Page 112 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Orchestrating different forms of knowledge 101

Second, musicians speak of “fingers’ knowing” (see also Sudnow 1978/
2001: 18, 71, 79); a great many of the composers we interviewed referred to it
as well. They sit at the piano, and their fingers tell them whether a sequence
of notes feels good or whether a given passage can be played – in physiological
terms, this is known as body or muscle memory. But beyond this, there is
knowledge of other bodies, too. Composers consider the performing musicians
who, during the concert, might “like to show their virtuosity” or should not
“be annoyed the whole time” by an extremely difficult sequence of notes. The
concept of body knowledge therefore also has an inter-subjective facet. Merleau-
Ponty calls this inter-corporeality: “It is through my body that I understand
other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive things” (Merleau-
Ponty 1945/2005: 216; see also Gallagher 2014: 10–16). Composers try out
things using their own bodies and have a common musical practice, so they
develop a shared bodily implementation of experiences. This common body
enables composers to anticipate the body perspective of musicians whilst they
are composing (see Gebauer 2009: 97–101).

3.3.2 Formal propositional forms of knowledge
It would be grossly negligent to overlook the composers’ broad cultural
knowledge or to underestimate its significance for their composing practice.
All the composers we met are frequent and intensive listeners, have a sound
knowledge of the historical and contemporary repertoires of their music culture,
are well-informed about contemporary discourses in music theory and concern
themselves with a broad spectrum of texts from various disciplines. Their
explicable knowledge is not merely academic theoretical knowledge, but relevant
in several ways. One composer described pieces of music and books that
inspire him as “sockets” into which he plugs. In certain situations, he “charges
his batteries” with music or philosophical thoughts to generate ideas for his
pieces. This kind of cultural knowledge does not lack practical relevance since
it is simultaneously a product of and a prerequisite for participating in a cultural
practice. It supplies a semantic framework that gives, for instance, a certain
meaning to the structural relationship between individual notes or associates
musical quotations and stylistic elements with a certain aesthetic. Codified cultural
knowledge is, as Paul Duguid (2005: 114) points out, “remarkably powerful,
but its power is only realised through the corresponding knowing how”.The
relevant, practice-based “knowing how” denotes not just the understanding of
semantic meaning but also the understanding of how relevant a particular
knowledge is in a given situation. Formal propositional knowledge, however, is
not genuinely practical because it is not a direct prerequisite for agency in
composing. That agency also requires domain-specific, artistic practical knowing.
Scholarly knowledge (see Figure 3.2) refers to contents that are system-
atically collected, discussed, verified and evaluated. Generally, scholarly
knowledge is deemed to consist of (preliminarily) justified true beliefs whose
validity is always provisional and bounded by paradigms. Composers