Per Caritatem

Actor and hip hop artist, Dante Terrell Smith, better known as “Mos Def,” grew up in Brooklyn and exhibited musical and acting talents at an early age.  Mos focused on musical theater in high school, attended New York University, and went on to establish himself as both as an actor and a significant voice in the world of hip hop, recording several solo and collaborative albums.  Mos’s lyrics are filled with layers of socio-political and religious commentary and critique, allowing for multiple interpretations and dialogic interdisciplinary engagements.  Below I offer one possible way to enter into dialogue with a song called “Mathematics” from his 1999 debut solo album, Black on Both Sides.

The body of the song opens with a six line stanza rhythmically interweaving the numbers one through ten in between concrete, historical particulars (Pete Rose—i.e. “Charlie Hustle”) to more abstract, universal, and religious allusions (e.g., “Seven firmaments of heaven to hell, 8 Million Stories to tell”).  Then in the next stanza, Mos moves away from the abstract and becomes more personal.  In these nine lines, he highlights how the poetics of a socially conscious hip hop—in particular the voice that it gives to the voiceless— lifts the “powerless up” from the social sinkholes of stigmatized spaces (ghettos, prisons, and “streets too loud to ever hear freedom sing”) and, in his case, has allowed him to overcome some of the socio-political obstacles faced by African Americans so that he might speak on behalf of suffering others.  Yet, as the last three lines indicate living in a condition both created and abandoned by the state—not to mention a socially ostracized, stigmatized “space” (projects, no-go zones etc.)—breeds violence, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness among those forced to occupy those infernal spaces.

The body of my text posesses extra strength
Power-liftin powerless up, out of this, towerin’ inferno
My ink so hot it burn through the journal
I’m blacker than midnight on Broadway and Myrtle
Hip-Hop past all your tall social hurdles|
like the nationwide projects, prison-industry complex
Broken glass wall better keep your alarm set
Streets too loud to ever hear freedom sing
Say evacuate your sleep, it’s dangerous to dream

The next section begins to develop and elaborate the kind of “mathematics” Mos has in mind.  Having to live in such inhumane circumstances of course takes its toll on a person’s psychological, emotional, and physical well-being, and often paradoxically, accelerates and intensifies the construction of the subjectivities that the hegemonic class had hoped to eradicate. As Mos explains, those who internalize the stigma and negativity imposed on them by the dominant narrative—the “chain cats”—end up dead, crushed in spirit and ground to dust for the economic gain of the (largely white) elite class.

But you chain cats get they CHA-POW, who dead now
Killin’ fields need blood to graze the cash cow
It’s a number game, but shit don’t add up somehow

When your world—the social space into which you have been thrown by forces outside of your control—is created, founded, and built upon injustice and exploitation, even something as supposedly clear-cut, steady, dispassionate, and uncontroversial as mathematics becomes a site of socio-political polysemous meanings.  So how does the “shit” not add up? Here are a few examples.

Like I got, sixteen to thirty-two bars to rock it
but only 15% of profits, ever see my pockets
like sixty-nine billion in the last twenty years
spent on national defense but folks still live in fear
like nearly half of America’s largest cities is one-quarter black
That’s why they gave Ricky Ross all the crack
Sixteen ounces to a pound, twenty more to a ki
A five minute sentence hearing and you no longer free

First, Mos critiques the music industry whose sights are set not on artistry and beauty but on profits.  Then he highlights the government’s out of control spending on national defense while simultaneously creating an atmosphere of public panic of the socially constructed “terrorist” as the new “other” to fear. Lastly, he offers his interpretation of the Ricky Ross case.  In a series of controversial articles in 1996, Gary Webb argued that the new all-out war on drugs had a disproportionate impact on blacks, particularly young black males on the lower end of the socio-economic and educational spectrum.  In the Ross case, as Webb explains, you have on one side, “Ricky Donnell Ross, a high school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandon, who has a master’s degree in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.” Both men were arrested for major drug trafficking offenses; however, according to Web’s story, even though Blandon testified in court that “the first kilo of cocaine he sold in California was to raise money for the CIA’s army, which was trying on a shoestring to unseat Nicaragua’s new socialist Sandinista government,” and admitted that his modus operandi was to employ guys like Ross, “a South-Central teen-ager who had the gang connections and street smarts necessary to move the army’s cocaine, a veritable blizzard engulfed the ghettos,” after all the deals were made in the “justice” system, guess which one ends up in the hole after his “five minute hearing”?—Ricky Ross.[1] The section ends with a jab at the new big brother State with its surveillance techniques now legalized and expanded beyond panoptic prisons.

The next seven lines continue to describe life in the urban hellholes, the ghettos and hyper-ghettos where people become hardened and turn to crime and other parallel economic (and often illegal) structures carved out in response to socio-political and economic ostracism and spatial confinement.  Note again the hopelessness and the sense of human potential wasted.

Rock your hardhat black cause you in the Terrordome
full of hard niggaz, large niggaz, dice tumblers
Young teens and prison greens facin’ life numbers
Crack mothers, crack babies and AIDS patients
Young bloods can’t spell but they could rock you in PlayStation
This new math is whippin motherfuckers’ ass
You wanna know how to rhyme you better learn how to add
It’s mathematics

Next we have a structural mirroring of the opening stanza playing off the one through ten number theme and closing with an eleven line description of the “numbers” problem where dead-end low wage (non-salaried and hence no benefits–health insurance, retirement fund, etc.) jobs and poverty-stricken living produce and give rise to drug use, trafficking, and other criminal activities.

Yo, it’s one universal law but two sides to every story
Three strikes and you be in for life, manditory
Four MC’s murdered in the last four years
I ain’t tryin to be the fifth one, the millenium is here
Yo it’s 6 Million Ways to Die, from the seven deadly thrills
Eight-year olds gettin found with 9 mill’s
It’s 10 P.M., where your seeds at? What’s the deal
He on the hill puffin krill [crack cocaine] to keep they belly filled
Light in the ass with heavy steel, sights on the pretty shit in life
Young soldiers tryin’ to earn they next stripe
When the average minimum wage is $5.15
You best believe you gotta find a new ground to get C.R.E.A.M.[2]

The white unemployment rate, is nearly more than triple for black
so frontliners got they gun in your back
Bubblin crack, jewel theft and robbery to combat poverty
and end up in the global jail economy
Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence

From the hopelessness of the ghetto, you move to the hopelessness of the prison and the cycle continues; however, along the way, should you survive the prison camp, the panoptic gaze makes sure that the negative narrative inscribed in your body and indelibly marking your soul stays with you—no bars needed as confinement, stigmatization, segregated spaces, and negated freedom operate on the outside through a network just as rigidly structured and socially impermeable as the hierarchical social strata of the carceral system. Lastly, Mos doesn’t mince words about the role race plays in this deadly numbers game.  Whether chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the ghetto, or hyper-incarceration, “blackness” continues as the mutable target socially constructed in the past as (subhuman) “thing” and now as the “dangerous other” whom, since we can no longer legally lynch, must be destroyed by more socially acceptable means.

And even if you get out of prison still livin’
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits
The system break man child and women into figures
Two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggaz
Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings
but you push too hard, even numbers got limits
Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret:
the million other straws underneath it
It’s all mathematics

Notes

[2] I had no idea what C.R.E.A.M. meant, but after a bit of searching here I found out that it is an acronym which stands for “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” and was made famous “by the Wu-Tang clan […] to describe money. Ever since the Wu-Tang commenced their rap reign in the early 90’s, CREAM has become the universal hip-hop word for money.”

[This is the concluding post for this series:  click on the links for Part I and Part II].

Lastly, turning to a section entitled, “Anticipating,” (chapter 10), I highlight some of the more constructive ways in which Christians might re-sound God’s truth.  Having just discussed how the cross of Christ alone is able to meet three very legitimate postmodern suspicions-escapisms of various flavors, a naïve optimism in human nature, and violent domination-Begbie helps us to see how music can express and embody an already-not-yet, authentic Christian hope.  The hope that Begbie envisages is decidedly not a future only, other-worldly nay-saying hope, but hope “of a future tasted now:  the remaking of this world and of our own humanity, previewed in the raising of Jesus from the dead, and to be enjoyed now through the Spirit” (263).  Following the lead of Russian theologians such as Berdyaev and Bulgakov, Begbie contends that the arts possess the ability to make manifest a proleptic taste of a fully redeemed, re-created cosmos.  Here the picture is not of music transporting us to a world wholly unrelated to our present world, but of music functioning iconic-ly, enabling us to experience now something of the beauty and harmony of the new creation.  There are of course countless possibilities as to how music might grant us such a foretaste.  The very structure of a piece is, for example, one such possibility.  As Begbie explains, “[t]he phenomenon of a future anticipated can also sometimes be found in the way a piece is structured, creating a sort of parable in sound of Christian hope-as when, for example, an ending comes ‘too soon’” (266).  Just as Jesus’s resurrection is a proleptic picture of the final resurrection of God’s people at the end of the present age (wherein the future irrupts into the present), so too music can reflect this “ending-in-the-middle” aspect of the Christian narrative.   For example, in the third movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony no. 41 in C major, we find a “perfect cadence,” which is typically a signal for closure, after the end of the minuet section (266).  However, the piece continues and the presumed ending functions as a transition to something new, to the trio section.   By structuring his piece with a surprise perfect cadence, whose ending turns out to be a new beginning, Mozart communicates the basis of an authentic, Christian hope:  “[t]he resurrection of Jesus is the ending, but found in the midst of history, generating a new beginning” (267).

In sum, my overall impression of Begbie’s book is extremely positive, and I highly recommend his book to anyone interested in engaging theology and music in a refreshing, imaginative way.  Although one might have hoped for more space given to non-Western music, Begbie shows sensitivity to such concerns and is careful not to exalt Western tonal music as the standard for Christian music or music in general.   Begbie has helped us to see the fruitfulness of bringing music into conversation with theology, and we are thankful for his fresh reflections, which have, no doubt, stirred our imaginations “by setting every aspect of music in the context of the breathtaking vision of reality opened up by the gospel of Jesus Christ” (308).

Part three of Begbie’s book, Resounding Truth:  Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, is devoted to setting music within what Begbie calls a Christian “ecology,” that is, “the basic patterns of beliefs that give the gospel its coherence,” with special attention given to the doctrine of creation (25, 305).  Chapter eight, which bears the title, “A Christian Ecology,” sets forth three central questions, which then organize and direct Begbie’s discussions through chapter ten:  “What kind of Creator creates?  What kind of cosmos does the Creator create and relate to?  And what kind of calling do we have in this cosmos?” (305)  Since Begbie’s overall aim is to cultivate “a Christian wisdom about music, that is, to generate godly habits of judgment that can form, inform, and re-form the practicalities of making and hearing music,” (305) I shall devote a significant amount of space to themes covered in chapter nine (”Music in God’s World”) and chapter ten (”Music in God’s Calling”).

In chapter nine, Begbie underscores the Christian understanding of the created cosmos as an expression of God’s love, in which he freely bestows existence to the created realm, which of course, includes human beings.   Thus, for the Christian both human beings and the cosmos itself are givens in the richest sense of the word, as we (nor it) had to be.  To understand sound waves, the human body, and the wood from which certain instruments are crafted as gifts arising from God’s ordo amoris has a profound impact on the way that a Christian ultimately views music.  The Christian’s most basic response toward music will be gratitude, that is, an attitude of thankfulness for “the very possibility of music” (213).  As Begbie so aptly explains, “[i]t will mean regularly allowing a piece of music to stop us in our tracks and make us grateful that there is a world where music can occur, that there is rhythm built into the fabric of the world, that there is the miracle of the human body, which can receive and process sequences of tones” (213).  Thus, a habit of thankfulness is crucial to cultivating a Christian wisdom about music.

Because creation is birthed from God’s freely given love and reflects his character, creation itself is good, even creation in its postlapsarian manifestation.  However, Christianity in its varied expressions has in many ways struggled to fully affirm the goodness of physical creation and our embodied nature.  This inconsistent attitude toward physicality in general has affected how Christians through the ages have conceived music.  Augustine, particularly in his early writings, was heavily influenced by a Platonic understanding of music in which the materiality of music is not valued for its inherent goodness but rather serves as a vehicle to reach the static, unchanging reality of forms.  This is not to suggest that Augustine denied the goodness of the created order;   however, it is to claim that his writings reveal a “marked ambivalence about physical beauty and the materiality of music” (214).  This ambivalence can also be seen in a number of medieval (Boethius) and Reformation theologians (Zwingli).  The de-valuing of the physical qua physical continued in the modern period but in a distinctively modern key.  That is, instead of an emphasis on a separate realm of eternal forms, we have a turn to the interior life of the individual, whether expressed with a Romantic, emotional emphasis (Schleiermacher) or a more thoroughgoing intellectualist bent (Kandinsky, Schoenberg) (214).  For example, the great modern composer, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), believed the enjoyment music gives should be “primarily intellectual,” as in his view the question of whether music sounds pleasant to the ear is “irrelevant to the question of artistic significance” (216).   In sum, for Schoenberg, the “enduring significance and value of music lies not at the level of the physical; [rather] we must learn to rise from the mere materiality of sounds” (216).    In response to these modern attitudes, Begbie encourages the Christian to embrace “music’s embeddedness in materiality,” as the physicality inherent to music and music making-the air pushed from our lungs through our vocal cords, the plucking of steel strings, the beating of drums made from animal skins, the vibrating sound waves-are all part and parcel of God’s good creation (216).

In chapter ten, Begbie explores music as part of our human calling.  Before highlighting some of the constructive ways in which Christians might “voice creation’s praise,” I shall begin by discussing two incredibly interesting yet ultimately misdirected paths pursued by the French composer, Pierre Boulez (1925-), and the American composer, John Cage (1912-1992).  Boulez, who was heavily influenced by Schoenberg’s intellectualist approach to music, developed a compositional style now known as “total serialism.”  As Begbie explains, “total serialism depended on the rigorous organization of music through the use of strict mathematical patterns” (246).  Unlike Schoenberg and his student Webern, whose projects focused mainly on the organization of pitch, Boulez applied his mathematical scheme to every aspect of a musical piece.  The rhythm, timbre, note duration, and so on must be rigorously calculated in order to prohibit the possibility of musical memory both of the past and even within a single piece.  Thus, Boulez aims at motif-less music, music lacking any sense of direction or gravitational pull (247).  Interestingly, Boulez himself became acutely aware of the pitfalls of his own project, viz., the utter dullness of his music.  “With every element in a constant state of variation, no repetition, no theme or any sense of development, it quickly generates a debilitating sense of boredom in the listener” (247).  In addition, the music sounds completely chaotic and disordered.

During this period of musical output, Boulez had been corresponding with John Cage, the chief proponent of “chance music,” and was distressed at the similarity in sound between his and Cage’s music.  On one side of the musical spectrum, we have Cage making music “through random acts such as tossing coins” (247).  On the other side of the spectrum, we have Boulez’s over-determined, mathematically precise compositional techniques.  Yet, ironically, the “results of total indeterminacy and radical indeterminacy sound much the same” (247).  As Begbie sums up so well, Boulez’s approach to music is a “parable in sound of some of the most disturbing currents in modernity,” a powerful musical example “of what happens when the human will is seen as the center and active source of unity and order” (247).  Because Boulez’s imposed order rejects the given sonic order of God’s universe, it fails to enrich human beings, having lost the potential to move or transform us.  Motif-less, motion-less, and monotonous, it leaves us simply bored.

Cage’s view of composition, as alluded to above, was diametrically opposed to Boulez’s.  Rather than impose a strict mathematical order upon music, Cage wanted to let sounds manifest naturally.  Though a Christian can appreciate Cage’s desire to respect the “integrity of sounds and our own embeddedness in nature,” as Begbie brings to our attention, Cage seemly overly suspicious of the possibility that “human interaction with the natural world can be fruitful or enriching” (251).  Of course a well-formed Christian wisdom should reject and speak against violence done to the created order; however, the extreme view espoused by Cage leaves little room for the possibility of interacting with the givens in a non-violent, positive way.  Here we should keep in mind that for centuries Western tonal music has been based on an modification of the harmonic series; “pianos are not tuned precisely in accordance with the series but are tempered to enable us to enjoy playing in a variety of keys and shift from one to another” (252).  When these adjustments first occurred, many musical purists were (and some still are) distressed, as they considered it a distortion of the original, the natural.  However, a Christian view of creative activity need not take this overly pessimistic stance, “believing that is it quite possible to engage respectfully with what is given and through this engagement elaborate fresh art that is felicitous and life-enhancing” (252).

I recently read yet another excellent book by Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth:  Christian Wisdom in the World of Music.  Once again Begbie brings music into conversation with theology-a conversation that continues to yield fresh insights.  One of the goals of Begbie’s book is to explore how Christians might “re-sound” God’s truth in the world of music, as well as to help us “re-think” our own pre-conceived views of music. The book as a whole is divided into three parts.  Part one provides an overview of the way music is practiced in Western culture and attempts to clarify the meaning of the term, “music.” In this section of the book, Begbie considers the ways that marketing and selling shape how we understand and practice music and how innovations in sound technology have distanced music from its “physical roots” (56)-topics particularly relevant to contemporary discussions in the sociology of music.  Likewise, Begbie argues against the trend to focus exclusively on (static) works-an approach that has characterized musicology in the West.  Instead, “it is best to think of music primarily as an art of actions,” the two chief actions being music making and music hearing, both of which are “socially and culturally embedded” (57).  Yet, Begbie also stresses that “music is embedded in a sonic order-it involves the integrity of the materials that produce sound and of sound waves, the integrities of the human body, and the integrity of time” (57).  In other words, though he gives full weight to the constructive and culturally conditioned aspects of music, Begbie likewise wants to do justice to the givens of music, or as he puts it, to “music’s embeddedness in a cosmos created out of the inexhaustible abundance of the Triune god” (58).

In part two, Begbie examines how music was understood and practiced by representatives of the “Great Tradition” (e.g., Pythagoras, Plato, Augustine, and Boethius), selected Reformation thinkers (Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli), and three modern Protestant theologians (Schleiermacher, Barth, and Bonhoeffer).  The final chapter of part two concentrates on the lives of two contemporary Roman Catholic “theological musicians,” Olivier Messiaen (1908-92) and James MacMillan (1959-). Begbie’s analyses of these two musicians are particularly helpful, as his explications and musical examples enable us to see how bringing music into dialogue with theology opens up “new spaces” for re-sounding God’s inexhaustible truth in a polyphonic mode.

Turning first to Messiaen, Begbie focuses on his treatment of time and eternity.  In contrast with the harmonic structures that characterize and dominate traditional Western music, structures that constantly move from tension to resolution and create a “dynamic of desire,” Messiaen’s music is permeated with harmonic sequences that remain unresolved for several passages (e.g., a long series of dominant seventh chords which fail to reach an expected tonic chord).  In combination with his atypical harmonic choices, Messiaen also employs innovative rhythmic techniques in order to create a musical impression of eternity.  For example, by using nonretrogradable rhythms, that is, “rhythms that sound or play the same backward as they do forward,” Messiaen’s music has a circular feel rather than a sense of linear, forward movement (however paradoxical that may seem in light of the temporal nature of music).  As Begbie explains, “[j]ust because they do not sound different when reversed, they present a kind of fusion of past, present, and future in which beginning and end fold into each other” (170).  Of course, Messiaen’s music does not completely lack traditional harmonic and rhythmic elements; however, when joined with his non-standard harmonic and rhythmic practices, a mysterious, bewitching effect is produced, which he believed particularly fitting for “embodying the truths of the Catholic faith and above all the truths of eternity” (170).   Though at times, Messiaen appears to overemphasize eternity to the detriment of created time, Begbie provides several examples to assuage such concerns.  For instance, Begbie highlights Messiaen’s view that our future life with God will not be a static existence but will involve movement of some sort.  In other words, when temporal creatures, as it were, enter into eternity, this should not be understood as “time’s destruction and the end of all movement and dynamism but the fulfillment of time, a kind of time in which past, present, and future can no longer be separated” (174).   Here Begbie distinguishes between temporality characterized by “transience and decay” and a more positive sense of dynamic, eternal existence-the latter set in sharp contrast with any idea of eternity as “nothing but pure stillness” (174).

Turning next to MacMillan, we find a composer, who unlike Messiaen, does not sense the need to abandon or subvert the traditional tension/resolution harmonic patterns of Western tonal music.  Instead, for MacMillan, such techniques “are a compelling means of keeping a composer in touch with a world that, though created good, has been so severely marred and disfigured” (176).  Conflict and struggle characterize MacMillan’s music, as his theological vision takes seriously the harsh realities and injustices so prevalent in the world.  A severe critic of the “modernist myth of progress,” MacMillan embraces extremes and is not afraid to give expression in his music to the messiness of embodied existence (178).  Rather than reproduce the saccharine sentimentality present in much Christian music today, MacMillan’s “pieces frequently display the dialectics and juxtaposition of extreme violence and extreme tranquility, the confrontation of dissonance and consonance” (179).  As Begbie notes, what seems to motivate MacMillan’s opposition to “monodimensional” (music lacking the conflict and struggle of reality) and overly sentimental expressions of music, is his embrace of our embodied existence and specifically, Jesus’s “flesh-involved engagement with the world in its fallenness” (180).  In other words, MacMillan is not driven by a nostalgic conservative impulse to return to a perceived Golden Age of music; rather, his desire to continue and expand the tension/resolution patterns of the Western tradition comes from his deep ties to the Christian narrative-a narrative whose center involves the crucifixion and resurrection of a God made flesh.  In short, although both Messiaen and MacMillan are committed to the same Christian story, each has a different “center of gravity.”   “[F]or MacMillan it is God’s cross-shaped involvement with this world of time, for Messiaen it is the joyful eternity that the timeless God has promised and secured for us” (180).

“That is my goal: time and timelessness are connected. This instant and eternity are struggling within us. And this is the cause of all our contradictions….”

Arvo Pärt

I absolutely love Arvo Pärt’s music.  In case you are unfamiliar with Pärt, below is a brief biography copied verbatim from this website.

***

Born in Paide, Estonia in 1935, Pärt’s musical studies began in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Middle School, interrupted less than a year later while he fulfilled his National Service obligation as oboist and side-drummer in an army band. He returned to Middle School for a year before advancing to the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957 where his composition teacher was Professor Heino Eller. Pärt started work as a recording engineer with Estonian Radio, wrote music for the stage and received numerous commisions for film scores so that, by the time he graduated from the Conservatory in 1963, he could already be considered a professional composer. A year before leaving, he won first prize in the All-Union Young Composers’ Competition for a children’s cantata, Our Garden, and an oratorio, Stride of The World.

Living in the old Soviet Union, Pärt had little access to what was happening in contemporary Western music but, despite such isolation, the early 1960s in Estonia saw many new methods of composition being brought into use and Pärt was at the fore-front; his Nekrolog of 1960 was the first Estonian composition to employ serial technique. He continued with serialism through to the mid 60s in pieces such as the 1st and 2nd Symphonies and Perpetuum Mobile, but ultimately tired of its rigours and moved on to experiment, in works such as Collage on B-A-C-H, with collage techniques.

Official judgement of Pärt’s music veered between extremes, with certain works being praised while others, for example the Credo of 1968, were banned. This would prove to be the last of his collage pieces and after its composition, Pärt chose to enter the first of several periods of contemplative silence, also using the time to study French and Franco-Flemish choral part music from the 14th to 16th centuries – Machaut, Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin. At the very beginning of the ’70’s, he wrote a few transitional compositions in the spirit of early European polyphony, the 3rd Symphony of 1971 being an example: “a joyous piece of music” but not yet “the end of my despair and search.”

Pärt turned again to self-imposed silence, during which time he delved back through the medievalism of his 3rd Symphony and through plainchant to the very dawn of musical invention. He re-emerged in 1976 after a transformation so radical as to make his previous music almost unrecognisable as that of same composer. The technique he invented, or discovered, and to which he has remained loyal, practically without exception, he calls tintinnabuli (from the Latin, little bells), which he describes thus: “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements – with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation.”

The basic guiding principle behind tintinnabulation of composing two simultaneous voices as one line – one voice moving stepwise from and to a central pitch, first up then down, and the other sounding the notes of the triad – made its first public appearance in the short piano piece, Für Alina. While typically in tintinnabuli the melodic voice is based on an abstract procedure or derived from text, here the melody is freely composed, but with the two voices irrevocably joined according to the tintinnabuli principle. The right hand plays notes from the scale of B minor, while the left hand plays notes from the B minor triad. There is only one exception, marked by a single flower drawn in the score, where the left hand plays a new note – a C sharp.

Having found his voice, there was a subsequent rush of new works and three of the 1977 pieces (Fratres, Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten and Tabula Rasa) are still amongst his most highly regarded. As Pärt’s music began to be performed in the west and he continued to struggle against Soviet officialdom, his frustration ultimately forced him, his wife Nora and their two sons, to emigrate in 1980. They never made it to their intended destination of Israel but, with the assistance of his publisher in the West, settled firstly in Vienna, where he took Austrian citizenship. One year later, with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange, he moved to West Berlin where he still lives.

Since leaving Estonia, Pärt has concentrated on setting religious texts for various forces. Large scale works include St. John Passion (1982), Te Deum (1984-86, rev. 1993) and Litany (1994). Works for SATB choir such as Magnificat (1989) and The Beatitudes (1990) have proved popular with choirs around the world and there is a growing ouvre of works for string orchestra and various chamber ensembles; numerous versions of Fratres (1976-date), Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977/80), Festina Lente (1988) and Siloun’s Song (1991). Among his champions in the West have been Manfred Eicher’s ECM Records who released the first recordings of Pärt’s music outside the Soviet bloc, Paul Hillier’s Hilliard Ensemble (and laterly Theatre of Voices) who have premiered several of the vocal works and Neeme Järvi, a long time collaborator of Pärt who conducted the premiere of Credo in Tallinn in 1968 and has, as well as recording the tintinnabuli pieces, introduced through performances and recordings, Pärt’s earlier compositions.

Pärt’s achievements were honoured in his 61st year by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

For an in-depth study of Pärt’s music, refer to Paul Hillier’s book “Arvo Pärt” in the Oxford University Press “Oxford Studies of Composers” series (published May 1997).

Copyright © Doug Maskew, 1997.

Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician, once said “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” The concept that color and musical harmony are linked has a long history, intriguing scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton. Kandinsky used color in a highly theoretical way associating tone with timbre (the sound’s character), hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound. He even claimed that when he saw color he heard music.

Biography

Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky spent his early childhood in Odessa. His parents played the piano and the zither and Kandinsky himself learned the piano and cello at an early age. The influence of music in his paintings cannot be overstated, down to the names of his paintings Improvisations, Impressions, and Compositions. In 1886, he enrolled at the University of Moscow, chose to study law and economics, and after passing his examinations, lectured at the Moscow Faculty of Law. He enjoyed success not only as a teacher but also wrote extensively on spirituality, a subject that remained of great interest and ultimately exerted substantial influence in his work. In 1895 Kandinsky attended a French Impressionist exhibition where he saw Monet’s Haystacks at Giverny. He stated, “It was from the catalog I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture…” Soon thereafter, at the age of thirty, Kandinsky left Moscow and went to Munich to study life-drawing, sketching and anatomy, regarded then as basic for an artistic education.

Ironically, Kandinsky’s work moved in a direction that was of much greater abstraction than that which was pioneered by the Impressionists. It was not long before his talent surpassed the constraints of art school and he began exploring his own ideas of painting – “I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could…” Now considered to be the founder of abstract art, his work was exhibited throughout Europe from 1903 onwards, and often caused controversy among the public, the art critics, and his contemporaries. An active participant in several of the most influential and controversial art movements of the 20th century, among them the Blue Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc and the Bauhaus which also attracted Klee, Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956), and Schonberg, Kandinsky continued to further express and define his form of art, both on canvas and in his theoretical writings. His reputation became firmly established in the United State s through numerous exhibitions and his work was introduced to Solomon Guggenheim, who became one of his most enthusiastic supporters.

In 1933, Kandinsky left Germany and settled near Paris, in Neuilly. The paintings from these later years were again the subject of controversy. Though out of favor with many of the patriarchs of Paris’s artistic community, younger artists admired Kandinsky. His studio was visited regularly by Miro, Arp, Magnelli and Sophie Tauber.

Kandinsky continued painting almost until his death in June, 1944. his unrelenting quest for new forms which carried him to the very extremes of geometric abstraction have provided us with an unparalleled collection of abstract art.

*The text in this post is taken from WebMuseum, Paris.

Jeremy Begbie continues to impress me with his creativity and theological astuteness.  Listen to the following passage on the Christian God who freely creates and freely loves. 

“We have seen that for the Christian, the world we inhabit can never be seens as just there, a naked fact, to be treated as a neutral boundary or (worse) as something that is basically an impediment to a fulfilling life.  The cosmos did not have to be.  It is made freely, without any prior constaint or necessity superior to God’s nature or will.  It is given, and given in the rich sense:  as an expression of divine love, the love that is God’s own trinitarian life (Resounding Truth, p. 212).”

Begbie then discusses by way of a passage from Leo Spitzer’s work, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, the differences between a Pythagorean and a Christian view of music.  As Spitzer explains, the Pythagoreans identified “the cosmic order”  with music, whereas Christian philosophers identified this order with love.  (Or in the case of St. Augustine, combined and tranformed the conception into “loving order” (ordo amoris).  Finishing out the passage, Begbie writes, “[t]here is a huge difference betwen regarding the harmony in which musical sounds are grounded simply as a bare fact or as an outpouring of love” (Ibid., p. 213). 

Jeremy Begbie, in his book, Resounding Truth:  Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, presents a nice definition of theology, viz., theology is “the disciplined thinking and rethinking of the Christian gospel for the sake of fostering a wisdom that is nourished by, and nourishes, the church in its worship and mission to the world” (p. 19).  Begbie then begins to unpack each part of his definition.  With regard to “disciplined thinking and rethinking,” Begbie emphasizes that theology involves intellectual effort; however, the intellectual activity in view is not a kind of detached, merely cerebral endeavor that fails to affect our willing and acting. Rather, this theological thinking touches every aspect of our humanity and is “inextricably bound up with story (the narrative shape of faith), symbols of various sorts (such as the sacraments), and practical action in the world” (p. 19).  Second, by “of the Christian gospel,” Begbie means “the announcement that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Triune Creator, the God of Israel, has acted decisively to reconcile the world to himself.  Here is theology’s raison d’être and its loadstar-theology is not a free-floating speculation, but it is disciplined by this gospel and seeks to interpret the whole of reality from this center” (p. 20).  The theologian then ultimately has to answer to his God-a God who is living and personal and actively engaged in the lives of his creatures.  Given that the heart of Christian faith centers on union with the Father through the Son by way of the Holy Spirit, true Christian theology then cannot be done apart from prayer, worship, and submission to Scripture.  Third, by “for the sake of fostering a wisdom,” Begbie wants to stress the practical orientation of theology. Here Begbie appeals to the wisdom literature of the Bible in which to become wise “means being able to discern what is going on in specific, down-to-earth situations and to judge what it is right to say and do in those situations in a way that is faithful and true to God” (p. 20).  Lastly, with the phrase, “nourished by, and nourishes, the church in its worship and mission to the world,” Begbie speaks to the importance of the communal dimension and ecclesial context of theology.    ”Theology that seeks a wisdom true to gospel, [...] cannot take flight from this community [the visible Church]-fallen, compromised and shabby as it is and always has been. [...] Theology’s first calling, I would contend, is to help build up the people of God, to shape the Christian community for the sake of its worship and mission to the world” (pp. 20-21).  

[See part IV].  This is my concluding post on the “Phenomenological Explorations of Music” series.

Having examined the calculated aspects of jazz improvisation, as well as highlighting the some of the ways in which improvisation and places of indeterminacy emerge and exist in classical music, I now turn to discuss (by way of Benson’s insights), the idea that a sharp dichotomy exists between the work and its performance.  In chapter four (”The Ergon within the Energeia“) of his book, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, Benson discusses the ways in which a musical ergon or product both emerges from musical energeia or activity, and yet this ergon “still remains within the play of musical energeia” and cannot be separated from it.  In other words, Benson believes that given the fuzzy boundaries between composition and improvisation, coupled with the unavoidable presence of interpretation involved in performances and the on-going nature of musical traditions, perhaps musical works are more properly described in dynamic rather than static terms.  Benson even goes so far as to say that

the telos of music making cannot be defined simply in terms of the creation of musical works, or even primarily so.  Instead the work becomes a means to the end of making music, not an end in itself.  [Likewise], if the work exists within the play of musical energeia, then it cannot be seen as autonomous or detached.  Like a living organism, it is ever in motion and constantly in need of care and infusions of new life to keep it alive.[1]

One of Benson’s goals in this chapter is to attempt to explain “this elusive thing that exists within musical energeia,” and in order to do so he dialogues with Roman Ingarden’s position.  Ingarden’s fundamental assumption is that “there is not merely an accidental but an essential separation between the work and its written and aural expressions.”[2] Ingarden takes this route because he is concerned to preserve a kind of superhistorical ergon that remains untouched by the energia of actual music performance through the course of time.  However, as Benson points out, Ingarden himself, being a good phenomenologist, is aware of tensions within his own position, which makes his contribution highly instructive.[3]  First, Ingarden begins by asking, what is relation between the work and the score?  According to Ingarden, the score preserves the work and helps to maintain its identity.[4] Yet, Ingarden (as was the case with Cone) admits that the score does not exhaust the work and merely relates aspects of the work-the score functions as a kind of “schema.”  If we acknowledge both that the score maintains the identity of the work in some sense, and yet the score does fully circumscribe the work, then we are pressed to ask, what then is the “something more” that the score fails to capture?  To this question, Benson adds, “[i]s there something that guarantees the identity of this surplus that goes beyond the score?  Moreover, what connection is there-if any-between this more and musical energeia?”[5]

In order to try to deal with the differences that surface between various performances of the same piece, Ingarden takes the position that a work possesses a “stock of possibilities” and is “in a sense inherently complete.”[6] Consequently, according to Ingarden, over time the various performers of a work are not creating anything new, rather there are simply discovering the latent possibilities already “embedded” in the work which simply need to be actualized.  Thus, the work does not really change over time but merely appears to change.  However, as Benson observes, “the problem with this view is that-practically-these possibilities seem not to come merely from within but also from without:  for they arise-at least partly-by way of performance traditions, which are themselves developing.”[7]  But again, being a good phenomenologist, Ingarden does not totally ignore the fact that the work in practice does in fact go beyond the intentions of the composer due to, what we have referred to previously as “places of indeterminacy” (Unbestimmtheitsstellen), which are as it were “born” with every work, and some of which are made only determinate through a live performance.  Thus, Ingarden at least implies that these untouchable works are in fact in process and dynamic.

Against what Benson labels as a kind of Platonist understanding of a musical work, Benson argues for a mediating way which acknowledges that a work possesses a “stock of possibilities” that constitute it, but that those possibilities are supplemented by additional possibilities that come into being over the course of time via the performances themselves and as a result of evolving musical traditions.  Elaborating his view, Benson explains,

a composer may indeed have a complex conception of the work (and so potentially a relatively complex conception of the work (and so potentially a relatively complex set of “intentions”), but those intentions are supplemented by the actual performances and the development of performance traditions.  Thus, we could say that Bach had intentions for the St. Matthew Passion that were complex and specific.  But the [later] performance by Mendelssohn did not merely bring out those possibilities (even though it did that too).  Rather, it also created certain possibilities-possibilities that truly did not exist before.[8]

If instead we opt for Ingarden’s position, we find ourselves in the following rather paradoxical situation.  That is, if we claim that musical works somehow transcend and are not touched by musical activity (energeia), then we must conclude that “no one every really experiences a musical work.”  Ingarden himself denies that we experience “a given musical work as an ideal aesthetic object.”[9]  As Benson puts it, “[o]n Ingarden’s account, then, the work itself turns out to be something that no one ever hears.”[10]  A second rather serious tension in Ingarden’s account again springs from his strict dichotomy between musical work (ergon) and musical activity (energeia).  Understandably, Ingarden is concerned to secure the identity of a musical work, and this is why he argues for a “superhistorical” work.  This allows Ingarden to say that the work is not simply identical to the score but possesses some degree of autonomy from both the score and the various performances.[11] Yet, Ingarden also admits both that musical works have an historical origin, and that “the properties of a work are constituted intersubjectively-and over time.”[12] Ingarden then leaves us somewhere between the historical and the superhistorical.  For Benson, this inbetween-ness highlights the failure of a position which advocates a sharp dichotomy between a work’s existence and identity on the one hand, and its “aural embodiments” on the other.[13]  Consequently, as mentioned above, Benson opts for an “interconnectedness of work and performance,” and suggests that instead of the denomination, “work,” which connotes a finished product, we should return to the idea of “piece.”  Piece implies both that which is “connected to a contextual whole” from which it cannot be completely severed, and it communicates a more fragmentary and on-going character-something “inherently incomplete, for the musical context in which it exists is in flux.”[14]

Although my essay probably raises more questions than it answers and only scratches the surface of what might be accomplished by bringing music into conversation with the insights of phenomenology, hopefully some the themes that we have considered-identity and difference, musical places of indeterminacy, and the various ways that music presents itself to us, from its origin (Ursprung) to the “final manuscript” (Fassung letzter Hand)-has provoked us to stretch our thinking about both disciplines in new ways. 

Notes

[6] Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 128.

[7] Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 128.

[8] Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 129.

[9] Roman Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art:  The Musical Work-The Picture-The Architectural Work-The Film, trans. Raymond Meyer with John T. Goldthwait (Athens:  Ohio University Press, 1989), p. 108, as quoted in Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 130.

[10] Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 131.

[11] Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 131. 

[12] Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 131.  Cf. Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art, p. 110, 115, and 119-20. 

[13] Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 132.

[14] Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, pp. 132-33.

I recently came across this website, as I was searching for information on artist, Romare Bearden.  The excerpts below are taken directly from the website, here and here. In case you are not familiar with Bearden’s life and work, please visit the site and enjoy the virtual tour, which includes a biography and a showcase of his wonderful art. 

 ”The complex and colorful art of Romare Bearden (1911-1988) is autobiographical and metaphorical. Rooted in the history of western, African, and Asian art, as well as in literature and music, Bearden found his primary motifs in personal experiences and the life of his community. Born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Bearden moved as a toddler to New York City, participating with his parents in the Great Migration of African Americans to states both north and west. The Bearden home became a meeting place for Harlem Renaissance luminaries including writer Langston Hughes, painter Aaron Douglas, and musician Duke Ellington, all of whom undoubtedly would have stimulated the young artist’s imagination.

Bearden maintained a lifelong interest in science and mathematics, but his formal education was mainly in art, at Boston University and New York University, from which he graduated in 1935 with a degree in education. He also studied at New York’s Art Students League with the German immigrant painter George Grosz, who reinforced Bearden’s interest in art as a conveyor of humanistic and political concerns. In the mid-1930s Bearden published dozens of political cartoons in journals and newspapers, including the Baltimore based Afro-American, but by the end of the decade he had shifted the emphasis of his work to painting.

During a career lasting almost half a century Bearden produced approximately two thousand works. Best known for his collages, he also completed paintings, drawings, monotypes, and edition prints; murals for public spaces, record album jackets, magazine and book illustrations, and costume and set designs for theater and ballet.

[...]

From shortly after he graduated from college through the late 1960s Bearden maintained a full-time job with New York’s Department of Social Services, specializing in cases within the gypsy community. Work in his studio was concentrated at night and on weekends. Nevertheless, starting in 1940 Bearden’s art was represented in solo and group exhibitions, both in Harlem and downtown (below 110th Street), and it consistently received enthusiastic reviews. Religious rituals and literature played an important role in Bearden’s life and art. So did music–from sights and sounds of folk musicians gathered for “the Saturday night function” in the south, to the hot tempo of Harlem clubs and dance halls.

In the early 1950s Bearden devoted considerable attention to song writing, and several of his collaborations were published as sheet music, among the most famous of which is “Seabreeze,” recorded by Billy Eckstine. In addition, throughout his life Bearden wrote essays on social and art-historical subjects, as well as three full-length books coauthored with friends: The Painter’s Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting (1969) with painter Carl Holty; and Six Black Masters of American Art (1972) and A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (posthumously, 1993), both with journalist Harry Henderson.”

[The painting displayed above is, Captivity and Resistance, 1976, a collage of various fabrics on canvas African American Museum in Philadelphia © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.  The central theme is the 1839 Mende rebellion aboard the sailing ship Amistad. Prince Cinque, the hero of the battle, is portrayed at center holding a staff. At right is the ominous apparatus for a lynching, presumably that of John Brown whose spirit shadow hangs over figures representing abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman].

Contrary to the common negative characterization (see part III), improvisation as expressed in jazz involves a high degree of prepared and calculated musical ideas.  All too frequently we hear the rather pejorative comment that in jazz it matters not what note one plays given the dissonance prevalent in jazz and its penchant for non-resolution.  Though perhaps in some expressions of jazz such a remark might ring true,[1] on the whole it tends to paint a rather misleading picture.  A more accurate account is that jazz improvisers are intensely aware of what notes they play, when to play them, and for what reason this note or that scale should be played as opposed to others.  For example, consider the common harmonic structures in which one finds purposely altered harmonies, i.e., dissonances that are deliberately applied to certain chord structures.  One of the first skills that a beginning improviser learns is that most traditional jazz pieces consist of what is called the ii-V-I harmonic progression.  For example, in the key of C major, the ii-V-I progression is:  D minor 7 – G⁷ – C major 7.  Because the V⁷  (or dominant 7) chord has multiple functions-e.g., it can serve as a transition chord into another key or as a common way to resolve back to the tonic key-it is a top candidate for harmonic alterations.   Why?  It is the chord that either leads us directly to a resolution back to the tonic key, or it functions as a transition chord to take us to a new key that will then serve as a temporary resolution of sorts.[2]  Given these functions, as opposed to being a “place of rest” (such as the tonic chord) or even a “temporary rest stop,” altering or extending its “normal” harmonies heightens the tension by adding new tonal colors into the mix.  Jazz musicians are deeply aware of these possibilities, and maximize the tension-release motif in their solos. In fact, it is a common practice among jazz musicians to have numerous altered patterns prepared in advance-patterns which they have practiced for hour upon end in all twelve keys (and modes) so that when performance time comes, the music has become such a part of them that it flows effortlessly from them.  Thus, it is in no way the case that jazz musicians simply fumble around, pulling notes out of thin air, rebelliously disregarding the harmonic structure of the piece because they have some kind of perverse attraction to dissonance for its own sake.  While this might de-mystify jazz improvisation to a certain extent, it does not eradicate that side of jazz that involves a strong degree of spontaneity and communal interplay.  In other words, mystery is still alive and well in the art of jazz improvisation because no matter how many patterns one has prepared in advance, the dynamism and community of jazz makes it such that in Heraclitean fashion, “no pattern is ever played exactly same way twice”; yet, the patterns are quite identifiable, as is the piece itself. 

If jazz in fact is not a free-for-all and involves, as I claim, a number of previously prepared musical ideas, one might be led to believe that notation is the crucial difference between composition and improvisation.  However, as Jeremy Begbie points out, “it seems odd to claim that composition only happens when musicians write music down.”[3] Here we might also mention that it is not uncommon for jazz musicians use written arrangements for both large and small ensembles.  In light of this apparent “dead end,” Begbie offers the following as a possible way to differentiate composition and improvisation,

A more promising way forward is to take composition to refer to all the activity which precedes the sounding of the entire piece of music, everything which is involved in conceiving and organizing the parts or elements which make up the pattern or design or the musical whole:  and improvisation to mean the concurrent conception and performance of a piece of music, which is complete when the sound finishes (italics added).[4]

With the above conception, composition entails all the musical activity that takes places prior to the performance of the piece as a whole, whereas improvisation consists in the simultaneity of conceiving and performing a musical idea. In other words, the act of improvisation emphasizes experiencing the “present,” i.e., rather than highlighting product or result, the accent is on process and activity, as “conception and performance are interwoven to a very high degree.”[5] With what Begbie has just said in mind, perhaps we could say that the improvisation that emerges in the musical genre of jazz is a kind of present, spontaneous, music-making activity that purposely and re-creatively utilizes prepared and hence thoroughly familiar musical ideas.  Yet, we should also highlight the following with regard to classical composition, which hopefully only complicates rather than contradicts Begbie’s way of distinguishing improvisation and composition.  Despite the fact that a kind of mythology portraying composition as a flash of instantaneous inspiration coupled with the Kantian idea of a creative genius tends to dominate our conception of the way in which a musical composition comes into existence, I agree with Benson that composers themselves actually engage in a great deal of improvisation.  As Benson observes, “composers are more accurately described as improvisers, for composition essentially involves a kind of improvisation on the already existing rules and limits in such a way that what emerges is the result of both respecting those rules and altering them.”[6]  In the end, given the mutual interplay between composition and improvisation, perhaps it is better to think of improvisation in terms of a continuum that ranges over both jazz and classical music, and that the structures of each allow for a greater or lesser degree of improvisation to manifest in the actual performance of the music.

Notes

[4] Ibid.,  p. 183. 

[5] Begbie, Theology, Music and Time, p. 184. 

[6] Benson, Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 133.

Regarding the history of the term “improvisation,” and the unfortunate negative attachments that have come to be associated with it, Jeremy Begbie writes,

At first it [improvisation] carried the relatively neutral sense of extemporization, [...] By the 1850’s it appears to have acquired pejorative connotations-off-hand, lacking sufficient preparation (as in ‘improvised shelter’, ‘improvised solution’).  Many musicians and musicologists continue to view it with considerable suspicion, if not disdain.  For some it is synonymous with the absence of rigour.  There are educationalists who see it as a distraction from authentic music-making.[1]

Contra this pessimistic and mistaken construal of improvisation, I suggest that jazz improvisation requires just as much skill, creative genius, and intellectual stamina as written orchestral compositions, and that the latter in fact are not without improvisatory elements.  To begin with, it is important not to gloss over the pervasiveness of improvisation in music in general. Before going further, I should pause, however, to acknowledge the well-known difficulty among music specialists in arriving at a satisfactory definition of improvisation.  Given this difficulty, we shall move through a number of possibilities, noting various aspects of improvisation broadly construed with the hope of finally obtaining a working definition of improvisation as related to our present purposes.

If improvisation is understood as a simultaneous occurrence of composing and performance, then improvisation cannot be limited to jazz.  In fact, what we find is that improvisation characterized in this manner has been prevalent in a wide variety of cultures and musical genres-from Gregorian chant, to Baroque music, as well as the majority of non-Western expressions of music which are by and large not notated.   However, even subsequent to the development of music notation, we find composers such as J.S. Bach, Handel, and Mozart highly skilled in the art of improvisation and expecting those who performed their pieces to possess this skill as well.  Nonetheless, as concerts in the 18th and 19th centuries gained in notoriety, the growing sophistication of musical notation seems to have played some role toward a more diminished view of improvisation.  Although the increase in notation severely limited opportunities for improvising in classical[2] music, the improvisatory elements even in meticulously notated music cannot be totally removed so long as human beings are the performers.  Avid music listeners can attest that whether speaking of an individual soloist or an orchestral unit, the personalities, stylistic particularities, and interpretative nuances manifest in the actual performance of a musical work all contribute a degree of creative liberty that falls within the sphere of improvisation broadly construed.   For example, how do we explain why we prefer one well-known cellist playing Bach’s solo concertos over another renowned and equally proficient cellist?  The notes on the page are exactly the same; yet, we are aware of differences in the ways in which one performer interprets the piece or articulates a musical passage.  In addition, it is common for a soloist to engage in what is called “ornamentation.”  That is, rather than simply play the melodic line as written, one adds neighboring tones and trills[3] that dress up or “ornament” the melody line.     

A second consideration possibly fueling a negative view of improvisation as somehow intellectually substandard is perhaps due to an overly rigid distinction that we in the Western musical tradition tend to make between improvisation and composition.  As I have indicated, improvisation is often understood as non-calculated, free-flowing and as lacking in intellectual rigor.  Composition, in contrast, is thought to be more or less inflexible, rule-governed and by nature, given its high degree of musical notation, purposely without spontaneity.  However, as we shall see, both views are misleading and set up sharp distinctions that do not correspond to what takes place in actual music making and performance. 

Notes

What I have in mind with this flexibility that maintains identity (see part I) can be illustrated by way of a jazz musical example, specifically, what is called in jazz parlance, a “lead sheet.” A jazz lead sheet is similar to a notated score for a classical piece; however, only the melody is written out in standard musical notation. In other words, in contrast to a classical score in which the bass line, the chords or harmonic structure, and more or less every note that will be played is written out in full musical notation, a lead sheet allows for significantly more flexibility. For example, above the melody line one simply finds chord symbols, as opposed to chords displayed in standard notation with specific voicings.[1] Writing the chord symbols in this manner affords the pianist or guitarist, as well as the bassist, a significant amount of creative freedom in performing the piece. However, we should be clear that this freedom does not destroy the identity of the piece, as one must choose harmonies and bass lines that fall within a certain trajectory of the specified chord symbol that will support the melody and mark out the general harmonic structure of the piece. Thus, with a jazz lead sheet, one is in a sense “tied to” the “score,” i.e., one must agree to submit to the “givens” that make the piece to be what it is and respond accordingly.[2] Yet, in other sense, one’s own personality, skill level, and creative sensibilities also come through making each performance something unique. One might even say that the flexibility that lead sheets afford, coupled with the distinctly human traits and personal idiosyncrasies that manifest in improvisation, in a sense engenders greater intelligibility and appeal to the piece itself. That is, the built-in flexibility of lead sheets aids in preserving the piece through the passage of time while simultaneously allowing and even expecting various re-articulations and new insights because it “has room for” the creative expansions that come with temporal progression and the furthering of tradition. Here I imagine that someone might object, stating that such places of indeterminacy might apply to jazz, but what about classical music in which the score is very precise? Doesn’t the extensiveness of the written score in classical music ipso facto rule out the possibility of the kind of indeterminacies that I have described? Although this is a commonly held opinion, it seems to me based upon a number of assumptions, two of which include: (1) the idea that jazz is a kind of free-for-all in which musicians simply improvise as it were ex nihilo, whereas classical music, in contrast, eliminates all improvisatory elements, and (2) the notion that a strict division exists between the work (as a kind of suprahistorical essence) and its performance (which allows for variations and supplementations). In the next post, I shall address the issues and questions surrounding (1).
Notes

As Bruce Ellis Benson explains in chapter two of his book, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, we tend to think that a musical composition is finished when the piece in its “final” version is written down.  However, there are a number of assumptions that we should question in connection with such a conclusion.  First, why assume that a process of revisions always leads to a better version, much less to the “perfect” version?  Beethoven, for example, was known for ceaselessly revising and offering a number of variants for musical passages and even entire sections of his symphonies. Even if we grant that his revisions generally improved his work, why should we necessarily conclude that they always did?  Second, is it not the case that pressing deadlines, familial responsibilities, or creative inertia also factor into to a piece coming to completion. That is, the artist may not in fact be satisfied with his or her final version, and yet the work must be brought to a close.  If this is the case, then we might even say that the composer is aware of the imperfections in his or her work-the places that at some later time, he or she if given the time, would want to change or develop the work.  Third (and closely related to the second point),  is there a sense in which a composition becomes “fixed” and definite when written down, or is it the case that even for the composer there is a certain “indefiniteness” and indeterminacy involved in his or her work even when the composition is “finished”?  Arguing for the latter, Benson states that although composers have “reasonably” definite intentions, “it would be impossible for their intentions to encompass all of the details of any given piece.”[1]  In other words, often or perhaps even most of the time, the composer himself is unsure exactly how he wants every aspect and detail of the work to sound until the piece is actually played with a specific group and with very particular instrumentation.  As Benson highlights, Mozart would at times perform different versions of the same piece to a group of friends in order to seek their input as to which version they thought best.  Having performed in several jazz orchestras and dabbled in jazz composition myself, I find this claim rather convincing.  It was often the case that our director, who was an accomplished composer and arranger, would present us with his scores and then during the rehearsal time, numerous changes would be made-changes that he could not foresee until the actual music appeared.  Clearly, he had a definite intention of how he wanted the piece to sound, yet the various intricacies of tempo, dynamics, and so forth were not solidified.  

But what about after all these things are made more precise, is it the case that at that point the work is finished?  This leads us to the next issue, viz. what counts as the correct interpretation of a piece?   To illustrate, Benson cites Edward Cone who comments on the difficulties performers face in playing Chopin’s music,

The performer’s first obligation, then, is to the score-but to what score?  The autograph or the first printed edition?  The composer’s hasty manuscript or the presumably more careful copy by a trusted amanuensis?  The composer’s initial version or his later emendation? [and so on].[2]  

To be sure one might give good reasons for choosing and preferring one version over another.  But still we must recognize that performers, conductors and arrangers play a role in the process of composing.  That is, the performers, conductors and arrangers in some genuine sense continue to compose a work that is already as it were “finished.”[3] Yet, as we stated earlier, composers certainly have some definite intentions, but how extensive those intentions are is another issue.  Also, the fact that composers may not even be cognizant of places of indeterminacy in their own compositions until the music is actually performed suggests that a determinate intention, though having some definiteness to it, may also “contain” what we might call a kind of built-in-flexibility that does not destroy its identity. 

Notes

[2] Edward T. Cone, “The Pianist as Critic,” in The Practice of Performance Studies in Musical Interpretation, p. 244, as cited in Benson, Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 70. 

[3] This idea of on-going composition strikes me as having something in common with Gadamer’s hermeneutical insight that texts always exhibit an “excess of meaning” upon which tradition builds.  Elucidating his position, Gadamer writes: “Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition whose content interests the age and in which it seeks to understand itself.  The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience.  It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history. [...] Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author.  That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well.“(Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. trans. and revised Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York:  Continuum, 2004),  p. 296). 

In Michael Krausz’s article, The Tonal and The Foundational:  Ansermet on Stravinsky, Krausz argues against Ansermet’s claim that Stravinsky’s atonal music is both sub-standard and unnatural.  Krausz approaches the issue from a non-foundationalist epistemology, “which assumes that there are no uninterpreted facts of the matter and no single ahistorical Archimedean interpretive framework from which we can make our cultural entities intelligible” (p. 383).  To illustrate his point, Kraus cites Peter Kivy’s example of the “Bach-bird,” whose song brings to Kivy’s mind, Bach’s Little Organ Fugue in C.

While my musical consciousness is busy fitting the Bach-bird’s song into a possible Western notation, based on major and minor seconds, the Indian’s musical psyche is just as busy accommodating it to the world of microtones.  Does he hear the cheerfulness of the Bach-bird’s song?  Why should he?  He doesn’t hear the same ‘music’ in it that I do.  I should no more expect him to hear the cheerfulness in the Bach-bird’s song than the cheerfulness of Bach’s fugue.  For he would need my musical culture to hear both of them; and that, by hypothesis, he does not have” (Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell, p. 92, as cited in Krausz, p. 383).

Kivy’s point is that in light of the fact that scales in the Western musical tradition are based on sequential patterns either alternating between major and minor seconds or composed of either major seconds (whole-tone scale) or minor seconds (chromatic scale), we in the West are accustomed to hearing music whose harmonies and melodies are based on these particular scales.  In Indian and other non-Western music, the scales themselves are different and contain, as Kivy observes, “microtones,” that is, intervals smaller than minor seconds.  Consequently, the harmonies and melodies derived from non-Western scales sound very different from those based on major and minor seconds.  For many in the West, Indian music sounds dissonant or out of tune; however, to Indians ears the same music is considered consonant and beautiful.    On the one hand, I find Kivy’s illustration convincing.  Yet, on the other hand, it also seems to be the case that there are at least some common features in the music itself that enable us to connect with shared human dispositions that are transcultural.  For example, low-pitched, repetitive bass notes, played extremely slowly are typically not employed by composers to communicate joy.  But here again, it is likely that we have to qualify this by saying that this is not the practice of composers in the Western tradition.

In writing an email to a friend, the following thought occurred to me that seems worthy of further engagement, viz., might there be a number of interesting parallels between the increasing attempt to logically arrange the major theological loci into a comprehensive systematic whole [e.g., the movement from Lombard's Sentences to St. Thomas' ST and beyond] and the increased sophistication in musical notation which had the effect of diminishing the practice of improvisation and creating an image of improvisation as intellectually substandard, as well as producing sharp dichotomies (at least in the Western way of thinking about music) between our ideas of (1) improvisation and composition, (2) the composer and the performer, and (3) the musical score and the (one correct) interpretation of that score. 

According to Jeremy Begbie in Theology, Music, and Time the majority of academic writings on music have been commentaries on written scores. Though this is understandable given the difficulty of reconstructing music that is not written out prior to the invention of recording devices, it has nonetheless produced an extremely one-sided view of the history of musical practices.^[1] To cite one well-known example, many music scholars have brought to our attention that even following the development of music notation, we find composers such as J.S. Bach, Handel, and Mozart highly skilled in the art of improvisation and expecting those who performed their pieces to possess this skill as well.  Tracing some of the possible reasons why improvisation’s high reputation and regard began to wane, Begbie points to the increasing sophistication of notation, as concerts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gained in notoriety.  Even the improvised solos sections purposely crafted by composers to display the talent of highly gifted soloists were with time significantly diminished by written solos.^[2]  Although this increase in notation severely diminished opportunities for improvising in classical music, the improvisatory elements even in meticulously notated music cannot be totally removed so long as human beings are the performers.  Avid music listeners can attest that whether speaking of an individual soloist or a orchestral unit, the personalities, stylistic particularities, and interpretative nuances manifest in the actual performance a musical work all contribute a degree of creative liberty that falls within the sphere of improvisation broadly construed.   With Begbie, I tend to agree that

All this suggests that the customary picture of improvisation as a discrete and relatively frivolous activity on the fringes of music-making might need to be replaced by one which accords it a more serious and central place.  Instead of regarding thoroughly notated and planned music as the norm and improvisation as an unfortunate epiphenomenon or even aberration, it might be wiser to recall the pervasiveness of improvisation and ask whether it might be able to reveal fundamental aspects of musical creativity easily forgotten in traditions bound predominantly to extensive notation and rehearsal.^[3]

A short essay of mine entitled “What makes music beautiful” has just been posted on The Church and Postmodern Culture Blog (hosted by Baker Academic and coordinated by Geoff Holsclaw and Jamie Smith).  If you are interested, please join the conversation.

Summarizing his findings with regard to art and human beings in the final chapter of his book, Redeeming Beauty:  Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics, Aidan Nichols says the following:

Art has been a feature of human society since prehistoric times. [...] Art discloses what we think our society is like, or what it is not like but ought to be like.  As the main expression (other than childbirth) of human creativity it can be said to take further the original creation by bringing into being new realities of intrinsic worth.  Above all, it is or can be a pointer to transcendence in three main ways.  The first [...] by making us go beyond interpretations of this or that thing or event toward an overall reading of the world.  The second was to see the world as having as its own precondition a fundamental meaningfulness beyond itself.  The third (after we had noted the possible moral effects of art in making us go beyond the limits of our present character) was that art might be regarded as a kind of epiphany of divine presence, divine light. [...] The arts reveal the human world, either as it actually is or as it ideally is.  They express the creativity of man when the artist adds to the things of intrinsic worth in the world, or the art-appreciating public makes the artist’s vision of what he has made live again.  The arts point to transcendence, not just the way the world as a whole is wonderful and presupposes a meaning greater than itself, but also by enacting divine presence sustaining the special density of meaning that art, literature, music can contain (pp. 145-146). 

Nichols then relates his findings to three aspects of the person and work of Jesus Christ.  First of all, Christ makes manifest or reveals what humanity is.  “As the true Adam, he shows us the reality of what the human species should be like and on the Cross discloses the range and power of the evil which inhibits our being as the first Adam was meant to be, in God’s image and likeness” (p. 148).  So Christ reveals what the postlapsarian world is like and (thankfully) what it ought to be like.  Second, Christ’s redemptive work transcends nature “by bringing into being a further dimension of reality,” viz., salvation and “new resources of grace and life” (p. 148).  In other words, just as art advances and elevates creation, so too does the work of Christ.  Third, in Christ the meaning of the world as a whole is revealed and points to the “Father’s wonderful plan to bring about the nuptials of heaven and earth, the uncreated and the created, in the sacrificial joy of the Kingdom.  He points to the source of the world in a pre-existing divine truth, [...] Moreover, he enacts that truth-the truth which is the Holy Trinity-in his own person” (p. 148).    Though only the Son took on flesh, the Son is eternally “co-defined by the Father and the Holy Spirit.” Hence, “Jesus is always the Trinitarian Son, essentially related to the Father and the Spirit in his work on earth” (p. 148).  In fact, the whole redeemed creation shall one day enter into the eternal dance of the Trinity, as captured in Rublev’s famous icon of the Trinity (p. 148). 

The risen and ascended God-man is the true predestined goal of all creation.  Here the capacity of artwork to be the vehicle of divine presence in the material form of words or sounds or shapes and colours is super-filled.  Christ is, then the perfect art work in the sense of that reality in whom is realized those goals that all artistic making has as its explicit or implicit ends.  Because he is infinite meaning, life and being perfectly synthesized with finite form, the cave-painters at Lascaux, or Hesiod penning his hymns, or Beethoven working on his last quartets, were all gesturing towards him through they realized it not (p. 148). 

In chapter seven of his book, Redeeming Beauty:  Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics, Nichols discusses, among other things, Jacques Maritain’s view of pulchrum (the beautiful).  Maritain appeals to St. Thomas’ dictum in which beauty is defined as id quod visum placet.  According to Maritain this definition relates to the effect, not the essence, i.e., the beautiful gives joy to the knower.  However, as Nichols points out, Maritain is quick to add that the “bestowal of delight in knowing” is a “formal constituent of beauty” (p. 133).  Here Maritain and U. Eco part ways, as Eco believes that Maritain is reading more into Thomas than is present in the text. According to Eco, “what Thomas actually says is, ‘people call things beautiful when they give pleasure on sight’.  For Eco this is a ‘sociological finding’ with ‘introduces the problem’ rather than solves it” (p. 133).  It seems to me the Eco’s point merits further consideration.

This brings us to Maritain’s account of the beautiful as found in Art et scolastique.  According to Maritain, “[i]f a thing exalts and delights the soul by the very fact of being given to its intuition, it is good to apprehend, it is beautiful” (p. 36).[1]  Here beauty is no doubt connected with the intellect, but following Thomas, beauty delights the mind through the senses.  “‘Our [human] art’ works over sensuous matter to bring joy to the spirit.  It is in a sense a taste of Paradise, the first Paradise, the Paradise of Eden, because ‘it restores for a moment the simultaneous peace and delectation of the mind and the senses’” (Art et scolastique, p. 37).[2]

Notes