Page 133 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

122 Musicological perspectives on composing

social context in which this work occurs. Methods of data collection and
analysis used for this study were: technology assisted self-observation,
autoethnographic literary-type writing, computer-assisted analysis, tex-
tual analysis of think-aloud protocol, and deconstructions of my own
writing. Post-composition analysis of “real time” video and audiotape
recordings, MIDI data, and sketches, were used to uncover and examine
issues and themes specific to my compositional process.
(Newman 2008: 3)

The above-mentioned anthology edited by Hermann Danuser and Günter
Katzenberger, Vom Einfall zum Kunstwerk [From idea to artwork] (Danuser
& Katzenberger 1993), also quotes four composers (Reinhard Febel, Alfred
Koerppen, Siegfried Matthus, Wolfgang Rihm), who commented on their
creative process in very different ways. Koerppen and Matthus attempted to
outline the process in all its phases (Koerppen more generally, Matthus using a
specific example); Rihm supplied various reflections on the topic; Febel largely
avoided it. The most striking feature of these texts – and fundamentally dif-
ferent from the earlier examples already discussed – is the composers’ intense
analysis of how to understand themselves as the composing subject. This
philosophical perspective, which may have been inspired by engaging with post-
structuralist critique of the idealistic concept of subject, might also be related to
aneed toframe one’s own artistic making within broader perspectives.
Similarly, a text by a participant in our project, Karlheinz Essl, entitled “Wie
entsteht eine Komposition?” [How does a composition come to be?] (Essl 1997:
149), begins with a reflection on the problem of the creative subject who lacks
detachment when speaking about his own creation. That he does so anyway,
Essl remarks, will lead to “philosophical speculations, detailed technical
descriptions and music-theory digressions” that say “less about the work itself
than about its creator or rather perpetrator”.From the perspectiveof discourse
analysis, the phrase “or rather perpetrator” is revealing. Essl appears to regard
the term “creator” as too closely linked to the Romantic understanding of
inspiration and is therefore inclined to add an alternative that relativises this
individualistic perspective. Like Xenakis a half-century earlier, Essl (1997:
156ff.) arranges his composing process into eight phases, which may of course
overlap in complex ways. Nevertheless, the similarity to Xenakis’smodel is
intriguing (I have summarised the phases using key points):

1) Receiving a commission or specific inspiration, which is normally linked
to certain conditions or stipulations;
2) developing a conception of the whole: how can this conception be
described?
3) deriving structural models from the formal development;
4) developing an adequate computer program in a spirit of playfulness and
curiosity; refining the model until the result coincides with his internal
conception;