Can we get out of the way?

“We sit down before [a] picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way” (19).

from An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis

Music as physical engagement with the world

Music making and music hearing are ways we engage the physical world. Even in the case of electronically generated music, the body is often involved through, say, a keyboard, and patterns of vibrating air are mediated through physical speakers. The physical things we involve ourselves with in music have ultimately arisen through the free initiative of God's love—they are part of the ordo amoris. To treat them as given in this full sense has a series of radical implications for understanding music. The most basic response of the Christian toward music will be gratitude. This does not mean giving unqualified thanks for every bit of music we hear, but it will mean being thankful for the very possibility of music. It 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 a reality we call "matter" that oscillates and resonates, that there is sound, that there is rhythm built into the fabric of reality, that there is the miracle of the human body, which can receive and process sequences of tones. For from all this and through all this, the marvel of music is born. None of it had to come into being. But it has, for the glory of God and for our flourishing. Gaining a Christian mind on music means learning the glad habit of thanksgiving.

--Jeremy Begbie, from Music in God's World

On-line visual literacy project

In class on Tues., I mentioned the On-Line Visual Literacy Project as a good place to get a working vocabulary for responding to visual artistic stimuli. Since then, I've also found this collection of links at Trinity Univ. in Washington. I've not yet investigated all of them. Let me know if you spot an especially good one.

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The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue

How do we steward the gift of music? And whose gift is it?

Consider this quotation from the conclusion of Bruce Ellis Benson’s dense and brilliant phenomenological look at how we make music. After positing improvisation as a better,more accurate way of thinking about the dialogue between composer, performer, audience, and tradition, he writes:

"While the fact that performance is essentially improvisatory . . . might seem to free the performer from restrictions, it actually does precisely the opposite. For it means that the performer has a tremendous responsibility, one that is far greater and more complex than one conceived in terms of simple transmission or reproduction or “fidelity.” The performer, just like the translator, is essentially the inheritor of a gift—something bequeathed, unearned, and unowned. As gift it is something over which the performer does not have mastery or control. Moreover, it is no merely the piece of music that is bequeathed but, rather, the whole tradition to which that piece belongs and in which the performer and listener merely take part. Of course the same is true for the composer: if composition can be described as a kind of improvisation on the work of other composers—indeed the entire tradition—then composers are likewise inheritors of a gift (and that in addition to the gift we would see as the ability to compose). Thus, we have a responsibility to this gift that has been given to us. It is not ours in the sense of belonging to us or having been founded by us or being something that we can treat as we please. Rather, we are stewards of that with which we have been entrusted." (187)

On Beauty and Being Just

Here's a version of the quotation from Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just that I read to start off our first class session:

At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. Beauty, according to [Simone] Weil, requires us “to give up our imaginary position at the center. . . . A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions.” . . . Her account is always deeply somatic: what happens, happens to our bodies. When we come upon beautiful things . . . they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space; or they form “ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world,” or they lift us (as though by the air currents of someone else’s sweeping), letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us.

An interview with Elaine Scarry from Salon adds to the discussion.