In this chapter, we stay with the improvisers but allow them to move us on from human freedom to different but related theological ground. As we have found, in speaking of constraints it is quite natural to use the word ‘given’. And in the world of improvisation it is hard not to use ‘gift’ language (a ‘given’ harmonic progression, a ‘given’ melody). But, as many studies have underlined, the ‘gift’ word-group is highly ambiguous, and instructively so.

Brute given and beneficial gift

The first ambiguity ties in with the discussion of freedom in the last chapter. In the English language, the word ‘given’ can denote a bare a priori, without purpose (beneficial or otherwise), carrying connotations of a somewhat cold, impersonal indifference – as in ‘it is a given fact’ or ‘we can take it as given that.…’ Alternatively, it may carry notions of inherently valuable entities and beneficial deliberation, as in: ‘this meal was given to me by my beloved’. The kind of theology of freedom we were elaborating through improvisation in the last chapter clearly comes into its own when constraints are viewed fundamentally in this second, positive sense. It was just this sense of ‘given’ which was missing in Boulez and Cage.

Moreover, it would appear that issues about time are closely bound up with this double sense of gift.