Page 14 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Introduction 3

collaboration, skills and understandings as well as adequate resources, all of
which are relevant for a field of practice. They take into account not only
conscious components, but also those that are not accessible to reflection,
1
such as incorporated skills activated within a given situation. Agency is thus
associated with a practical sense – in other words, with an unmediated direct
knowing or intuitive feeling for the direction, mode and effect of an action.
Many contemporary theories thus no longer regard agency as individualistic.
People’s social interactions generate and reproduce a shared practical style of
thinking and acting. Since in many cases agents depend on the participation
of other people and objects to be able to carry out an action, their ability to
act must logically be conceived as a form of distributed agency. We put the
concept of agency in concrete terms by referring to a precise artistic field of
activity. Having researched other fields in the past (fine arts in Zembylas 1997;
literature in Zembylas & Dürr 2009; jazz in Niederauer 2014, 2016), our focus
in this publication is on composing processes in western contemporary art
2
music. We concentrate on the what, how and why of specific doing in composing.
In this, we deliberately avoid the concept of creativity, which is currently
experiencing inflationary use (see Hargreaves, Miell & MacDonald 2012: v;
Deliège & Richelle 2006: 2) because it explains artistic achievement mostly as
the result of inherent and personality-related dispositions and problem-solving
skills. Even reconnecting creativity to societal conditions (see Amabile 1996;
Csikszentmihalyi 1996) does not change its basic traditional interpretation as
individualistic and is therefore unable to describe how people act (Coulter
1989: 104–111; Burnard 2012: 319f.).
From this preliminary praxeological position, we conceptualise human
doings and sayings not as the implementation of exclusively pre-formed contents
of consciousness or internalised patterns of action. While people can obviously
refer to their goals, reflections, plans, decisions and routines during a self-
description, we researchers must not forget that introspective and retro-
spective interpretations as a rule fulfil certain purposes of explanation and
justification. Even where a person follows a given pattern of action for a
concrete activity – say, cookbooks or parental-advice literature – he or she
needs to have aptitude, flexibility and at least some capacity for improvising
to competently carry out any non-trivial task. Art as “process of doing or
making” and mastery in the sense of “skilled action, ability in execution”
(Dewey 1934/1980: 47), which emerges from people’s connections with “tools,
environments, [and] other persons or groups of networked people” (Szivós
2014: 22), can never just be learned from instructions, patterns or sets of rules.
The latter are usually drawn up using language whereas doing is a coordinated
bodily implementation in a specific situation embedded in a practice. The
difference between the two is categorical (see Zembylas 2014c: 115–120):
instructions, plans and rules primarily capture the what of an action while the
how – the artful mastery (see Polanyi 1958: 50) – remains unrepresentable.
Accordingly, we view composing processes not as the mere application and
result of knowledge, experience and training – although knowledge,