Page 19 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

8 Introduction

composing? How do they do it? When do certain work phases occur? Study-
ing composing processes in actu lays bare their essential openness and fragility.
They are open because the gestalt of the final product that composers strive for
is only generated during the work process. Until that point, there are countless
forking paths. Composing processes are fragile because they are sensitive to
disruptions and entail the possibility of failure. The concept of decision-
making is mostly not suited to explaining creative processes. Nor do we resort
to phase models, but concentrate instead on analysing the empirical material.
We clearly see from this that there is an interdependence of all sorts of activ-
ities immanent in processes, which we divide into four groups: exploring,
understanding, valuing and making. While we can separate out these activity
groups for analytical purposes, they only attain their full significance in their
unity and interconnectedness.
The third chapter, “Orchestrating Different Forms of Knowledge”, assumes
that current sociological, musicological and psychological research into com-
posing processes must be expanded by adding an epistemic conceptualisation
of artistic agency. At the beginning of the chapter, we undertake an analytical
differentiation of the concept of knowledge. Instead of remaining bound by
traditional binary conceptions – knowing how to do something versus knowing
that x is the case, explicit versus implicit knowledge, theoretical cognising versus
actionable knowing – we identify a variety of different forms of knowledge.
We emphasise the significance of abilities that are relevant in creative processes
and, as a result, the significance of experience, the body (including sensory
perception) and practical fine-tuning for particular circumstances. Alongside
this, we discuss the role of formal-propositional knowledge contents, because
reflective moments are activities that are integrated into composing practice.
Our empirical analysis discloses, first, the interlinking and synergy of different
forms of knowledge and, second, that the change from flow of action to
conscious distancing from the musical material is a typical feature of complex
and long-term activities.
In the fourth chapter, “Musicological Perspectives on Composing”, our
colleague Andreas Holzer devotes himself to the issue of how ideas, explora-
tion and notation correlate. His specific focus arises from the low profile
within musicology of sketch research (meaning the reconstruction of a work’s
genesis based on analysing the extant documents). He opens the chapter with
a historical outline of musicological research into composing processes and
goes on to identify the basic problems in attempting to capture composers’
actions and thought processes using sketches, interviews and self-descriptions.
The second half of the chapter is dedicated to three case studies. By means of
comparative interpretation, Holzer elaborates case-specificdifferences in the
composers’ attitudes and their associated work modes, specific composing
circumstances, the nature of their musical material, and their concrete aes-
thetic objectives. These differences lead him to question the meaningfulness of
generalising theories and methods, and to call instead for complex particula-
rities to be sensitively handled.