Composers As Gardeners

For me this was a deja vu article in the sense that I recognised in it themes from elsewhere, particularly theological, despite the fact that it's Brian Eno in an interview piece on Edge. First a quote that probably sets the scene best.

Composers As Gardeners | Conversation | Edge:

for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing. Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them turn into something.

As those readers alert to the paradigm shifts in science over the last 30 years or so will realise, this has something to do with chaos, complexity and emergence. But let's put it together with John Polkinhorne's line about God making things make themselves and the metaphor that Eno uses is ripe to be crossed-over into theological thinking about creation. Two things theological then occur to me: one is to recommend engagement with Fretheim's work on God, creation reflecting on passages and themes from the Hebrew Bible. Fretheim does an inspiring job of reading passages on creation and showing how they really do support ways of thinking about creation which includes the chaotic, the unpredictable and the self-assembling and so relativistic and chaordic insights.

The other thing that it links with is one of the themes in Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense where a major metaphor for God that Vanstone develops is of God as artist working with materials that have a certain recalcitrance and how the artistry lies in how the dialogue between artist and materials is worked through. This would certainly play well with the complexity science insights.

Another thing I bring to this is a conversation a few months back with an older artist who clearly didn't resonate with Vanstone's reading of the artistic task; defining good artists as being in total control of their materials and distinguished by the greatness of their vision.

Of course an artist must be capable of crafting their vision, but I still think that Vanstone has a fundamentally right insight. In actual fact, no artist can entirely reckon without some recalcitrance in materials and I think that there is a greatness in a redemptive approach which explores with the materials rather than over or simply through the materials. Therefore their vision, however implicitly and perhaps unreflectingly, is already in dialogue with the materials, the media (as Andy Crouch notes, even architects have to 'compromise' because builders rarely manage to realise the artistic vision).

And, it seems to me, Eno's reflection on what he has been trying to achieve with his generative music, tips the balance away from the modernistic 'mastery' vision of art (and theologies of creation -dare one mention Calvin here?) to the emergent, chaordic art where distinctions between artist and audience or 'public' are eroded and the event/ed-ness of art is played with and the sensuousness of materiality is often foregrounded. Eno's picking up of the gardner metaphor does a really nice job of capturing this.

Part of what is going on is also a reappraisal of what form of art gets to be thought of as paradigmatic of art. I'd like to put in a plea for drama too ... or live music: in both of these forms the trialogue between audience and performers and between author/composer and performers and directors is crucial. And who is the 'artist' in a play? The playwright? The actors? The director? There's a real issue of synergy and community in this. And this, I and others, would argue, is the important thing to capture when thinking theologically about creation and creating. Meticulous sovereignty/providence is out; it is untrue to what we experience and what we genuinely know about the way things are through scientific enterprise.

Creation and creating are actually communal, social and synergistic. We need to get away from the myth of the solitary artist and their brave vision and recognise, even celebrate, the embeddedness of art production and appreciation in human, indeed, creational community.