Page 122 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

4 Musicological perspectives

on composing

Andreas Holzer

Scholarly interest in the processes of composing in their entirety and with all
their associated requirements and conditions is a relatively recent phenomenon
in musicology. There was, however, interest in certain aspects from about the
th
mid-19 century, for example, in the form of sketch studies or an exploration of
the psychology of creative processes. This chapter is therefore divided into two
sections. The first will provide a historical outline of attempts that did not
examine the result of a creative process (usually a work based on a score), but the
process itself. The second section will explore composing-as-process using
current theories, not least to answer the question of the extent to which an
amalgamation of contemporary sociological and musicological perspectives
generates new, or at least apt, insights into a subject that continues to be con-
sidered highly problematic by broad swathes of musicology. For John Sloboda
(1986), for instance, the process of composing represents a phenomenon simply
too complex to be accessible to any musicological scrutiny. Robert Schumann’s
claim that humans have “a distinct awe of the workplace of genius” and there-
fore wish “to know nothing of the causes, tools and secrets of creativity” (Schu-
mann 1835: 50 – our translation) can be found in a very similar version in a
recent publication. In the preface to the sketch diary kept over several years by
Robert Platz (2010: 7 – our translation), Stefan Fricke asks the following
questions – rhetorical though they may be – about the composer’smethod: “Was
this really a good idea? Do the writings not reveal too much of the writer? Does
he not grant us an insight far too profound, far too intimate into the close
surroundings, everyday life and professional practice of the freelance artist?” At
the very least, the statement (Schumann) has turned into a question (Fricke).
However, such scepticism is not exclusively due to the idea that the process
of creating artworks eludes investigation because of its complexity, that it is
too intimate, or that embedding it into everyday life somehow demystifies art.
Yet when Theodor W. Adorno pushes the genesis of an artwork into the
background (which he does by allotting this aspect an extremely marginal
role in his Aesthetic Theory, if nothing else), he has a quite different aim:

In art the difference between the thing made and its genesis – the
making – is emphatic: Artworks are something made that has become