Page 124 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Musicological perspectives on composing 113

sketches will continue to form its core subject. As Lewis Lockwood (1992: 2) was
compelled to summarise in his Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process,
Nottebohm’s impetus had virtually no impact until the 1950s, when the Beethoven
Archive in Bonn started to think about publishing the sketches; and after
that, nothing noteworthy appeared until Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson and
Robert Winter’s book, The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction,
Inventory (Johnson, Tyson & Winter 1985). It is obvious that sketch studies
were not rated very highly within the discipline of musicology. Since the early
1990s, however, there has been a marked re-appraisal:

Cooper (1990), Kinderman (1991), Lockwood (1992) and others have
published extensive studies on Beethoven;
Ulrich Konrad (1992) has contributed in several works to the belated
1
demystification of the Mozart myth, according to which Mozart “completed
everything in his mind”.
The anthology Vom Einfall zum Kunstwerk [From idea to artwork]
(Danuser & Katzenberger 1993) widens the observable horizon from the
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th
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heroes of the 18 and 19 centuries to the 20 century.
In close succession, two volumes appeared that were based on an evaluation
of sketches from the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel (Oesch 1991,
Meyer 1993), an institution that has in the recent past established itself as
an influential research institution in this field and is now home to sketches
and documents by numerous living composers.
In 2009 the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique
(Ircam) in Paris started an extensive project examining the composition
methods of well-known composers from the mid-20 th century onwards,
using their sketches and other sources (works by Pierre Boulez, Bernd
Alois Zimmermann, Gérard Grisey, Marco Stroppa and Stefano Gervasoni,
among others).

Over time, the orientation and limits of the issues raised within sketch studies
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have also changed and expanded. In keeping with 19 -century musicological
research, which focused on masterpieces by geniuses, sketches were initially
assigned a status comparable to relics, supposedly able to give insight into the
mysteries of the creative process. In his attempt to get as close as possible to a
composer’s intentions, Heinrich Schenker was a pioneer of urtext research in
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the early 20 century. Using sketches (and focusing once again on Beethoven),
he tried not only to illuminate the genesis of works and locate it in the composer’s
biography, but also to make it productive for a more specific understanding of
the pieces in his analyses. Schenker, like August Halm and Ernst Kurth, con-
tributed to replacing “a normative-dogmatic music theory, whose last out-
standing representative seems to have been Hugo Riemann” by “capturing,
through ever more differentiated analyses, the particularity of the work”
(Dahlhaus 1989: 2, 262 – our translation). Schenker apparently felt compelled
to justify having included sketches in his analyses of Beethoven because the