Page 136 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Musicological perspectives on composing 125

sources (score and sketches) by including work records and interviews, with
the aim of delving deeper into the way the composition process unfolds. Yet
ultimately even these are texts and not directly observed processes. However
close in time to the composing activity the work records might have been
established, they are still not accurate representations of the composition
process. Rather, these records are the results of selection and interpretation: what
did the composers wish to communicate to us, and how could they verbalise
their thoughts? It must also be remembered that some might have felt pres-
sured to make statements. Conversely, academics run the risks of ascribing an
ordered structure to the described processes that may not correspond to the
way they were practically implemented.
Our analysis has a broader field of survey than the studies by Nicolas
Donin previously referred to. To what advantage? In my opinion, all quantitative
findings are of modest epistemic value – quite apart from the fact that for the
results to be quantitatively relevant, the field of survey would have had to
be substantially bigger still. Questions such as how often composers used a
piano during composing, whether they preferred certain times of day, what pro-
fessions they consciously called on for inspiration and so forth can certainly be of
some interest. First, even without a large-scale quantitative survey, it is possible
to get some idea of the bandwidth of the answers to be expected. Second, it is
ultimately questionable whether a potential result – for example, that 30% of
the composers in a representative survey use the piano during composing – is
epistemologically valuable for understanding an actual process. It is not least
for this reason that our study applied a qualitative approach.
Another fundamental issue is whether generalisations are possible. The
relevant studies usually categorically deny this (e.g. Behne 1993: 310), and
with some reason. Clearly, no activity carried out during a composition process
is entirely unique, individual or new: it always carries within it a collective
component. However, the reverse is not true: one cannot work back from the
individual to the collective, at least not concretely. In this, I follow Howard S.
Becker, who prefaced the analyses in his book “Art Worlds” with the motto,
“Complexity was my goal, not generalisability” (Becker 1982/2008: xix). In
other words, we are more concerned with taking into consideration all the
conditions for carrying out an artistic practice, and thus making the complexity
of composition activities at least dimly perceptible, than with wondering how
generalisable an observation might be. Put differently: what is generalisable is
at best the degree of the complexity we map out, rather than the conclusion
that the respective concrete processes we analyse are transferrable. This may
be a sobering admission: it is possible neither to explicitly verbalise the com-
position process in all its dimensions nor to generalise specific study results.
Nonetheless, academics should make every effort to capture the practical
events adequately.
Since I shall be discussing the case studies of Marko Ciciliani, Karlheinz
Essl and Joanna Wozny in particular, I will begin with a brief overview of
their respective composing processes: 4