Page 62 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

The topography of composing work 51

silently effective and escape formalisability. Even those composers who work
with algorithms still struggle to make the right artistic decisions – as do all
composers. In his diary, Karlheinz Essl describes several attempts to achieve
various effects, such as “colouring the granulated sound current using con-
volution”, which were ultimately unsuccessful. He experimented “with other
plug-ins […]. Many of them are useless for my purposes, but in Spectral-
ShuffleI finally find exactly the effect that I’d imagined soundwise”. After
devising his software instrument, he “plays with it for hours” and improves
the program. Essl says of subsequent work steps that he is thinking of “very
different scenarios as realms of possibility”, but that they would have to be
structured so that listeners “can follow”. Again and again, he listens to the
provisional results several times over and decides what he likes. Some things
are not clear: “I’m not sure if I should really leave in the ‘singing’ with the
flanger melody. It doesn’tseemto fit with the overall progression. The passage
sounds ‘great’ in itself, but it’sdefinitely strikingly different.” Karlheinz Essl
writes no meta-rules for making aesthetic judgements on his material. Even if
he did, he would then need further rules for further difficulties in deciding –
meta-meta-rules – so as to be able to continue, until he encountered new
difficulties requiring new rules to solve the problems of the meta-meta-rules.
In short: the result would be a rule regression that would permit almost no
practical action (see Zembylas 2004: 286–303). He therefore relies on his
artistic and practical experience and his sensory and aesthetic intelligence to
make decisions and finish composing his piece.
Composers in the field of computer music always work at the interface of
music, information science and technology, which requires a triple expertise.
The computer composer Mikhail Malt states in an interview that a composer
who creates a new Max patch to try out new sound possibilities (Max patches
are programs, or rather routines, written in the programming language Max/
MSP) has three perspectives on the patch. First, the composer’s viewpoint, in
which the patch itself is less interesting than the aesthetic output. Second, the
performer’s perspective, for whom the patch has to be ergonomical to a cer-
tain extent: the patch must be of accessible design and simple build so that
the performance can unfold without problems or glitches. Third, the instru-
ment-maker’s viewpoint, whose motto is: the better designed the patch, the
more operations it makes possible; but the more complex it becomes, the
more difficult composition ideas are to express.
Even the most powerful computer cannot replace a composer. There are
two things computer programs cannot develop: a practice community and a
socially generated artistic identity. Both community and identity are recipro-
cally constituted by continuous practical interaction, in which composers
attain a shared intelligibility through collective processes of learning and the
negotiation of meanings and values. There is one further reason why pro-
grams and algorithms cannot replace a composer. Algorithms can be
“described as formalisable and abstracting processes that deliver solutions for
certain tasks” (Nierhaus 2012: 1), but this does not deprive composers of the