conception of beauty that is too sweet and precious. Yet his essay on Jacob’s wrestling with the stranger/angel/God titled “How to Wrestle with the Irresistible” in his book Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art gives us a very subtle, nuanced account of beauty that is violent and unsettling (Chrétien 2003). Whatever beauty is—and beauty is not really the subject of this paper—it is, at least in this world, often broken and flawed. At times, it is more like Kant’s sublime—raw 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 define 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 by the divine, and recalls them to itself through the intermediary of love” (Proclus 1988, 77). We find this same connection of beauty and God in Dionysius—or Pseudo-Dionysius—again by way of the call: “Beauty ‘calls’ all things to itself (whence it is called ‘beauty’),” writes Dionysius, 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 we participate in the call? In one sense, that participation is possible because God both transcends the world and yet is reflected by it. One can—on this point—agree with John Milbank, 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 God who is infinite poetic utterance” (Milbank 2003, ix). While it seems to me that Milbank here unduly limits participation to poiesis (i.e., the ancient Greek term for artistic making)—and I would want to broaden it to include phronesis (i.e., the ancient Greek term for practical wisdom)—the context for these reflections certainly makes poiesis an appropriate way in which 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 responding, I do not speak entirely on my own behalf but on my behalf and the behalf of others; and 3) that the improvised response is always a repetition and an improvisation.
The first characteristic, then, is that the call always precedes me. It is not just that the response is a response to a prior call; it is that even the call in these songs echoes a prior call. That call can be spelled out in terms of the previous performance of these pieces. But it can likewise be traced back to earlier calls. This is why Chrétien speaks of it being “always too late for there to be an origin” (Chrétien 2004, 5), for the origin of the present call far precedes it. Thus, responding to the call is both a responding to a present call—one here and now—and to the calls that have preceded it. We do not first call; rather, we call because we have already been called. To improvise in jazz, then, is to respond to a call, to join in something that is always already in progress. One becomes an improviser by becoming part of the discourse of jazz.
While it would take considerably deeper analysis than we have time for here to explain what is involved in becoming a jazz musician and learning how to improvise, we can briefly summarize what happens as follows. Speaking with Pierre Bourdieu, we might say that one must cultivate a habitus, a way of being that is both nurtured by and results in what Bourdieu terms “regulated improvisations” (Bourdieu 1977, 78). They are “regulated” precisely by the constraints that make jazz “jazz”—and not something else. One becomes habituated into this habitus by listening, and learning to listen is the precondition for all future improvisation—especially when one improvises with others. So we can say that each improvisation is like a response to improvisations of the past. To become an improviser, 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 improvise means one is steeped in the tradition and knows how to respond to the call of other improvisers. Although we tend to think of jazz improvisation in terms of spontaneity, that quality of improvisation—while undoubtedly present—is usually greatly exaggerated. It is also remarkably paradoxical. Not only are many “improvisations” often heavily “scripted” but also spontaneity is only possible when one is well prepared. It takes a great deal of work to be spontaneous.
“Being spontaneous” is not something one simply wills. Keith Johnstone notes that it is the “decision not to try and control the future” that allows for spontaneity (Johnstone 1979, 32). The implication here is that one opens oneself up to the future to allow something to 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 the past is what makes the future possible. Of course, in realizing the debt to and dependency upon the past, the jazz musician is aware that any response to the call is made possible by a gift. The call is a gift to me, something that comes—like life itself—ultimately unbidden and simply disseminated. There is, of course, a long tradition (both inside and outside of the Christian tradition) in which the ability to paint or sculpt or improvise has been seen as a gift, something simply bestowed upon one that calls for responsibility on the part of the receiver to cultivate, nurture, and exercise.14 In this sense, both the ability and the products that arise from that ability are gifts. If one takes their gift character seriously, then one senses a kind of responsibility for exercising artistic gifts. Although it is theatrical rather than 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 is being 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, with others (even when one improvises alone), and in the name of others. Given that the call precedes me, I do not begin the discourse, nor do I bring it to a conclusion. For instance, if I’m playing one of the perennial standards of jazz, I do so along with so many others—whether those 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 simply improvising on that tune alone. I am improvising on the tradition formed by the improvisations upon that tune—what literary theorists call its “reception history.” Whereas in regard to literature, Harold Bloom has spoken of “the anxiety of influence”—which is the desire to be new, fresh, and original—jazz musicians would rather speak of “the joy of influence.”16 Bloom’s talk of “anxiety” stems from the idea of genesis as sheer originality. But, as we have 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 response is always both a repetition and an innovation. Chrétien writes of the strange logic of improvisation (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” (Chrétien 2004, 25). Chrétien goes on to explain this enigmatic claim by saying that there is a kind of space that is opened up in ourselves that gives us a voice so that we are able to pass on the call without mere repetition. We hear the call and we translate it into an idiom of our own.
Thus, to return to Said, we can say that artistic improvisation has no origin, even if it has a beginning. For a beginning in this sense is one that has always already begun. Artistic genesis happens within the flux and the chaos. When God says “let there be light,” to whom or 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 the call is always an echo of a previous call. And it is only in being called that we respond.
Notes
- The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. s.v. “genesis.”
- This is a quotation attributed to Bach.
- As the quotation from Kant makes clear, “genius is a talent” according to Kant. If we were to pursue this carefully defined conception of genius, then Kant’s view might be less problematic. However, elsewhere Kant speaks of the genius not as a talent but as a person (“the product of a genius . . . is an example that is meant not 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 and more in how Kant has normally been interpreted.
- I should point out that Kant often uses phrases like “on this point everyone agrees” precisely when he is putting forth ideas on which everyone doesn’t agree.
- For example, see Hans Lenneberg, “The Myth of the Unappreciated (Musical) Genius,” Musical Quarterly 80 (1. 980): 219-231.
- Hegel may be the first to show how intersubjectivity—the interconnected nature of human persons—is constitutive of human subjectivity, though he is certainly not the last. See Hegel, 1977, ¶ 178-196.
- Most of this information comes from a fascinating interview between Stanton 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 States and became entranced by the thrum of the boat engine. The anapestic tetrameter rhythm (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable) of the motor became the rhythm of the book.
- A “fake book” provides the performer with chords and melody, with the expectation that the performer “fake” the rest.
- See Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (Springfield, Mass: Merriam-Webster, 2003) s.v. “improvise” and The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “create.”
- For more on Handel’s composing, see Winemiller, 444-70.
- The Oxford English Dictionary 2nd ed. s.v. “appropriation.”
- Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names 701c-d, in The Complete Works, trans. Colin Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist, 1987). The English translation uses “bids” in place of “calls.” But, since the verb is kaloun in the Greek text, “calls” seems a more accurate translation.
- Just as an example, I note that at the Iridium Jazz Club (NYC) website one finds the following regarding the famed jazz guitarist Les Paul: “Les Paul says his greatest God-given gifts are perfect pitch, a love for music with the ability to learn it quickly, and the curiosity and persistence of an inventor who wants to know “how things tick” (http://www.iridiumjazzclub.com/les.shtml).
- “I call anything that an actor does an ‘offer’. Each offer can either be accepted, or blocked. . . . A block is anything that prevents the action from developing” (Johnstone, Impro 97).
- Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) and John P. Murphy, “Jazz Improvisation: The Joy of Influence,” The Black Perspective in Music 18:1/2 (1990): 7-19.
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