{"id":212,"date":"2014-03-01T14:55:09","date_gmt":"2014-03-01T14:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=212"},"modified":"2015-08-31T19:33:06","modified_gmt":"2015-08-31T23:33:06","slug":"music-generosity-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2014\/03\/01\/music-generosity-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Music and the Generosity of God"},"content":{"rendered":"
Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n 4’33” by John Cage tacitly combines theory and practice to promote wide attention to music. Although theologically dismissed, the piece also provides an acoustical opening to recognize that all sounds radiate the generosity of God. The article below retrieves the composition in order to propose that the giving of God manifests in the ubiquitous soundscapes of ordinary life. Furthermore, the soundscapes of everyday life constitute particular kinds of theological proclamation and invitations to worship. By linking historical influences of 4’33” \u2013 an arts symposium at Vassar College, two lectures at Julliard and Wesleyan University based upon the teachings of Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, and the White Paintings by Robert Rauschenberg \u2013 with Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of “givenness,” the essay suggests that Divine generosity reverberates in music without boundary. As illustration, the final pages briefly sketch how communion and the life it celebrates and the life of which it is a part vocalize the In 1872, Nietzsche described music as that which is “the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, and the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon.”[1]<\/a> In other words, music amplifies the essence of all that we can experience and know, but only by first echoing human freedom and power.[2]<\/a> Eighty years later, on August 29, 1952 American composer John Cage’s 4’33” (four thirty-three) seemed to exemplify exactly what Nietzsche meant.[3]<\/a> In actuality, the composition announced far more \u2013 the ubiquity of music and the generosity of God.<\/p>\n The ubiquity of music expresses a material idea that music appears everywhere sound occurs (which is scientifically-proven to be every place). Music pronounces itself without boundary or necessary genesis in human intent. 4’33” draws attention to the ubiquity of music with especial clarity.<\/p>\n God in the following pages describes the one who biblically self identifies as Ehyeh asher Ehyeh<\/em> (I will be what I will be) and the one biblically portrayed as creator and giver of all times, places, persons, and things, including sounds. For the current author, God lived on the earth as Jesus of Nazareth, gifted humanity with the Holy Spirit, and will come again to judge and to redeem the totality of life. Yet in as much as God may be known by theological discourse and concepts like “Creator,” “Savior,” “Redeemer” and “Trinity,” God is beyond Being, even in the supreme sense, and remains forever undefined by human, biblical, and\/or doctrinal description or any other kind of articulation. Only God fully defines God.<\/p>\n Yet God’s own disclosure is not the only way in which the incomprehensible God imagined here becomes knowable. Intimating God also becomes possible according to what God furnishes in everyday existence \u2013 by what God gives. The essay here proposes that music, broadly conceived according to the ubiquity of sound, constitutes one aspect of divine generosity. Music is not God but music is given by God.<\/p>\n At an outdoor amphitheater located in the Woodstock Valley of New York’s Catskill Mountains, Maverick Hall, pianist David Tudor sat down for his penultimate performance of the evening, incorrectly listed as follows:<\/p>\n <\/em>4 pieces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . john cage<\/em><\/p>\n 4′ 33″<\/em><\/p>\n 30″<\/em><\/p>\n 2′ 23″<\/em><\/p>\n 1′ 40″<\/em>[4]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/em>Tudor set a stopwatch to four minutes and thirty-three seconds. He placed it on the music shelf of the piano. When the timer began, he opened and closed the instrument’s lid. He turned pages to mark transition between movements. Yet he never pressed a key. Tudor “silently” “played” perhaps the most controversial and influential musical compositions of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n Invisibly, nature made Tudor’s performance come alive. Oak, maple, hemlock, and shagbark hickory trees introduced an ambient chorus of rustling leaves. Raindrops against the roof produced percussion during the second movement. Nearby critters added unexpected ornamentation. So did hushed exchanges of confusion from the audience. After Tudor had completed the piece, Maverick Concert Hall, a rugged barn-like structure with an upper paneling of windows reminiscent of honeycomb, had transformed into a legendary shrine of new music.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n Adoration, however, did not effuse from the recital audience. Instead they sat stunned, perplexed, and pissed in reaction to what they heard. Earle Brown, as reported by Cage biographer David Revill recalls “[a] hell of a lot of uproar…it infuriated most of the audience.”[6]<\/a> One audience member who was an artist supposedly shouted with vehemence, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s run these people out of town.”[7]<\/a> Few could have imagined that 4’33” would become Cage’s most famous work and a landmark in the history of musical composition.[8]<\/a> Most thought it was a stunt. Perhaps none would have surmised its theological origins and promise.<\/p>\n In a recent chapter entitled, “The Given with which the Artist Works,” from Art in Action <\/em>(1987), Nicholas Wolterstorff combines theological and musical disdain to excoriate the musical approach of 4’33.” Wolterstorff writes, “All <\/em>the standards of craftsmanship in the art of the musician are irrelevant in the face of some of the music of John Cage.”[9]<\/a> For Wolterstorff, 4’33” ignores artistic integrity. Cage composes with “total subservience to materials” and 4’33” champions “de-aestheticization,” \u2013 artistic purposelessness that evokes dissatisfaction in audiences.[10]<\/a> In Voicing Creation’s Praise <\/em>(1991), Jeremy Begbie reintroduces Wolterstorff’s outlook as “the \u2018Cage’ attitude” that eliminates human freedom and intent in art.[11]<\/a> For Wolterstorff and Begbie, Cage musically undermines God’s intention for humanity to create and order the materials of the earth. Cage’s methods amount to the practice of musical abandonment and theological nihilism.<\/p>\n To date, Begbie’s position on Cage remains unchanged.[12]<\/a> In fact, his reading against Cage dominates English language discourse about music and theology. The rejection has far wider implications than castigating one of the most influential composers of the 20th<\/sup> century and Western tonality in general. Begbie draws boundaries around the musical activity of God.<\/p>\n Begbie and forebears like Wolterstorff miss the musical and theological pregnancy of a watershed piece like 4’33”.[13]<\/a> 4’33” does not promote de-aestheticization, but unbounded audition and attention that can hear and experience music anywhere. The composition does not demonstrate absolute subservience to ambient noise. Rather it suggests givenness that instantiates the generosity of God. <\/em><\/p>\n Three historical moments in the conception of 4’33” offer pathways for retrieving the composition as theologically fecund: 1) a presentation by Cage at Vassar College, 2) two lectures before and after the Maverick Hall performance that link Zen to music and 3) the White Paintings from Robert Rauschenberg.[14]<\/a> Retracing those events shows how misguided characterizations are which position the piece as anti-theological. In fact, 4’33” grows out of a cultural genealogy that can neither understand nor articulate its artistic visions without resourcing theological language and ways of thinking.<\/p>\n The first public mention of ideas that would eventuate in 4’33” took place at a national intercollegiate arts conference, The Creative Arts in Contemporary Society, from February 27\u201329, 1948, at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.[15]<\/a> The Vassar Miscellany News described the conference as an “attempt to see the arts not as isolated aesthetic problems, but as fields of human endeavor inextricably connected with politics, science, and sociology” and that the conference aim or “destination is not just this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from now on.”[16]<\/a> What is surprising is the theological turn that the conference takes in Cage’s contribution and the undertones of theology active in the work of the other panelists. In attendance with Cage were seminal figures in the history of shaping modern American aesthetic and philosophic thought: literary scholar, F.O. Matthiessen, dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham, novelist, Irwin Shaw, painter, Ben Shahn, poet, Malcolm Brinnin, and philosopher, Paul Weiss.[17]<\/a><\/p>\n During the Saturday afternoon 2:00pm Art and Music panel John Cage spoke with social realist painter, Ben Shahn.[18]<\/a> At that time, Shahn had succeeded as a rare breed of artist able to produce and sell works to galleries, public exhibitions, and private collections, as well as more populist outlets and venues like magazines, advertising campaigns, and corporate buildings, despite his ethic of no-compromise. One piece wedding his unusual creative vision and commercial appeal, completed in the same year of the conference and uncannily anticipatory of Cage’s lecture and the advent of 4’33” is Shahn’s Silent Music (1948).<\/p>\n
\nnearness of God.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nSonic Ubiquity and Divine Charity<\/h3>\n
Maverick Hall<\/h3>\n
Wolterstorff & Begbie<\/h3>\n
The Vassar Lecture<\/h3>\n