Page 141 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

130 Musicological perspectives on composing

The shared experiential knowledge they have accrued must have an impact on
the composer’s musical conception.
In any case, his feeling of “being-caught-between-two-stools” is linked to
the fact that the artistic direction he has chosen does not correspond to the
paths that have what one might call discursive priority. The orientation of
artistic fields in Bourdieu’s sense – including, for example, the subsidising of
ensembles and festivals – is determined not least by the dominant discourse.
As a self-reflective composer, Ciciliani appears to feel the need to engage with
this discourse and take a stance. In his essay, “Vom Kanon der Verbote und
der medialen Musik” [On the canon of prohibitions and electronic music]
(Ciciliani 2013), for instance, he discusses the stubborn persistence of taboos,
such as the prohibition of tonality. While nowadays hardly anyone still refers
to this former (or perhaps not quite former?) taboo, he finds it to be still
surprisingly in force. Ciciliani considers the “musical clichés” of the Avant-
garde or New Music to be just as biased and hackneyed as the clichés of
tonality. Moreover, “the primary focus of artistic activity [should] no longer
be the treatment of the material” (Ciciliani 2013: 4). Accordingly, he posits
that the “primacy of structure” (Ciciliani 2013: 4) – which demands a “com-
posing focused on a memorising listening” (Ciciliani 2013: 5) and continues
to be seen as the only criterion for adequacy – needs to be overcome. After
all, he says, we should also accept works whose textures focus on the com-
municative potential of the resulting sounds. Ciciliani’s decision to enter the
aesthetic discourse linguistically is probably linked to a certain self-justifica-
tion as well, which we can assume plays a part in every aesthetic positioning.
On the other hand, Ciciliani revealed in an interview that he no longer feels a
great need to justify the material that he uses.
The constellations are very different for Karlheinz Essl. He has composed
a great number of pieces whose performance involves other musicians.
However, he is both composer and performer of the electronic work com-
posed as part of this project, “Herbecks Versprechen”.As withothersof
his electronic pieces, the specificity and complexity of the playing instruc-
tions makes it almost impossible to hand it over to other performers. As he
points out, however, even with works that have both instrumental and elec-
tronic segments, problems often arise in the performance context because
not all musicians are willing to engage with electronics. Furthermore, he
explains, it is not easy to find the appropriate verbal or graphic instructions
to represent a progression of electronic processes; collaborating with inter-
ested individuals is therefore easier to manage. Essl’s decision to compose
mainly electronic music may well have been influenced not just by aesthetic
elements, but also by a need for independence. He points out that electronic
pieces or pieces that require one additional person could be performed and
re-performed without much organisational or logistical effort, but that it is
more common in the New Music sector for the composer to be exposed to
a great many dependencies, especially if he or she composes for larger
ensembles.