Page 103 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

92 Orchestrating different forms of knowledge

their conformity to rules and explicit criteria than with visual gestalt perception:
the ability to perceive the significant properties directly at first glance.
The connection with experience is twofold. Experience necessarily correlates
with a certain age, or rather with a certain duration of working in a field of
practice. Second, it hints that judgements are not arrived at arbitrarily or by
chance. As Katharina Klement insists: “Where the decisions are taken that
really lay the foundations [of the work …], I at least try to be careful”.
Action – unless it occurs under time pressure (see also Ross, Shafer & Klein
2006) – also encompasses conscious considerations. A composer can engage
in an appraising reflection or seek external advice. Katharina Klement mentions
such a case:

I: Does it ever happen that a musician says “That’s impossible to play,
please rewrite it”?
Katharina Klement: Of course. Yes, that’s happened to me several times.
Usually it’s something that had given me a headache as well. […] They
were always things that were too complicated, so it was good to rewrite
them more simply.

Bodily-somatic sensations and emotions are present, but often not pervaded
by analysis or reflection. The composers sense something, but cannot give
reasons for it until someone else has helped them gain insight – in other
words, provided the impetus for seeing certain aspects clearly. Clemens
Gadenstätter also invokes a kind of intuitive authority. His statement is fairly
representative of conversations with professionally experienced composers:

I: When you make sketches, do you also keep in touch with colleagues to
discuss the sketches?
Clemens Gadenstätter: Not really. Composing is … I mean, there are
people you talk to, that you tell things, that you exchange with a bit. But
when it clicks and suddenly makes sense, that’s something […] that you
sort of feel: ah, now it has clicked! Yes, now it makes sense! Now I’ve
immersed myself in the idea and structure to such an extent that every-
thing links up almost automatically. At that point, connections and logic
arise that I didn’t really believe I was able to think up.

One possible way of interpreting this sudden intuition is that the composer’s
awareness of his aesthetic and practical judgement –“ah, now it has
clicked”– correlates with the implicitness of the criteria for composing. In
their five-step model of skill acquisition, Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (Dreyfus &
Dreyfus 1986: 19ff.) include a specific trait for “proficiency” and “expertise”:
those who act proficiently or expertly replace the explicit and formal rules
with “situational discriminations” (Dreyfus 2002: 370). This ability to dis-
criminate can be demonstrated using an example from a Gerhard Nierhaus
(2012: 31 – our translation) study. In it, he asked the composer Elisabeth