Page 58 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

The topography of composing work 47

Even though our composers have different opinions on their role as authors
of texts, consensus still emerges: their ambivalent attitude towards intellectual
expectations. Some consider it a real strain “because it’s become almost a
neurosis, where you can’t write a single note without justifying it somehow.”

1.4.2 Notations
It is probably difficult to imagine our daily lives without written language.
Writing a text message, reading newspapers and books, or handwriting a
shopping list are a daily matter of course and a firm part of our lives, without
us thinking much about them. This literality that constantly surrounds us,
however, also has a different effect, as Walter Ong (1982: 78) notes: “More than
any other single invention, writing restructures consciousness.” This applies not
only to verbal language. With the invention of notation systems, music –
which until then had only had an existence in sound and performance –
achieved a sign-bounded objectivisation, which gradually changed musical
thinking. Erhard Karkoschka (1972: 1) views a notation system, on the one
hand, as a tool “to make possible the construction, preservation and commu-
nication of more complex kinds of music”. On the other hand, however, he
points out the very significant fact that “the technical possibilities of a notation
system also influence the act of composing – the entire thinking of all musi-
cians”. As media, then, notation systems are absolutely not epistemically
neutral. The technical reproducibility of performed music since the end of the
th
19 century, as well as its digitisation about a century later, in no way changes
the structuring and generative impact of notation systems.
Notation systems consist of a limited number of signs, of a syntax and
semantics. Following Ernst Cassirer (1923/1953: 161), we view notation systems
and artificial languages not primarily as “product (ergon), but [as] an activity
(energeia)”,whose “true definition can only ever be genetic”.Notationsystems
make possible activities such as forming, organising, representing, recombining
and sharing musical thoughts, or coordinating several members of an orchestra.
To speak here of symbolic or cognitive affordances provides an interesting
analogy to the concept of material affordances that we have already discussed.
Adjectives such as “symbolic” or “cognitive” should here be understood as
being practice-bounded. The use of notation systems resembles the writing of
texts in that it is not an immaterial and purely mental act, but a core element
of the practice of composing. Like every other practice, reading and writing – or
rather the ability to read and write – are the result of exercise and education.
For Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969/2005: 6),

[i]t is misleading then to talk of thinking as of a “mental activity”.We
may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs.
This activity is performed by the hand, when we think by writing; by the
mouth and larynx, when we think by speaking; and if we think by
imagining signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks.