Page 12 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Introduction

Many contemporary composers describe, analyse and reflect on their creative
processes to explain their musical work to the public. Such self-reflection is
undoubtedly illuminating for those interested in music, and important for
musicological research. It should also be supplemented – every self-description
remains within the boundaries of what can be linguistically expressed, is
potentially prone to errors, and cannot illuminate beyond the beam of self-
reflection. “Blind spots” are not necessarily proof of a lack of reflexivity;
rather, they often point to something that cannot be reflected on. In other
words, they signpost something that is implicit in doing. The specialist term for
this is tacit knowing, and it will be the focus of this publication. We will there-
fore foreground neither individual composers nor their works, but creative
processes of composing. The composers’self-descriptions – their “I” perspectives –
will be extended using sociologically and epistemically inspired perspectives to
elaborate contents which would otherwise remain in the background of situa-
tive awareness. We will further be directing our interest onto those components
and conditions that constitute artistic agency. This publication is aimed at
interested readers working in sociology, musicology, music psychology and
psychology of creativity as well as those who compose, teach and study, and
artists in general who conceive of artistic practical knowing not simply as an
accessory of their work, but as the genuine product of their practice. Our
remarks should also be understood to transcend the concrete empirical realm
to form building blocks for the advancement of a sociology of artistic practices
(see Zembylas 1997, 2014a; Zembylas & Dürr 2009; Niederauer 2014).

Starting-point and research interest
Although composing processes develop particular dynamics, compositions do
not write themselves – that is to say, the concept of agency seems highly
relevant. Following this conceptual line, our research interest is not about
uncovering and explaining creativity, but about a sociological and epistemic
subject: what constitutes artistic agency?
Empirical studies of artists’ creative processes risk not doing justice to the
particularity and variety of artistic practices by falling into reductionist