Page 129 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

118 Musicological perspectives on composing

Bahle aimed to transcend Hausegger’s (1903) study in which composers
were only asked general questions. He encouraged composers to engage in
self-reflection directly after they had finished an act of composing. During his
first empirical investigations at the Institute for Psychology and Pedagogy at the
Mannheim School of Commerce in 1927–28, he was accused of having cre-
ated laboratory situations (his findings yielded the book Zur Psychologie des
musikalischen Gestaltens [On the psychology of musical creation], Bahle
1930). In his next book, Der musikalische Schaffensprozess [The creative pro-
cess in music] (Bahle 1936), he tried to pre-empt his detractors, inter alia by
approaching more than 30 renowned contemporary composers (including
Richard Strauss, Alfredo Casella, Arthur Honegger, Karl Orff, Ernst Krenek)
and asking them to choose one of eight specified poems and set it to music
(with the option of using another poem of their choice instead). He included
fairly comprehensive “guidelines on self-observation”. No less than 27 com-
posers accepted his request, of whom 18 chose one of the specified poems.
Bahle then extended the results with further questions and interviews and com-
pared them with detailed historical examples. His third book, Eingebung und
Tat im musikalischen Schaffen [Inspiration and deed in musical creation]
(Bahle 1939), dealt in more detail with individual perspectives, such as
inspiration, experimentation and the role of creative pauses.
While Bahle’s extensive studies had no real successors, they did meet with
vehement criticism: “Here is someone who draws conclusions on musical
creation based on the babblings of a few self-important amateur bunglers”,
declared Paul Hindemith in response to Bahle’s first book, which did not
include any notable composers. Given the significant role that Hindemith
attributes to technical craft in composing, it is paradoxical that he, more than
almost any other composer of his time, believed to an almost pathetic extent
that the heart of any artistic existence lies in inspiration, in musical vision: “If
we cannot, in the flash of a single moment, see a composition in its absolute
entirety, with every pertinent detail in its proper place, we are not genuine
creators” (Hindemith 1952: 51).
The fact that so few scholars drew on Bahle’s work in the decades that
followed might be explained by two factors. First, his studies encountered
heavy resistance from representatives of the aesthetics of inspiration (along-
side Hindemith, for instance, Hans Pfitzner took up the cudgel in an
impassioned polemic). The picture of the genius as someone who can spon-
taneously imagine an entire piece of music, a picture based primarily on
th
Mozart, had by no means disappeared in the 20 century, as Paul Hindemith’s
quotation above illustrates. Arnold Schönberg made similar statements –“A
composer conceives an entire composition as a spontaneous vision”
(Schönberg 1946/1967: 1) – as did Karlheinz Stockhausen –“Iwakeupand
the entire pieces are in me” (quoted in Mountain 2001: 274). Second, after
World War II, in some parts of the composing world, for instance Darmstadt, 2
the person of the creator was relegated in favour of the material or structural
level of the work.