Page 128 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Musicological perspectives on composing 117

three, Hausegger reproduced the replies of the following composers in their
entirety: Hans Sommer, Nikolaus von Reznicek, Engelbert Humperdinck,
Camillo Horn, Peter Rosegger (for others, he gave a short summary of their
answers).
A few years later, Max Graf, who lectured at the Vienna Academy of
Music and Performing Arts, devoted himself to the subject of the process of
composing in its totality – whilst apparently unaware of Hausegger’s work.
Although Graf also relativised the mystery of Romantic inspiration from the
start, he did so with a view to pointing out that even the “most sober average
person” was no stranger to unusual psychological states, inexplicable moods,
apprehensions and “accesses of melancholia” (Graf 1910: 2 – our transla-
tion). He maintained, however, that artistic creation was founded on a special
“strength of the unconscious”, not dissimilar to the state of lunacy, which led
to an inner excitation of such intensity that it “had to break through to the
outside” (Graf 1910: 15). The extent to which Graf’s thinking was anchored
in this universe of Romantic and psychological ideas is also revealed in his
chapter on sketches. It is no accident that he directed the reader’s attention
first onto artists who created quickly and without much sketch material, such
as Mozart or Schubert. Inevitably, however, this led him into a crisis of justi-
fication concerning Beethoven. Graf was determined not to give the impres-
sion that Beethoven’s extensive sketch material was the sign of a sober and
systematic approach. Rather, these “fragments and debris of music” were
likewise “brought to the surface by the violence of passionate affects” (Graf
1910: 134).
The anti-Romantic discourse of the 1920s was similarly reflected in
attempts to demystify the artistic creative process. Among the manifold efforts
being made in a variety of places, Viktor Shklovsky’s (1917/2004) treatise Art
as Technique, one of the founding texts of Russian Formalism, was particu-
larly early and interesting. The most extensive and elaborate attempt in music
was made by Julius Bahle, who devoted three books to the topic between
1930 and 1939, some of them very comprehensive. They were based on wide-
ranging analyses of contemporary psychological research, Wilhelm Dilthey’s
hermeneutics, aesthetic theories for instance of Friedrich Theodor Vischer
that were no longer entirely current and previous studies including Hau-
segger’s. Bahle primarily critiqued the Romantic view of creative processes
and the notion of a compulsion to express oneself because they dis-
proportionately focused on rather inaccessible notions such as “idea” or
“inspiration”, which he considered to be merely “scattered highpoints of the
creative process” (Bahle 1936: XIII – our translation). He believed that, on
the contrary, “an activity structure that was founded on experience, purposeful
and aware of values” should be ascribed to composing, in which conscious and
unconscious factors were superposed and which took into account even
apparently simple, everyday occurrences (Bahle 1939: 3). Bahle also criticised
the predominant focus on the musical works (Werkästhetik) that was widely
practised in musicology at the time.