Page 115 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

104 Orchestrating different forms of knowledge

[…]. “Seeing” in such situations is anything but a matter of perceiving
discrete sense data, collecting them and then synthesising them. […]For
that we need to have a set of categories and concepts drilled into us, if we
are to orient ourselves. This conceptual orientation is precisely what we
receive in the course of our professional enculturation.
The conceptual orientation that evolves through enculturation is not only
intellectual, but also linked to acquired sensorimotor skills (see Noë 2012:
25f.). Wittgenstein (1953/1968: § 19, 23, 304; 1967: § 532–534) views it in the
context of practical rules, examples and analogies (see Williams 1999: 200f.).
Anthropologically speaking, humans are quintessentially shaped by the symbolic
means that they themselves have created and use. As Charles Taylor (2006:
32) writes, it is virtually impossible to draw a clear boundary here:

It is not only that any frontier is porous, that things explicitly formulated
and understood can “sink down” into unarticulated know-how, in the
way that Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus [1986] have shown us with learning,
that our grasp on things can move as well in the other direction, as we
articulate what was previously just lived out. It is also that any particular
understanding of our situation blends explicit knowledge and unarticulated
know-how.

Similarly, analytic propositions cannot be clearly demarcated from synthetic
propositions, nor formal propositional knowledge from artistic practical
knowing (see also Quine 1951; Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 19f.). We therefore
want to emphasise the following: first, composers’ formal propositional
knowledge is not simply theoretical and abstract, but intrinsically interwoven
with other sensory and motor skills. Second, the oscillation between a flow of
action and a conscious distancing from the material – in other words, between
the intuitive and the reflective work mode – is a typical trait of complex and
challenging activities, such as composing.
Consequently, we regard music-aesthetic theories and musicological elements
not as “external objects” at all, but as systems of beliefs entangled with
musical practices. Under certain circumstances, some of them might be con-
ducive to experimental approaches; others might reinforce canonical ideas
associated with traditional trajectories. Thus, generally speaking, we argue
along with Juniper Hill (2012: 87ff.) that music theories and aesthetic ideas
may encourage or inhibit musical activities and, consequently, we consider
them to be conditions that afford agency. While being educated and having
broad propositional knowledge is not evidence of mastery, the two forms of
knowledge – propositional and artistic practical – cannot be uncoupled. As
Jeff Coulter (1989: 15f.) states:

Knowing what people are doing (including oneself) is knowing how to
identify what they are doing in the categories of a natural language,