Susie Lingham

… ad lib…

“…. we ask God to free us from ‘God’ so that we may be able to grasp and eternally enjoy truth where the highest angels, the fly and the human soul are all one – in that place I desired what I was and was what I desired.”¹

Reader, although the words above are the 13th Century C.E. Dominican mystic-theologian Meister Eckhart’s, let us imagine that, perhaps just before the mutiny in heaven, Lucifer prayed (not yet fathoming the depths of his own desires), his desire for equality and truth coupled oddly with his desire to be desired – his desire for freedom from hierarchical strictures cuffed to his desire for self-empowerment. It was this noble prayer that set freedom free amongst the ‘dogs of war’; it was this ‘heretical’ turn of mind that set the angels nervously whispering: ‘Havoc’!

Brutus, red-dripping knife in hand, not seeing the dogs of war lurking, shouts:

‘Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets!’

Alas, poor, deluded, murderous Brutus: Shakespeare consigned wisdom to the tongue of one less ‘honourable’. What price, Liberty? Her spirit is sustained on blood; the tyrant that raises its bloodied head again and again is not Caesar’s, but Liberty’s, for Liberty leads the people where most angels, with good reason, fear to tread. Lucifer the Light-bringer took the measure of his freedom just a little further than sound, and was thrown out of the structure, falling endlessly, the echoes of his prayer: “God! I would be free of you! Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is…” wind-whipped right out of hearing. You could say it was not anarchy he desired, just liberty, equality. But even his smallest wish to be one with both human soul and fly was unfulfilled, for on his way down, he was crowned Lord of the Flies. So much for desiring freedom for the fly.

How free our assumed birthright, ‘free will’? As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it, despairingly: “I am at a loss to account for what we believe in believing that we are autonomous [.]”² We do not choose our name at birth. We may change that name, but not for a long while later. Not before the implications of the name have laid sediments of associations deep in the psyche. We are named, ‘characterized’, by our parents’ desires or disappointments. Not only do we not choose our names, we do not choose our parents. To be fair, parents do not exactly choose their children either — they may, or may not, have chosen to have a child, to start a new life. But you, you, just came into being, and who can say why? It is but one effect-cause in a long chain of cause-effects. Not the consequence of an original intention, but a lottery result. The result of risk-taking.

Yet, we are tethered to our need for meaning, purpose. Our lives must mean; our actions must signify. We are human because we intend. And we expect grand intentions of whatever force it was that gave rise to our existence. Equality with angels is desirable, but, ideally, fly should not figure in the equation. If our lives weighed as much as a fly’s brief existence, where would be the sense in that? Isn’t human life, well, more meaningful?

Words, language, meaningful speech holds us hostage to cultural agreements and disagreements. We are ensnared by the meanings of words. Music, on the other hand, allows the powerful encounter of the possibility of meaning without words. When we feel the pulse and rhythm of life itself, we are moved without having to know exactly why. We sense the edges of rhythm’s patterns when we experience syncopation; just out-of-time enough to be in-time, it is in the stretching of metronomic measure that we taste the elasticity of boundaries. To really know what the song “I Got Rhythm” means is to know how far to stretch time without breaking that sense of timing, tempo.

Which brings us to notions of extempore, and Jazz: that supremely dexterous, acrobatic, slippery music, spawned from the desire for freedom in every sense of the word: freedom from backbreaking labour and pain, freedom from slavery and the injustices of this world. It was seeded from a prayer to be freed from the rules that kept justice at bay. Musically, Jazz had its beginnings as an expression of the desire to give the ears full reign over the eyes. It became music to be heard and flirted with, not read and obeyed.

What is the measure of freedom? Liberty, autonomy, independence, choice, free will, sovereignty, improvisation, and all that jazz, means nothing without the notion of measure. Take the structure of two stringed instruments common in Jazz music, the guitar and the cello. The guitar is a fretted instrument; its notes are measured and mapped on the fingerboard as tangible, defined spaces. Fingers recognize and respond to these measures. There is a certain exactitude to the fretted fingerboard that inspires confidence, trust, reliability, predictability. Quite unlike the unfretted fingerboard of the cello, which calls for an awareness of where notes end and where they begin — so, what for inexpert fingers is all approximation and feeling-about, wiser fingers would have learnt the measure without the fret. But fret or no fret, the measure of music is that most inexact instrument of all: feeling.

Jazz is characterised by improvisation and syncopation. But the word itself? Early 20th Century, ‘of unknown origin’. It is the spirit of music itself, tripping off ledger lines and unfettered by manuscripted bar lines. And nowhere is this spirit more evident than in the improvisatory nature of that liberating moment in Jazz, the moment of the “ad-lib”. Ad-lib is shortened from ad libitum — origin Latin — and literally means “according to pleasure”. The OED defines ad-lib thus: “to speak or perform without previously preparing one’s words”, “spoken or performed without previous preparation” and, as a “direction”, means “with free rhythm and expression”. It also means “as much and as often as desired”. Instead of rigid, discrete notation, ad-libbing releases music as pure flow. There is an element of trusting the moment, and one’s sense of momentum.

Ad-libbing is an important feature of the improvisatory nature of Jazz music — although it is a term that has come to describe any ‘performance’ where one has to think off the top of one’s head, or off the cuff, or to think on one’s feet. Head, hands, feet — unshackled. It is a state of unrehearsed space-time in performance: spontaneous, impromptu, unscripted, unruly. It is no longer singing — the singer becomes a sound-and-rhythm-making instrument, pure voice. Freed from presupposition and prescription, freed from the need to be reasonable and pragmatic, Reader, we can tread a new measure, gather new momentum towards escape velocity, to that Eckhartian place where we can be sovereign and autonomous. At least as far as it is possible to be autonomous, given the givenness of the human condition. There is no escaping a certain measure of measure. Some things are unchosen, but we can always improvise.

As much as freedom is about agency and autonomy, freedom is also a feeling, sometimes inexplicable. As much as oppression is undesirable, and expression desired, yet one agency’s oppression is another’s expression. Just like the somewhat contradictory intentions we read from the words we put in Lucifer’s mouth earlier on: it is tricky to attempt to balance the desire for self-empowerment against desire for everyone else’s liberation. Put another way: Freedoms have a way of impinging on each other. And some freedoms are bloodier-minded than others. Some are just bloody. Sometimes, necessarily so.

Ad-libbing is incoherent eloquence. It is Liberty in celebratory mode. Spontaneous, free of signification, freed of meaning, beyond words – rhythm and melody becomes the unruly language of freedom. Reader, let us unshackle our hands and feet. It is time to sing, to dance – unchoreographed, unrehearsed. Off the top of your head, off the cuff, and on your feet: ad libitum.

Susie Lingham

Susie is currently senior lecturer and course leader of the Contemporary Art Degree Programmes at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. She has recently completed her DPhil (PhD) in Literature, Religion and Philosophy at the University of Sussex, U.K. Her interdisciplinary work – text, image, performance and sound – synthesizes ideas and research across various fields relating to the nature of mind.

1. Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies, London: Penguin Books (1994). [↩]
2. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, New York: Oxford University Press (1986), p.117. Nagel calls the ultimate objective standpoint one can take “the external standpoint”, which he says “at once holds out the hope of genuine autonomy, and snatches it away.” This is because there will always be a “still more external and comprehensive view of ourselves that we cannot incorporate, but that would reveal the unchosen sources of our most autonomous efforts. The objectivity that seems to offer greater control also reveals the ultimate giveneness of the self.” (pp.118-119). [↩]