Page 145 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

134 Musicological perspectives on composing

resistance, and can thus also influence the way the composing process unfolds.
For example, Wozny’s sound ideas come up against the possibilities afforded
by instruments. With Essl and Ciciliani, there is, among other things, a tense
relationship between their aesthetic intentions and the potential of the software.
The internal relationships and compositional approaches frame the develop-
ment of particular exploratory strategies for generating various composing
possibilities. Within these possibility spaces, many decisions are made that
drive the composing process. I will consider these constellations in the next
section.

Explorations, playful proving grounds, trials, and decisions
How do composers explore compositional possibility spaces? What strategies
do they call on to enable the composing process to proceed, and how do they
actually implement them? Once again, a mere enumeration of different indivi-
dual methods is not the point. Likewise, frequently made generalisations – such
as positing a clear formal architecture as the polar opposite of the processual
approach – at best offer a basic and rather abstract orientation, since the vast
majority of individual cases occurs in the space between those poles. Oppos-
ing a planned structured approach to an open explorative approach has
similar issues. A great number of theories of creativity have attempted to
elucidate this problem. Given the scope of this chapter, I can only sketch
them here. The starting-point for later representations is often Graham
Wallas’ division of the creative process into four phases, as developed in his
book The Art of Thought (Wallas 1926/2014: 39): “preparation, incubation,
illumination, verification”. The first phase ranges from investigations in all
directions to conscious planning based on the possibilities thus developed,
and is followed by a phase of largely unconscious, associative or combined
playing-around and explorations (incubation). Spontaneous insight – Wallas
talks of “flashes of insight”– confers a certain shape on the results of the
second phase before they are subjected to a final check and poured into their
final moulds (verification). Just like Wallas’ phase model, many later theories
of creativity consider the creative process to be a fairly linear process.
By contrast, more recent studies overwhelmingly reach the conclusion that
non-linear processes often predominate, or at least that the relationship
between prior organisation and elaboration must be assumed to be flexible,
not least because processes potentially have their own momentum. A repre-
sentative approach is the Meaningful Engagement Matrix (MEM) developed
by Andrew R. Brown and Steve Dillon to describe creative processes.
This matrix consists of “five modes of engagement” (attending, evaluating,
directing, exploring, embodying) and “three contexts” (personal, social,
cultural), which become relevant during the composing process in different
combinations (Brown & Dillon 2012: 82). Using this matrix, Brown and
Dillon conducted a twelve-month observation of five experienced composers
involving sketches, videos and interviews (Steve Reich – minimal music,