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Because music is temporally located—the music in the second bar lies between the music in the first and the third—it always has a context, and each bit of music has its unique context. Thus, paradoxically, the initial statement of a theme is different from the next statement, even if it is note-for-note identical to it, precisely because its location in the music is different. Indeed, the second statement somehow also reaches back to affect our sense of the first (for example, we might feel, "Oh, that statement is more important than I had first sensed: the composer is repeating it"). All the more is repetition not merely reiteration when we hear the same music in different circumstances.

Thus, Begbie argues, each time we take the Eucharist we are enjoying it in a different context—indeed, in several different contexts. This partaking is framed by my partaking last week and the many weeks before when my life was different than it is today, when the worship theme was different than it is today, when world events were different than they are today, and so on. Each repetition adds something new to the experience of Christ and his church in the present moment, even as it both recalls his once-for-all work on the cross in the past and points ahead to the hope of his return in the future.

• How should we relate to tradition? In the third part of his book, Begbie explores musical improvisation, with the jazz combo as his main illustration. He shows how improvising musicians "submit" to a theme on which they all agree. It might be a distinct melodic phrase, or perhaps simply a particular progression of chords and pattern of beats. Having agreed on this "tradition," however, the musicians do not slavishly repeat it. Instead, they use it as material for their own creativity. As they work together, furthermore, they might generate a new theme, chord progression, or rhythm that becomes the new tradition on which they then improvise. (Begbie points to instances in the history of jazz in which particularly famous improvisations eventually become treated as separate songs, such as "Anthropology" derived from "I Got Rhythm.")
  
  
• What about freedom? Music shows how the improviser cannot work without constraints. There is no creation ex nihilo for human creators, and yet there is both genuine freedom and genuine creativity. We always, necessarily and inescapably, work with what God has already provided: in the history of music, in our own abilities and limitations, in the present moment of imagination, and so on.

Begbie cites David Sudnow's memoir of his attempt to move from classical piano to jazz, Ways of the Hand, as a superb example of the embodiedness of our creativity. The possibilities of creation rest within our (trained, yet also generative) bodies, as we "get the beat into the fingers" and then play. Yet we also appreciate that "the pace of notes [is] closely tied up with the physical possibilities of the hands and fingers in relation to the keyboard." We are, ourselves, instruments with particular possibilities and particular limitations, just as one can play a completely smooth glissando on a slide trombone and cannot do so on a piano, while one can play many more notes simultaneously on the latter instrument. We are free to be who and what we are.

In sum, music offers us "enrichment through enactment." We get to see and hear theological themes playing out (literally) in music in ways that help us sort out our theology better than before.

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October 7 2002, Vol. 46, No. 11