It was at a baseball game, when someone handed him a pair of binoculars, that Andrew Stanton suddenly got the idea for what the character WALL-E should look like. He spent the entire next inning looking at the binoculars backwards, twisting them this way and that to simulate various expressions of sadness and joy. Stanton, the director of the film WALL-E, had been thinking for years about the idea of a lone robot left to clean up an uninhabitable earth, but it was only in that moment that he figured out how the animated robot should look. That idea came in an instant, but it took quite some time to realize that watching the songs “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment” from the movie version of Hello, Dolly! would be just the right songs to teach WALL-E emotion. Figuring out the “voices” of the robot characters took even longer, and it basically required working with Ben Burtt for a year, during which they kept trying out different sounds until they found the ones that worked. Stanton compares the process to trying out paint swatches on the wall. And these were only some of the myriad details that had to be put in place to make the film a reality.[116]
Many artists will instinctively resonate with the process that Stanton went through. Some ideas come in a moment, but many aspects have to be worked out over days, weeks, months—even years. And those ideas don’t usually come by being isolated but by being connected: with other artists, the history of art, friends who inspire you, and the world of everyday life. Often what happens is that you see something—perhaps as mundane as a pair of binoculars—and you suddenly realize how it could be painted or reworked into something that’s both similar and different. Or perhaps you hear something—the chirp of a bird, a musical chord, a mechanical device that has a certain rhythm—and you imagine the beginning of a piece of music. That last example was the inspiration for Dr. Seuss to write his first book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street![117] Those are just two examples of the multifarious ways of improvisation.
An improvising artist is one who does not create ex nihilo but very much from something. Here it is helpful to turn to the creation account as depicted in Gen. 1.
Consider the following passage:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Gen. 1:1–5)
What exactly is God doing here? Further, what is this “beginning” (re’sit) and where does it begin? One can say this is a basic question regarding any kind of genesis: at what point can we say that something begins? It is significant that the Oxford English Dictionary defines “genesis” as “the action of building up from simple or basic elements to more complex ones.”[118] For something like that seems to be described here. The earth is described as “a formless void” and “darkness covered the face of the deep” (tohu vabohu, or “the depth in the dark”). And then God creates (bara). On this account, things are already in medias res—into the middle of affairs. That is, there is already something going on, and then God enters the picture.
Yet, even though Ian Barbour claims that “creation ‘out of nothing’ is not a biblical concept,” there exists significant evidence to the contrary.[119] In 2 Macc. 7:28, a mother implores her son to “recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed” (as the NRSV has it), or we could translate this phrase simply as “realize that God made them [the world] out of nothing.” Gerhard von Rad claims quite simply that “the conceptional formulation creatio ex nihilo is first found” in this passage.[120] But one can also point to Ps. 148:5, in which the psalmist writes, “Let them praise the name of the LORD, for he commanded and they were created.” Augustine wrestles with the opening verses of Genesis, but then concludes (speaking of God), “You cannot have gone to work like a human craftsman, who forms a material object from some material in accordance with his imaginative decision. . . . Is there anything that exists at all, if not because of you? Clearly, then, you spoke and things were made. By your word you made them.”[121]
While all of this raises some distinctly theological questions, my concern here is not with theology but with the artistic ramifications of the notion of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). Gerhard May is certainly right when he states, “Church theology wants through the proposition creatio ex nihilo to express and safeguard the omnipotence and freedom of God acting in history.”[122] At issue, then, are power and freedom. The God who can create ex nihilo is simply more powerful and free than the God who merely creates from that which already exists. How we interpret the first few verses of the book of Genesis depends very much upon what kind of God we think is being depicted here. A truly powerful God has no need of existent matter. Likewise, a truly powerful artist is one that has no need of tradition and interaction with predecessors. Just as pseudo-Mozart wrote of getting ideas from nowhere, so the romantic artist creates seemingly out of nothing.
As it turns out, most ancient accounts of creation assume ex nihilo nihil fit—from nothing comes nothing. Thus, the creation accounts found in various ancient Mesopotamian texts are about creation from something. Similarly, early Christian theologians such as Justin Martyr generally were in favor of the “from something” account. That is likewise the view of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who believes nothingness or nonbeing makes no sense and so one cannot even say, “It is or it is not.” On his account, one can only say, “It is or . . . ,” since “nothing” makes no sense. It is not. It is no thing. Indeed, even that great songwriting team Rogers and Hammerstein point out that “nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.”
Regarding the account of creation as found in the Old Testament, Catherine Keller speaks of the “mystery of the missing chaos.”[123] How, she asks, have theologians simply forgotten about that chaos? The goal of her book Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming is to deconstruct ex nihilo theology and return to that forgotten chaos. Writing as a feminist theologian, she claims that the ex nihilo account is a highly masculine one. As we have seen, it belongs to a discourse of power. In its place, Keller suggests a theology of becoming in which we rethink the very notion of beginning. In this respect, she is indebted to Edward Said, who distinguishes between “beginning” and “origin.” Whereas beginnings are “secular, humanly produced and ceaselessly re-examined,” origins are “divine, mythical and privileged.”[124] There is something special about an origin. Keller’s problem with ex nihilo is that it erases the deep and the past. It speaks only of a moment. And it passes over the chaos out of which creation takes place. To quote Keller, “What if we begin instead to read the Word from the vantage point of its own fecund multiplicity, its flux into flesh, its overflow?”[125]
Keller claims that we begin amid the chaos and the flux. In this respect, the verb means something other than at least one definition that the Oxford English Dictionary provides for “begin”—“take the first step.” One never truly begins, then, for there is always a step that has already been made. Keller wants to make this point not merely for human beings but also for God. She quotes theologian William P. Brown approvingly: “By and large God does not work de novo or ex nihilo, but ex voce and per collaborationi [by collaboration].”[126] To understand what Brown means by this statement, we must return to the Genesis account and note that God works with the earth and the waters in a collaborative way so as to produce animals and sea monsters. God says, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas” and “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind” (Gen. 1:22, 24).
Justin Martyr writes that “in the beginning [God] of His goodness, for people’s sakes, formed all things out of unformed matter.”[127] By this account, God orders that which already exists. And that is precisely the problem for the third-century church father Athanasius:
If this be so, God will be on their theory a Mechanic only, and not a Creator out of nothing; if, that is, He works at existing material, but is not Himself the cause of the material. For He could not in any sense be called Creator unless He is Creator of the material of which the things created have in their turn been made.[128]
But does Athanasius give us a false dilemma? While working on this book, I discovered that a colleague of mine—an Old Testament scholar named John Walton—happens to have a very helpful interpretation of what is being described in Genesis. He insists that we must consider this question: What is the text asserting that God did in this context? As he puts it, the account found in Genesis is not about “the material shape of the cosmos, but rather its functions.”[129] In other words, the text isn’t about “where does the cosmos come from?” (a question about material) but “why does the cosmos have the order and structure that it has?” (a question about function). Of course, this also gives us a different idea of creation—by this account, even God works with material that is already there. And Walton argues that this is exactly what is meant by the Hebrew word (bara) that we translate as “create.” So the issue is not “existence vs. nonexistence” but order.[130]
Again, though, my concern here is not theological in nature. I am not trying to make a statement regarding the orthodox version of creation. I leave that to the theologians. Instead, I am asking a question: What does each account tell us about artistic creation? As I see it, on either view, God is an improviser. For creation—however we define it—is precisely God setting in motion a reality of “ceaseless alterations” (as Milbank puts it).[131] Thus, the very being of life is improvisatory—by which I mean that it is a mixture of both structure and contingency, of regularity and unpredictability, of constraint and possibility. Further, if God is indeed still at work in the world, then God is likewise part of that improvisatory movement. Living in such a reality means that we take part in that improvisatory movement in all that we do. Since we are creatures embedded in multiple and ever-changing historical and cultural milieus, our identities and very being arise from our relation to others and to the world we inhabit.
So how would this view of God translate into an account of artistic creation? In my view, we end up with what I call creatio ex improvisatio (improvisatio is a Latin term that only rarely occurs and only after the fifteenth century). Artistic genesis, then, always begins somewhere. And that idea is very much exemplified by Baroque music rather than romantic music.
The Play of Improvisation
Romantic music celebrates the original innovative artist. Baroque music does virtually the opposite. Baroque music was much more of a community affair, something one does not alone but with others. This was true of how both composers and performers worked, in true improvisatory fashion. David Fuller describes the situation as follows: “A large part of the music of the whole era was sketched rather than fully realized, and the performer had something of the responsibility of a child with a colouring book, to turn these sketches into rounded art-works.” Fuller compares the “scores” of Baroque music to the “charts” or “fake books” one finds in jazz.[132] The composer provided some idea of how the piece was to go, but a substantial portion of the shape of the musical piece was up to the performer.
Yet it was not merely the performer who was improvising; it was likewise the composer. Here it is helpful to juxtapose the notion of creation with that of improvisation. By using the term “improvisation” instead of “creation,” I mean to stress that artists “fabricate out of what is conveniently on hand” rather than create in the sense of “to produce where nothing was before.”[133] In making art, we always start with something. The extreme side of such “borrowing” would today come under the rubric of “plagiarism.” It may come as rather a surprise that Bach was in the habit of starting with a melody appropriated from either himself or someone else. A well-known example of his creative borrowing is how the popular song “Innsbruch, ich muß dich lassen” (“Innsbruch, I must leave you”) morphed into “O Welt, ich muß dich lassen” (“O World, I must leave you”) that became part of his St. Matthew Passion. Of course, this was standard practice at the time—a time when the idea of ownership of intellectual property didn’t exist. George Frederic Handel was also prolific in his “recycling” of his and others’ work.[134] This raises questions about the notion of ownership and copyright, to which we will later return.
Such a conception of artistic creation is strikingly at odds with that of the modern/romantic paradigm. Now, I admit that many modern artists both have been and are currently committed to “pushing the envelope.” What I’m questioning is just how “original” even the most supposed “original” pieces of art actually are. I fully admit that, say, Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper (1967) are landmark—even in ways original—artistic contributions. Yet it strikes me that these examples are nothing like a “complete departure” from their respective genres but are instead a significant advance within them. That is to say, they are still part of a recognizable genre and not something entirely new—which indicates that they all represent semi-new ways of reworking what already existed. Thus, I am contending that the old wisdom of Ecclesiastes still holds: “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccles. 1:9). Without a doubt, there is reworking, revision, rethinking, and renewal—but there is no true revolution. Here I side with Gadamer, who writes, “Even where life changes violently, as in ages of revolution, far more of the old is preserved in the supposed transformation of everything than anyone knows, and it combines with the new to create a new value.”[135] Rock ’n’ roll may be a new genre, but it could never have come into existence without heavy borrowing from the blues.
Gadamer’s concept of “play” (Spiel) also goes a good ways toward helping us think about how artistic improvisation takes place. Play might seem to be merely something we do as recreation, but Gadamer suggests that play gives us a clue to human activity in general. Note that the German term Spiel can be translated into English as either “play” or “game.” If we take the latter meaning, we can say that to play is to take part in an activity that exists apart from the single player. Gadamer thinks of the making of art as beginning in the to-and-fro of play but ending in what he calls “transformation into structure.”[136] At some point, what was the play of experimentation starts to become more “stable” as a structure. The beginning of a musical phrase turns into a full melody. Some lines hastily drawn on a canvas get more and more definition as other lines are drawn. A piece of stone moves from being a square block to an increasingly defined shape. But how does all of this happen? Here there can be no simple answer, for pieces of art come into existence in different ways over varying lengths of time. Gustav Mahler’s (1860–1911) first symphony is interesting in this respect. While Mahler wrote the bulk of it in 1888, parts of it come from material dating back to the 1870s, and he revised it more than once. The final version dates to 1906.
While it is difficult to present anything like “the” model for artistic improvisation, consider the following story. Malcolm Cowley gives us what are in effect two descriptions of the process of how Hart Crane (1899–1932) wrote his poetry. According to the first description, a Sunday afternoon party at which everyone was laughing, playing croquet, and having a good time was often the backdrop for his writing. Crane would be among those laughing—and drinking—the most until he would disappear into the next room. With a Cuban rumba or torch song or Ravel’s Bolero in the background, the partygoers would hear the keys of a typewriter busily banging away. Then, about an hour later, Crane would appear with a poem and have the partygoers read it. At least, that is the way in which Cowley originally told the story. It certainly is intriguing and fits rather well with the artistic genius idea we noted in chapter 2. Yet Cowley later realized that this was really only part of the story. Usually Crane had been thinking about that poem—seemingly produced in an hour—for months or years and writing bits and pieces along the way. Then he would use the occasion of the party to try to “get inspired.” But the process of writing the poem wouldn’t end there:
As for the end of the story, it might be delayed for a week or a month. Painfully, persistently—and dead sober—Hart would revise his new poem, clarifying the images, correcting the meter and searching for the right word hour after hour. “The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise,” in the second of his “Voyages,” was the result of a search that lasted for several days. At first he had written, “The seal’s findrinny gaze toward paradise,” but someone had objected that he was using a non-existent word. Hart and I worked in the same office that year, and I remember his frantic searches through Webster’s Unabridged and the big Standard, his trips to the library—on office time—and his reports of consultations with old sailors in South Street speakeasies. “Findrinny” he could never find, but after paging through the dictionary again he decided that “spindrift” was almost as good and he declaimed the new line exultantly. Even after one of his manuscripts had been sent to Poetry or the Dial and perhaps had been accepted, he would still have changes to make.[137]
It strikes me that Crane’s experience in writing poetry is probably rather similar to that of the process of how many or even most artistic pieces come into existence. One gets perhaps an inchoate idea, then begins to see it take shape (by either writing some preliminary lines or putting together chords and melodic motifs or taking some pictures or trying out some dance steps). Slowly, not infrequently with painstaking decision making and trial and error, something is transformed into a kind of structure—something that starts to have its own identity.
That is not to say that some pieces of art don’t ever come about in a flash of inspiration. Yet even these sorts of stories often turn out to be untrue, or not quite as dramatic as they first seem. Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” would seem to be an example to balance that of Crane. After all, here is what he tells us in the preface to the poem:
On awaking he [Coleridge] appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away.[138]
As appealing as this story is, it unravels rather quickly. We know that Coleridge had been reading Samuel Purchas’s Purchas His Pilgrimage (1617), and it turns out that the first two lines of “Kubla Khan” come, with only a little alteration, directly from a sentence in Purchas.[139] So the poem doesn’t come out of “a dream.” Indeed, Coleridge is indebted to a number of writers.[140] Coleridge claims to have written the poem in the summer of 1797, but there is good reason to think that he wrote it later than that. Not surprisingly, many critics find it impossible to believe that Coleridge could ever have remembered fifty-four lines from a “dream.” Then there is the question of the “person from Porlock,” who seems most likely to be a literary device. So, whatever we may think of the poem, the story behind its creation doesn’t hold up.
A Little Help from My Friends
It is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) who insists that “life itself is essentially a process of appropriating. . . . ‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a corrupted or imperfect, primitive society: it belongs to the essence of being alive.”[141] Certainly all art making is essentially appropriation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “appropriation” as “taking as one’s own or to one’s own use.”[142] A simple example of this is that poetry and novels rely upon “appropriating” words from some language. But improvising requires more than just borrowing from language. It requires appropriating from life, from the world of ideas, and from the “language” of painting or film or sculpture or dance. Indeed, it is so basic to artistic improvisation that the novelist Margaret Drabble (1939–) boldly admits that “appropriation is what novelists do. Whatever we write is, knowingly or unknowingly, a borrowing. Nothing comes from nowhere.”[143] At least for human improvisers, we are constantly appropriating.
The question, then, is simply: How much does any given piece of art depend upon another? The answer is: it all depends. For appropriation and dependency represent a rather wide spectrum that has representatives all along the way. Even if one tries to come up with examples that are truly “original,” one inevitably can find influences and sources for such examples. A typical example of an “original” piece of art is Igor Stravinsky’s (1882–1971) The Rite of Spring (La Sacre du Printemps), which first premiered in 1913. Consider the following description of it from 1927: “Harmonic tradition collapsed; everything became permissible and it was but necessary to find one’s bearings in these riches obtained by this unexpected ‘license’. . . . Stravinsky broke down everything old at one blow.”[144] The musicologist and Stravinsky scholar Richard Taruskin quotes these words and then says the following:
Minus the rampant animus, this is more or less how The Rite of Spring is still viewed today. The usual account of the work places almost exclusive emphasis on its putative rupture with tradition; and despite all his subsequent disclaimers, that is the view the composer chose to abet, increasingly alienated as he was from the cultural milieu in which the ballet was conceived. It was, however, precisely because The Rite was so profoundly traditional, both as to cultural outlook and as to musical technique, that Stravinsky was able to find through it a voice that would serve him through the next difficult phase of his career. Precisely because The Rite was neither rupture nor upheaval but a magnificent extension, it revealed to Stravinsky a path that would sustain him through a decade of unimaginable ruptures and upheavals brought on by events far beyond his control.[145]
Taruskin’s point is that what sounds so new and different is actually very strongly grounded in the tradition of Russian music that Stravinsky inherits. The Rite is thus marked by its fusion of traditional and modern elements. And Taruskin points out that Stravinsky, although wavering back and forth, generally chose to promote the “revolutionary” interpretation of the piece, since that made The Rite (and thus Stravinsky himself) seem all the more remarkable. Yet this kind of rhetoric is often just that: ways of talking that make pieces of art seem more extraordinary than they really are by overemphasizing the “new” aspects and downplaying the more “traditional” ones. However “innovative” a piece of art might be, it is always still very strongly dependent upon tradition. The avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez (1925–) captures this quite nicely when he says:
The composer is exactly like you, constantly on the horns of the same dilemma, caught in the same dialectic—the great models and an unknown future. He cannot take off into the unknown. When people tell me, “I am taking off into the unknown and ignoring the past,” it is complete nonsense.[146]
Indeed, what could “taking off into the unknown” possibly look (or sound) like?
Improvisation with what is available to an artist can take many different forms. The painter and sculptor George Braque (1882–1963) began to experiment with making collages out of newspaper fragments, ticket stubs, pieces of wood, fabric, stamps, and other items. Here we have a kind of improvisation that takes the detritus of human life and makes it into something artistic. In turn, film directors often look to novels for their material. There are various versions of Jane Austen novels that attempt to be as “faithful” as possible to the original. The photographer Sherrie Levine (1947–) has made a career of photographing photographs of other photographers and then presenting the results as her own. She is known for an exhibition titled “After Edward Weston” (1980) in which she presented her photographs of Walker Evans’s photographs.
Or, to offer another example, folk music likewise relies on borrowing and “remixing” strands from other pieces of music that can result in either something that is very close to an existing song or something quite different from anything that already exists. Folk music is so strongly “intertextual” that, if such borrowing ceased, so would the very genre. For this reason, the musicologist Charles Seeger writes, “The attempt to make sense out of copyright law reaches its limit in folk song. For here is the illustration par excellence of the Law of Plagiarism. The folk song is, by definition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a product of plagiarism.”[147] As I mentioned earlier, rock music would be unthinkable without the very direct influence of the blues. It was not just that rock musicians were listening to blues musicians and getting ideas; it was that they were actually ripping them off. For example, Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut album is heavily indebted to Willie Dixon’s songs “You Shook Me,” “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and “You Need Love.” Of course, once such pieces of art start to generate huge revenues, creative borrowing becomes problematic. Thus, Dixon sued Led Zeppelin. The family of African composer Solomon Linda, who wrote the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (used by Disney in The Lion King), filed suit against Abilene Music. Picasso and others appropriated from African art back when such borrowing seemed perfectly acceptable. More recently, Bob Dylan borrowed from the Confederate poet Henry Timrod. Dylan’s “When the Deal Goes Down” has the line “more frailer than the flowers, these precious hours,” whereas Timrod’s “Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night” goes, “A round of precious hours . . . And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers.”
Perhaps we need to be more honest and simply recognize that borrowing is what makes art possible. Back in 1876, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) had already noted:
Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant,—and that commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing,—that, in a large sense, one would say, there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.[148]
Of course, there has long been something like a consensus on what kind of borrowing is permissible. The poet John Milton (1608–74) gives us the formula in brief: “For such a borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors it is accounted Plagiare.”[149] The composer Johann Mattheson (1681–1784) expands on this idea: “Borrowing is permissible; but one must return the thing borrowed with interest, i.e., one must so construct and develop imitations that they are prettier and better than the pieces from which they are derived.”[150]
It shouldn’t be difficult to see that defining the role of artists in terms of improvisation changes pretty much everything. If artists are indebted to one another, there can be no “lone” genius, disconnected from the community. Instead, we are all improvisers together, quoting one another, saying the same thing in different ways, and providing different perspectives. There is an ever-shifting balance between quotation and originality, between old and new, between you and me. Some of what I say is more “mine”; some is more “yours”; some is more “tradition.” Getting the exact ownership right may only be possible to a certain extent. And then the question is: Does it really matter?
Copyright: The Artist and the Church
A few years ago I was preparing an article for an edited collection of papers that had been given at the Wheaton Theology Conference. I quoted eight lines from a Duke Ellington (1899–1974) song called “Come Sunday.” And I ended up having to pay the publisher $50 for those eight lines (they originally wanted $75, but I countered with $35 and we compromised at $50). What makes this a particularly interesting story is that that chapter is filled with quotes from philosophers and theologians. Yet, in every other case, the copyright exemption known as “fair use” came into play. I was writing an academic essay using published work that was “factual” rather than fiction, and I was only using relatively short quotations. But “fair use” for songs, symphonies, poems, films, and novels is more complicated. Or, to put that slightly differently, anything that counts as an artistic product is generally protected against public performance—or even simple repetition. There are some exemptions. A notable one is the “religious service exemption,” US Copyright Law section 110[3], which allows “performances of a dramatico-musical work of a religious nature, or display of a work, in the course of services at a place of worship.” Then there is the exception for “performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work otherwise than in a transmission to the public, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage and without payment of any fee or other compensation for the performance to any of its performers, promoters, or organizers” (US Copyright Law section 110[4]), though that continues with a list of further qualifications. Then there is the “fair use” exemption (US Copyright Law section 107), which is vague, as well as various “educational” exemptions that are—taken all together—somewhat complicated.[151]
Thus, even though the books that I cited are copyrighted, Duke Ellington’s song simply “stuck out” as something worthy of special attention. Being a great fan of Ellington, I’m glad his heirs are getting their due, and yet something seems wrong here. I was allowed to quote a whole paragraph (or more) from any of the other authors, but eight lines from Ellington suddenly meant I had to pay up. That raises a further question: How many things are actually copyrighted or trademarked that might seem to be common property? Every time I visit my local AMC theater, they play a clip that says, “Silence is Golden®.” How can anyone trademark such a common saying? Were you aware that the folk song “Old King Cole” is owned by Cecil Sharp, who has made a profession out of “collecting” old folk songs and copyrighting them under his name (and then collecting the profits)?[152] Did you know that the words “old fashioned” are owned by the giant food conglomerate Mrs. Smith’s?
One can only ask, where is all this to end? The editors of an anthology on copyright put forth what would seem to be the two obvious extremes. On the one hand, we might end up with “copyright totalitarianism” in which music and films and other forms of art or literature are so closely monitored that some central agency “knows” how long you are listening to a piece of music or reading a particular book (perhaps with a GPS loaded on your iPad or Kindle). You are charged a monthly usage fee and both fined and denied further access if you don’t pay. Sampling and borrowing would become odd curiosities of the past, with future generations wondering how anyone could think to do anything so outré.[153] The alternative is what those same editors call “copyright anarchy,” in which the music, book, and other such artistic industries realize that there is simply no way to control sampling, downloading, copying, and borrowing.
As should be clear, neither of these extremes is desirable. Artists, like any other laborers, are “worthy of their hire,” and we should have respect for their improvised art. And yet, one cannot help but question aspects of copyright law. Above all, it is conceptually problematic, precisely because the idea that one can “own” a cultural product is a relatively new and ultimately questionable idea. Of course, it may seem obvious to us, but our ideas about copyright and the very idea of “ownership” of cultural/intellectual property are 100 percent culturally dependent. This is one reason why that annoying movie clip “You Wouldn’t Steal a Purse” is conceptually problematic.[154] We have developed these ideas regarding ownership of cultural property, but they are relatively new ideas and quite foreign to the ways in which people have generally thought in the past.
Further, given what we have seen of the modern/romantic paradigm, it should come as no surprise that such a paradigm is the basis for much—if not all—of our thinking about copyright. Consider what two experts on copyright say: “Today’s copyright law requires that somebody (or several somebodies) be the author(s) of a copyrighted work. There is no place for truly collective authorship based on notions of group work.” Yet we have seen that we are always working together in some way. However, it turns out that the romantic paradigm has been very useful—economically—for many companies. “Music, publishing, and movie executives constantly invoke the genius-creator with piety, even when their own artists demonstrate the need and will to collaborate widely and even though their own businesses return relatively little to most creators. They put their celebrities out in front to celebrate the Romantic notion of the creator, while they depend on crude economic calculation to lay claim to works for hire.”[155] “Works for hire” means that, if someone employs you to make art, then they own the finished project, which is why so many musicians (for instance) feel “used” by record companies.
Unfortunately, though, these ideas also have serious consequences for the flourishing of creativity. When Marc Gershwin, nephew of George and Ira, worries that “someone could turn ‘Porgy and Bess’ into rap music,” we should worry about his worry.[156] Why shouldn’t someone turn Porgy and Bess into rap music? Gershwin’s worry is all the more worrisome when we remember that Porgy and Bess is the result of heavy borrowing from African American music (in some cases even “stealing” traditional songs). But, of course, Gershwin’s music has been the source of so many improvisations by both black and white musicians that the borrowing has gone full circle. What is more problematic is that copyright laws have only gotten progressively more restrictive. We have moved from (1) the American Constitution’s provision of fourteen years (with the possibility of an additional fourteen years, if the author was still alive) to (2) twenty-eight years with a renewal period of twenty-eight years (1909) to (3) the length of the author’s life plus fifty years (1976) to (4) the author’s life plus seventy years (1998), which was enacted to protect some key Disney characters.
And it should be pointed out that ASCAP and BMI—companies that enforce copyrights—are very good at making people pay up. Although copyright is widely disregarded in certain parts of the world, the goal of such enforcers is that everyone pays. If you hold a parade (even a nonprofit one in your small town), you have to pay for the music you use. Yoga instructors are required to pay for the music they play. I actually called up BMI’s customer service and asked, “If I just start singing a song in the park, do I have to pay?” To which the quick answer was, “Yes, because it’s a public performance.” And when I answered, “But I’m not charging any money,” the answer was, “It’s still a public performance.” So you are—at least according to BMI’s customer service—breaking the law if you start singing a tune while walking down the street. Probably the most egregious instance of being overbearing was ASCAP’s attempt to get thousands of summer camps—including, most famously, Girl Scout Camps—to pay up for singing songs around the campfire. ASCAP’s John Lo Frumento claimed, “They buy paper, twine and glue for their crafts—they can pay for the music, too. We will sue them if necessary.”[157] It never actually came to that, because ASCAP was forced to back down because of bad public relations (people don’t like you when you say mean things about the Girl Scouts).
Exactly where we go from here is unclear. Many people writing on copyright law realize that the law as it currently stands is unworkable and will only impoverish creativity. Some suggest that copyright should last somewhere along the lines of ten or fifteen years, perhaps with some possibility for renewal.[158] That would move copyright in the direction of the much shorter trademark protection on prescription medication. Of course, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi have made an excellent case that “fair use” can come into play in many situations. Yet navigating fair use is somewhat complicated. It would also recognize what seems to be the inevitable reality that makes sharing music, films, or whatever through the internet is increasingly easy.
But someone might ask: Why have you spent so much time talking about copyright in a book on the arts and the church? The answer is simple: because copyright laws all too strongly mirror the modern/romantic paradigm by assuming that works of art are discrete units of originality, when they are instead interconnected “pieces” of a much larger artistic fabric.[159] So the very notion of copyright and what it means to “create” a piece of art needs to be seriously rethought, since these two notions go so closely together. My own inclination is that copyright should be significantly shortened and less restrictive. Yet that only gets at one practical aspect. Much more important would be a serious discussion of what to make of the very notion of copyright in light of the fact that any of our “creating” is ultimately improvising. My hope here is to help provoke that discussion.
Yet here I want to turn to the question of what it means to live improvisationally.
Living Improvisationally
Although the idea that we are made in God’s image—the imago Dei—has been used in many ways (some of them questionable), it seems clear that part of what it means to be creatures that bear the divine image is that we are likewise artisans. Yet what does that mean? The creation narrative depicts God as the artisan par excellence. J. Richard Middleton points out that “it is due precisely to God’s exercise of royal power that there is a stable, dependable cosmic structure.” What that means for us is that “humans are like God in exercising royal power on earth” and also that “the divine ruler delegated to humans a share in his rule of the earth.”[160] The very process that God has set in motion is one in which we are to share. We are thus artisans in God’s image, though in a significantly lesser sense than God is an artisan. If we hold to the account of God as creating out of nothing, then clearly we are starkly different from God, for we always create out of something. However, even if we say that God “improvises” upon the formless void, his artisanal power is so much greater than ours in quantity, and his creation is so much more original than ours in quality, that comparison must be thoroughly qualified.
Yet, as part of that reality—and made in the image of this original improviser—we take part in that improvisatory movement in all that we do. As beings inhabiting the flux, we find our lives constantly in motion. As creatures embedded in multiple and ever-changing historical and cultural milieus, our identities and very being arise from our relations to others and the world we inhabit. As improvisers, we constantly reshape that which is at hand rather than “create.” We improvise with each sentence that comes from our mouths and with every action that we perform. Even though we have rituals for greeting and eating and worship, we are constantly improvising upon them.
How does all of this work out in our lives? If we are truly improvisational beings, then it would seem that everything we do is improvisation. We might simply say that we dwell in the world improvisationally. In all that we do, we are engaging in creatio ex improvisatio. Here we need to go back to the idea of a “beginning.”
Earlier, I used the phrase “always already” in regard to the call and the response. Central to Martin Heidegger’s early thought is the idea that Dasein—which is how he speaks of human existence—always finds itself already at home in the world, in the midst of language, and with tools ready at hand.[161] The phrase immer schon (always already) is like a Leitmotiv in Being and Time. And it plays a similar role in Chrétien. After citing Heidegger’s claim that we are able to speak only because we have “always already [toujours déjà], listened to speech,”[162] Chrétien goes on to say, “We are entangled in speech as soon as we exist, before we have ever uttered a word, and in this sense we have always already listened and obeyed.”[163] Such is true of speech, but we have seen that it is likewise true of the call (l’appel)in general. We have already seen that this call comes from God.
Yet this raises an interesting question: Are the calls of creation truly the first calls? Might there not be ones that preceded even them? The clue that raises at least the possibility of such a question comes in the portion of the Genesis narrative in which humankind is brought into being. In a dramatic departure from the previous refrain of “let there be,” we find “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen. 1:26, italics added). Whether the use here of “us” and “our” is itself truly an indication of the Trinity is less important than the doctrine itself. For, if God is not one but three, then there is reason to think that some sort—however it might be conceived—of “call” and “response” goes back and forth between these three persons. Moreover, if God is eternal, then it makes little sense to speak of a “first” call. The relationship of the persons of the Trinity has been eloquently described by the fourth century Eastern fathers Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great with the term περιχώρησις (perichōrēsis, Lat. circum-incedere), from which we get “circumincession,” which means “to move around in.” Perichōrēsis is the divine dance of the persons of the Trinity in which they move around, with, and in each other. But surely perichōrēsis could likewise be thought of in terms of a call and response—not a divine dance but a divine discourse of ceaseless calls and responses reverberating and interpenetrating each other. And, should we read the “let us” as simply God’s speaking of the celestial hierarchy (a common enough reading of this passage, even among Christians), we also find evidence of calls that precede the calls of creation. John speaks of the “four living creatures” in the heavenly realm who sing “day and night without ceasing”: “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Rev. 4:8). This is truly a continual call, a call that continues throughout eternity. Moreover, John is echoing something already found in the Hebrew Bible: in responding to Job, God says that “the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy” (Job 38:7).
In either case, by the time the call reaches us, it is never the first call. We are always already caught up in the improvisatory movement that makes language and life possible. To speak is to be part of an ongoing conversation and also to be part of an ever-evolving hybridity of others and self. As someone who speaks with many voices, I am not simply my own voice but a polyphony of voices. Thus, the I for Chrétien is no “self-contained” or “self-constituted” I. Instead, it is composed of multiple voices.
To improvise is always to speak to others, with others (even when one improvises alone), and in the name of others. For instance, if I’m playing one of the perennial standards of jazz, I do so along with so many others—whether those playing alongside me, or those playing the tune in some other corner of the world, or all those who have played it before. Jazz musicians typically have a sense of what the author of Hebrews calls “so great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1). Moreover, when I play a tune, I am never simply improvising on that tune alone. I am improvising on the tradition formed by the improvisations upon that tune—what literary theorists call its “reception history,” or how a particular piece of literature or music has been received in history.
Whereas, in regard to literature, Harold Bloom has spoken of “the anxiety of influence”—which is the desire to be new, fresh, and original—jazz musicians would rather speak of “the joy of influence.”[164] Bloom’s talk of “anxiety” stems from the romantic paradigm of art, with its drive to be “original.” The primary artistic goal in the modern/romantic paradigm is to carve out a place for oneself by overcoming the influence of previous artists. One wants to become (to use Bloom’s language) a “strong poet” who stands out as unique and thus distances herself from the tradition. But jazz provides an entirely different model. As a jazz improviser, one becomes part of a community of improvisers. As improviser, one works with material that already exists rather than creating ex nihilo. As improviser, one is aware of being wholly indebted to the past. As improviser, one speaks in the name of others. As improviser, one joins a conversation.
Although Chrétien almost certainly did not have jazz in mind, he opens The Call and the Response with a quotation from Joseph Joubert that captures these aspects perfectly: “In order for a voice to be beautiful, it must have in it many voices together.”[165] My voice is always composed of many voices and so is never simply “my own.” When I speak, I am always speaking on behalf of others. My voice contains their voices. Or, as my doctoral advisor Rudolf Bernet beautifully puts it, “Somebody who must hold a lecture discovers that he or she is continually paraphrasing other authors and speaks as well in the name of colleagues and friends.”[166] I have often thought of this quote as I give lectures, for I realize that I am speaking in the name of Bernet and so many others. What emerges in this improvisation upon improvisation is an ever-evolving hybridity in which identity and ownership are often stretched to their limits. Is an improvisation “mine” if it is so indebted to other improvisers? And how is even my identity as an improviser connected with those of other improvisers?
To describe a community as one of multiple voices is indeed right. Yet perhaps it does not go quite far enough. In juxtaposition to (that is, in addition to) the notion of “polyphony,” we need to set the notion of heterophony—both descriptively and prescriptively. First, whereas polyphony provides the aspect of a multiplicity of voices, heterophony emphasizes the otherness of those voices. If there is to be true otherness, then we cannot—and should not—have a beautifully blended polyphony. Indeed, one can argue that this lovely notion of polyphony is all too liberal and modern, for it wishes to smooth over the difficulties and the dissonance. Second, heterophony emphasizes the idea of differing voices that do not simply blend or produce a pleasing harmony but remain distinct and sometimes dissonant, sometimes precisely when we would rather they were not.[167] This is not to say that now dissonance takes center stage; rather, it is to say that dissonance—sometimes eventually resolved and sometimes not—is simply part of that conversation. Only if there is true heterophony can there be the expression and existence of otherness. Without such openness to such dissonance, we would not have the late Beethoven quartets. Harmony may arrive, but that arrival may well have to do with a change in us as listeners, and perhaps a revision of what counts as “harmony.”[168]
Having considered how our lives are improvisational, let me close this chapter by considering how church communities are responding to the call to live improvisationally by promoting the arts and supporting artists. In working on this book, I’ve visited a wide variety of churches that are doing remarkable things. One church that particularly stands out—in many ways—is Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Saint Gregory of Nyssa is a church that works particularly hard to get everyone attending the worship service involved. When I spoke to Sanford Dole, the church’s music director, after a service, he mentioned that a central goal is to achieve “shared leadership” in which the congregation has a strong sense of being involved. In an interview, Richard Fabian, one of the two founders of St. Gregory’s, sounds this same theme: “St. Gregory’s liturgy is deeply and radically traditional. This means shared leadership; real lay authority with lay liturgists, composers, preachers, and worship leaders. . . . It puts the invitation to participate in worship at the center. In a passive, consumerist culture, our congregation sings; people move from their pews, they touch each other.”[169]
Now, this idea that participation is “radically traditional” may strike some readers as surprising. We often think of “traditional worship services” as ones in which the celebrant or pastor is the primary person of action. In such services, the congregation is often quite passive—occasionally they sing a hymn or song, but mostly they sit and listen. When Fabian speaks of “traditional,” he means the early church, in which those attending were very much active participants. The Eucharist was an actual meal, and there was no elaborate hierarchy of clergy and laity. Simply put, these early services would have been highly interactive. And that is what St. Gregory’s is attempting to regain. For instance, their Music for Liturgy (basically, their “hymnal” produced both by and for the church) has quite a number of pieces that are composed by various members of the church. In fact, the church has produced a CD with all original compositions. But that’s not all: on its website, there is a large variety of liturgies and other resources for worship that can be used by any congregation. The church encourages visual artists by organizing a retreat for them twice a year, and it has a writers’ group. Everyone in the church is encouraged to learn how to make icons, including children. The aim, says Sanford, is that they “feed off of each other’s creative energy” in precisely the way I’ve talked about in this chapter.
Of course, there are many ways that the arts and artists receive support in various churches. Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City encourages its artistic members by getting them involved in worship services. Given that the church is located in Manhattan, there are plenty of professional artists from which to draw. Thus, professional instrumentalists and vocalists lead the congregation in a wide variety of musical expressions. The bulletin covers and other publications are the work of graphic and visual artists, while professional actors often read the Scripture readings. But Redeemer goes even further, for it offers what they term “vocation groups”—many different small groups specifically designed to provide fellowship for actors, classical music performers, composers, filmmakers, or jazz musicians.[170] Redeemer also organizes “faith and work seminars” designed for artists to gather to discuss how their belief affects their work as artists, as well as philosophical and theological questions that arise in their daily work. The church holds evening “open forums” that employ a combination of music, lectures by Timothy Keller (the church’s main pastor), and public discussion. Naturally, few churches have the opportunity to employ and support such a wide range of talented professionals. On the other hand, in churches without so many professionals, there is far more opportunity for nonprofessionals to exercise and develop their own talents.
Saint Gregory the Great Church in Chicago (a Roman Catholic parish) has an “artists in residence” program. While many colleges or organizations have such programs, Saint Gregory the Great’s is somewhat different. Consider how they explain it on the church’s website: “The St. Gregory the Great outreach does not merely celebrate the efforts and talents of the individual artist, but melds those efforts and talents into a wider spiritual vision and mission. We describe this wider spiritual vision and mission as ‘Evangelization Through the Arts.’” The goal, then, is twofold: the church seeks to support artists who can “make the parish a base where their art can not only be created, but also shared with the community as a living expression of gospel faith and virtue.” Artists truly become part of the community, for they are both supported and in turn “serve the parish mission in various practical ways.”[171] Such two-way support is really the ideal for the church community.
Then there are the conferences put on by such megachurches as Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington (in the Chicago area) and Saddleback Church (in southern California). Having attended Saddleback’s conference, I was impressed with the great variety of workshops being taught. For instance, one could sit in on a seminar with Jimmy and Carol Owens (two of the pioneers of contemporary Christian music) on the basics of songwriting. In private conversation with Jimmy Owens, I found him quite sensitive to the dangers to which Christian musicians are prone, such as making worship leading into a “performance,” a common criticism of contemporary Christian musicians. But there were also workshops on topics such as “Creating a Culture of Worshipers,” creating a dance ministry, and even the problem of “copyright compliance.” Both Willow Creek and Saddleback have been exemplary in involving artistically talented individuals in their services. Both have worked hard to support artists of all types, these worship conferences being only one example.
Having considered improvisation as a new way of conceiving life and what we as artists do, we need to turn to some potential dangers.