Per Caritatem

The term, “improvisation,” is often used in colloquial speech to connote activities, actions, or plans undertaken with little or no forethought or preparation. Similar ascriptions have been applied to musical improvisation—jazz in particular—in order to suggest that improvised music lacks the technical, intellectual, and cultural complexities and refinements of traditional Western classical music. As I have argued elsewhere,[1] I find the strict, rigid division assumed between jazz (as largely improvised music) and classical (as largely non-improvised music) to be inaccurate and misleading. There are, of course, improvisatory elements in classical music, ranging from the motif development that characterizes the compositional process to the performative variations of specific melodic lines ornamented and executed by the musicians themselves. Rather than a dichotomous view of composition and improvisation, I suggest understanding the two as occupying different “places” on a continuum and having the ability to move to a different “place” depending upon the degree of improvisatory space the particular composition or piece allows.

Having stated these initial caveats (with more to come), nonetheless, there are features that characterize jazz improvisation, distinguishing it from the common practices of Western classical composition. For example, the jazz improviser cannot take back, or as Lee B. Brown puts it, “erase,” the notes he has played in the course of his improvised solo.[2] In contrast, in the process of working out her composition, a composer can alter a theme, as well as a rhythmic or melodic motif, or she can decide to abandon the theme altogether in favor of a new one. This antecedent compositional activity is something we, as listeners, never experience. A jazz improviser does not have this past-time luxury but must play in the moment, in time. “He can only build upon the steps he has just taken.”[3] Brown calls this the improviser’s “situation.” This dynamic, out-in-the-open, present compositional activity in which the jazz improviser engages is, of course, risky. A player might exceed his technical abilities and thus be unable to recover from a lightening speed melodic run developed in conversation with the other musicians. Likewise, a soloist might begin a musical idea that starts off well and yet fails midway through the piece. Even so, risks and “imperfections” of this sort are, at least in part, what jazz enthusiasts appreciate, as they create an unfolding musical drama for the musicians and the audience. Stated with more specificity, because the jazz improviser always plays in real time and thus must choose to act (to choose not to play is also an act), her musical acts—failures and successes alike—become, in a very literal sense, part of the musical piece itself. As Brown puts it, in jazz improvisation, “[t]he risk-taking process itself becomes an ingredient in the result. […] With improvised music, all attempts at revision too become part of the music.”[4]

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I am happy to announce that my book proposal, Foucault and Self-Writing: On the Art of Living as Improvisation has been accepted by Wipf & Stock and will be published via their Cascade Books Imprint. In case you are unfamiliar with Wipf & Stock’s Cascade Books Imprint, here is an excerpt from their website:

“Cascade Books is the most selective of the four imprints of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Under this imprint we publish new books that combine academic rigor with broad appeal and readability. Encompassing all the major areas of theology and religion, Cascade Books has published such major authors as Stanley Hauerwas, Jürgen Moltmann, John Milbank, John Howard Yoder, Margaret Miles, and Walter Brueggemann.”

One among many things I have found attractive and laudable about Wipf & Stock is their commitment to resist as much as possible the market-driven approach to publishing.  For example, their stated vision is “to publish according to the merits of content rather than exclusively to the demands of the marketplace.”

Even though it will not be completed until early 2012, below is a brief description of my book to pique your curiosity, attract your interest, and hopefully arouse your reading desires:

Although it is fruitful to bring Foucault’s philosophical and socio-political reflections into conversation with the visual arts, enacting a similar dialogue with music and with jazz in particular reveals insights unavailable to the visual arts or plastic arts.  Music is itself inherently temporal in nature, unfolding and revealing itself sequentially. Musical performance and jazz improvisation in particular, are communal group-oriented activities. The individual musicians unite around a common piece (a “text”) and perform or birth (“interpret”) it together. Just as music is intrinsically temporal, we as humans are finite, temporal beings. Our subjectivities are shaped over time; we improve, regress, redefine, and rewrite ourselves over time. As free-yet-tradition-situated beings, ever engaged in various power relations with other free beings, we like the jazz musician have the requisite capacities to carve out distinctive subjectivities and to create and recreate our own voice, not ex nihilo but through re-appropriating the “already-said” in fresh ways.

In the context of analyzing a scholarly dialogue between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Bulter, David Stern makes a helpful distinction between a situated, rather than a displaced subject. Having discussed Seyla Benhabib’s articulation of weaker and stronger postmodern views of socially constructed subjectivities,[1] Stern adds, “[i]n the weaker version of the thesis, the subject is situated in a world, but remains a subject capable of intentional action and autonomy.”[2] In contrast, the strong view—held, for example, by Judith Butler—claims that the subject is socially constructed “all the way down.”[3] As Stern explains, Benhabib opts for the weaker postmodern thesis wherein a situated subject “is a subjectivity that is not merely a passive product of the ways it is affected by the world.”[4] For Benhabib, we are no doubt influenced and formed by various cultural narratives, “nevertheless we must still argue that we are not merely extensions of our histories, [but] vis-à-vis our own stories we are in the position of author and character at once.”[5] Particularly in light of Foucault’s later essays and interviews, one could make a strong case that Behabib’s situated subject is more or less equivalent to Foucault’s doubly-constructed subject.

Following Benhabib’s author/character analogy, I propose the activity of jazz improvisation as way to think about the situated or doubly-constructed subject.  Jazz improvisers belong to a tradition, which they themselves shape and by which they are shaped. The particular melodic lines they utilize, the musicians they imitate and “quote,” the kinds of instruments they play—an electric rather than an acoustic guitar, a synthesizer rather than a piano—and even performance opportunities are all socially and historically conditioned.  Nonetheless, the various ways in which they take up, re-shape, innovate, and expand the givens of tradition/s, highlights the subject-pole of construction.  In other words, though the improviser-subject is embedded in a socio-historical milieu that forms her, she is able to contribute to and even radically alter her context.  As she willfully and intentionally works out these changes, innovations, and reconfigurations in dialogue with the tradition, her own subjectivity is likewise reconstituted.[6] Her musical voice, style, and signature come to be otherwise.  The ability to maneuver within and utilize the very structures, mechanisms, and discourses shaping us for emancipatory, re-creative purposes sits well with Foucault’s analyses of the subject.

Notes

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[1]According to Banhabib’s interpretation, the stronger postmodern thesis ultimately fails to provide the kind of emancipatory resources needed for feminist as well as other social theories addressing oppression and related concerns.  See, for example, Benhabib, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” especially 23–24. “Postmodern” and “postmodernism” are, of course, polyvalent terms.  Banhabib appeals to Jane Flax’s description of the postmodern position as embracing the following three “deaths”:  the “Death of Man,” the “Death of History,” and the “Death of metaphysics” (Ibid., 18).

[2] Stern, “The Return of the Subject?,” 111.

[3] Ibid., 112.

[4] Ibid., 111.

[5] Benhabib, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” 21.

[6] For a more detailed discussion of the ways in which a musician is both shaped by and reshapes musical traditions, see Nielsen, “What Has Coltrane to Do With Mozart,” especially 67–8.

Here’s my quarterly non-academic post–an ipod recording of me playing a solo jazz guitar version of Lennon and McCartney’s tune, “Yesterday” (to listen to the recording, click the arrow below).

[audio:http://percaritatem.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/5_3_2009-9_06-am.mp3]

There are, however, a few philosophical questions that I can’t resist asking:  how is the identity of the tune, “Yesterday,” retained when I have re-harmonized the melody and added notes to and subtracted notes from the melody?   Also, clearly I have interpreted/performed the tune in a way that exceeds the intention of the “original authors,” yet, the piece is still clearly recognizable as Lennon/McCartney’s tune, “Yesterday.”  What are the implications for “authorship”?  What view of interpretation best captures the phenomena that emerge–an interpretor as co-author with a productive role?  If so, what are the givens of the tune itself that function as limiting structures–structures that both allow for new re-interpretations and  allow the tune to emerge in an identifiable way (while simultaneously dis-allowing any and every interpretation to count as “legitimate”)?

[Part I]
This resistance to a reduction of white sameness by enslaved blacks took many forms, ranging from physical violence to seeking a new life in free territories to purposely disrupting work routines.  Another area in which resistance manifested was in what we might call the specifically “religious” sphere.  “Slave religion” (Cone’s term), which asserted the dignity of blacks because they too are created in God’s image, not only affirmed freedom from bondage but also freedom in bondage (Cone 1972, 28).  That is, though it is the case that Christian slaves did seek an ultimate, definitive end to their sufferings in the new, re-created world, they also believed in and sang spirituals about a God who was actively involved in history now-in their history (Cone 1972, 32).  As Cone observes, black spirituals were often inspired by biblical passages that emphasized God’s care for and participation in liberating the oppressed.  While they expressed a deep trust in God’s promise to deliver his people, the spirituals also allowed the slaves to cry out in their suffering, asking the same question encountered so often in the Psalms, “How long, O Lord?”  In this willful act of turning to God in prayer, we see not only the manifestation of an eschatological hope on the basis of who God is and what he has done and is doing in history, but we likewise have an acknowledgment of the eschatological tension experienced in the present life where injustice so frequently prevails.  When the day finally came and God liberated the slaves from their bonds, these African American believers experienced what Cone calls an “eschatological freedom grounded in the events of the historical present, affirming that even now God’s future is inconsistent with the realities of slavery” (Cone 1972, 42).  In short, for black slaves, freedom “was a historical reality that had transcendent implications” (Cone 1972, 42).  Thus, given what we have said up to this point, we might summarize one of the central theological themes of black spirituals as the belief that God had not forsaken his people coupled with the conviction that he would one day deliver them from their present unjust human oppressors-a conviction that in no way promoted a passive strategy of non-resistance but encouraged them to speak against the injustices committed against them and to pursue the freedom and dignity that they deserved as human beings.

Not only did black spirituals play a significant role the genealogy of jazz, but the blues as well left its own particular imprint on the face of jazz.  Employing a slightly different analogy, one might say that black spirituals and the blues are in a sense the soul that to varying degrees continues to animate jazz.   In both of these musical styles, we encounter improvisatory elements, syncopated rhythms, call and response patterns, and the use of “blue notes,” that is, flattened third, fifth, and seventh scale tones.  These blue notes imitate musically a wide spectrum of human emotions yet are particularly apt at communicating deep, heartfelt sorrow.  Although, on the one hand, it is accurate to understand jazz as a fusion of European harmonic structures and practices with distinctively African elements such as syncopation, swing, and complex polyrhythmic layerings; nonetheless, on the other hand, jazz, having been in a very real sense birthed into being by black spirituals and nurtured by the blues, retains, reflects and continues to re-tell the Christian narrative of hope in the midst of suffering.   Such hope was regularly exhibited in the lives of jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and Charlie Christian, who struggled moment by moment against the hatred of racism.  While both these musicians surpassed many if not all of their white contemporaries in musical talent, they and other black musicians were denied opportunities to play in the major venues, overlooked by the media, and made to stand in the shadows of white performers. Yet, in spite of this unfair and dishonest treatment, jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington (a professing Christian), Charlie Christian and numerous others were able to transcend these injustices by means of their music.

Though admittedly I have provided a mere sketch of the genealogy of jazz, my chief purpose has been to highlight the role played by black spirituals, and hence Christianity, on the historical development of jazz.  Just as the spirituals served as a way not only to tell the black story, but also the black story as understood within the history of redemption, so too jazz retains significant aspects of the Christian narrative, as it continues to communicate the joys, sorrows and hope of both African Americans and all others who are open to being changed by the narrative and the music.

Works Cited

Cone, James H, 1972.  The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. New York: The Seabury Press.

Part of what I hope to accomplish with this albeit brief ad fontes journey is to raise our awareness of the function of black spirituals within the context of the early black Christian communities in America, and to highlight the distinctive ways in which the Christian faith of African Americans cannot be extricated from the coming-into-being of what many (including myself) consider as America’s most important musical contribution, jazz.  Black spirituals first and foremost have a story to tell-a story whose main characters were concrete individuals, who, on a day to day basis, were confronted with a society, which by and large refused to acknowledge their history and existence as human beings.  In the face of the de-humanized and deplorable treatment of slaves by the whites in power, black spirituals allowed slaves to affirm their dignity as human beings created in God’s image and provided a way for their otherwise legally silenced voices to be heard.

While the Africans of North America were being torn from their families and homeland and stripped of their culture, their white oppressors were unable to silence their music-music that in many ways allowed the cultural richness of the African people to live on.  Although the origins of African slavery in North America are difficult to pinpoint, it was in Jamestown in 1619 that the first Africans were sold into slavery.  By 1700, the majority of Africans in North America were made slaves for life (Cone 1972, 20).   Despite the great physical and psychological suffering,[1] the African spirit resisted a reduction to white sameness.  Vividly describing some of the inhumane and compassionless treatment endured by slaves, Cone writes:

Slavery meant being regarded as property, like horses, cows, and household goods.  For blacks the auction block was one potent symbol of their subhuman status.  The block stood for ‘brokenness,’ because on sale days no family ties were recognized. [...] Slavery meant working fifteen to twenty hours a day and being beaten for showing fatigue.  It meant being driven into the field three weeks after delivering a baby.  It meant having the cost of replacing you calculated against the value of your labor during a peak season, so that your owner could decide whether to work you to death.  It meant being whipped for crying over a fellow slave who had been killed while trying to escape (Cone 1972, 20-1).

Numerous other monstrosities could be cited, including slave catechisms created by whites, who claimed the name of Christ, hoped to more docile slaves and to convince blacks that they were in fact created to be slaves.  As previously mentioned, one must not underestimate the deeply historical, concrete nature of black spirituals as vehicles to communicate not only the slaves’ experiences in a white-defined society, but also they served as a way to preserve their African cultural roots and identity.  Yet, here again, white hatred went beyond physical enslavement and extended its scope in an attempt to “dehistoricize black existence, to foreclose the possibility of a future defined by the African heritage.  White people demeaned black people’s sacred tales, ridiculing their myths and defiling the sacred rites” (Cone 1972, 23).  Manifestly, the whites in power had defined humanity according to their own European image in order to justify their cruel actions as “civilizing the savages.”  However, their perverse plans failed, and “black history is the record of their failure” (Cone 1972, 24).

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[1] Cone provides several powerful examples of the suffering endured by people of African heritage.  “Slavery meant being regarded as property, like horses, cows, and household goods.  For blacks the auction block was one potent symbol of their subhuman status.  The block stood for ‘brokenness,’ because on sale days no family ties were recognized. [...] Slavery meant working fifteen to twenty hours a day and being beaten for showing fatigue.  It meant being driven into the field three weeks after delivering a baby.  It meant having the cost of replacing you calculated against the value of your labor during a peak season, so that your owner could decide whether to work you to death.  It meant being whipped for crying over a fellow slave who had been killed while trying to escape” (Cone 1972, 20-1).