Page 16 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Introduction 5

This book will integrate these perspectives and extend them with additional
dimensions. The role of several participants, persons and objects elucidates
the social and material dimension of composing practices. We will discuss the
temporal dynamics of composing processes so as to point out the inherent
interdependence of individual work phases. We will present the cognitive
and simultaneously somatic dimension of composing work by showing the
effects of several forms of knowledge, which we shall elaborate from an
interpretative description and analysis of doing.

Empirical bases and research design
In November 2013, we set out on a two-year research project entitled “Tacit
knowing in musical composition work”. Our team at the University of Music
and Performing Arts Vienna included Andreas Holzer (musicology), Annegret
Huber (musicology), Martin Niederauer (sociology), Rosa Reitsamer (sociology)
and Tasos Zembylas (cultural institution studies/philosophy). This inter-
disciplinary make-up was necessary to attain our primary research aims: first,
the documentation, description and analysis of complex composing processes
several months long; second, the examination of the components and conditions
of artistic agency.
Given the financial means available, we made the following practical decision:
to ensure that the collected data would be reasonably comparable, we limited
ourselves to contemporary art music. We contacted professional composers
aged between 35 and 55, with a professional experience of 10 to 30 years. All
of them live and work in Austria and are confronted with similar occupational
and institutional constraints. To generate an internal differentiation in the
data, we contacted composers with different composing methods. Our sample
thus included composers who create instrumental or electronic (or mixed)
works as well as composers who work with specific raw acoustic material.
The “empirical heart” of the study is made up of five case studies of compos-
ing processes in actu, i.e. as they happen. Our documentation covered the entire
timeframe of the respective composing process, from the initial idea to its pre-
miere. The fact that this documentation did not occur retrospectively distin-
guishes our research project from other musicological and music-psychology
analyses of creative processes, which mostly attempt to reconstruct, in hindsight,
the creation of an already finished work using sketches, recordings and other
material. These run the risk of ascribing goal-orientatedness or rational structure
to creative processes. Moreover, studies in music psychology in particular do not
analyse the whole creative process, but limit themselves to individual work
phases. And when musicologists exceptionally do discuss the entire creative pro-
cess, they usually examine the genesis of only one specific composition. Thus,
such analyses frequently lack the comparative perspective (see Chapter 4).
Our documentation strategy is based on a non-invasive concept. Permanent
shadowing of composers in their daily routines would have been impractical