Page 125 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

114 Musicological perspectives on composing

predominant and clichéd understanding of the manner in which geniuses
created art was that it was effortless. He does so, for instance, in his discussion
of the second movement of the “Piano Sonata op. 111”:

Sheet by sheet of images of the hardest struggle and torture of the soul.
Unfortunately, these are quite inaccessible to the imagination of the
layman or uneducated musician, who simply cannot believe that Beethoven,
in spite of his most extraordinary gift of improvisation and his experience
of having already created such a large number of works, and even in his
most advanced age, was still not spared the struggle of having to conquer
every single note of a variation movement with an easy arrangement,
almost as if he were a novice.
(Schenker 1916: 55 – our translation)

Despite the turbulent reception afforded his works because they included
sketches in musical analysis, Schenker’s contribution had no significant impact.
This was due not least to the widespread opinion that the genesis of an artwork
was not only irrelevant for understanding the latter, but was moreover also a
private matter for the composer. Theodor W. Adorno was a prominent
representative of this position, as the above quotation reveals. A few of
Adorno’s contemporaries did experience a sort of reversal of values, but for a
long time this had no effect on musicology at all. Thus, Walter Benjamin’s
(1928/1979: 65) statement that “[t]he work is the death mask of its conception”
chimes with Paul Valéry’s argument (Valery 1962: 70 – our translation): “In
me lives a primordial inclination, an insurmountable inclination – it may well
be despicable – to view the completed work, the finalised piece, as a sort of
expulsion or discard, as a dead thing.”
After the Beethoven Archive in Bonn planned to publish the sketches in the
1950s, a similar decision was also taken at the drafting stage of the complete
Schönberg edition, in the 1960s, to integrate sketches – a procedure that has
since become the norm. This complete edition as published includes, alongside
the notes and critical commentary, extensive chapters on the genesis of works
as well as on printing, performances and various versions. Since it also collected
testimony by Schönberg and members of his circle, and the most varied
documents from the context of the complete process of creation, it could be
considered an anticipation of the requirements of critique génétique. This
branch of literary criticism developed in France in the 1970s and attempted to
explore individual processes of writing by integrating all available sources,
even previously neglected peripheral ones. To the best of my knowledge,
musicologists did not make a firm case for embracing critique génétique in
musicological practice until the 1990s.
The Paul Sacher Foundation mentioned above has not only vastly extended
its collections by including living composers, it also, in line with critique
génétique principles, gathers a large variety of sources, which in turn enable a
large variety of perspectives onto creative processes. The prefaces of the series