Page 68 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

2 The processuality of composing

We have so far taken for granted that composing can be characterised as a
process, trusting to the reader’s general sense of that concept to make
further explanation unnecessary. In this chapter, however, the processuality
of composing moves centre-stage, making a more precise definition crucial.
Understanding music as a dynamic process becomes pivotal from the
moment we first conceive of music not primarily as a “text”– as the textu-
alist paradigm within musicology suggests – but rather as a performative
phenomenon. Some musicologists, such as Philip V. Bohlman (2001: 18; see
also Cook 2001: § 5–7), argue that music should be seen as a process altogether,
not as an object:

The metaphysical condition of music with which we in the West are most
familiar is that music is an object. As an object, music is bounded, and
names can be applied to it that affirm its objective status. […] By con-
trast, music exists in the conditions of a process. Because a process is
always in flux, it never achieves a fully objective status; it is always
becoming something else. As a process music is unbounded and open.

One way of analysing the creative process in art is to draw for instance on
Henri Poincaré (1908/1914: 50–63) and Graham Wallas (1926/2014: 39) and
subdivide it into stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, verification.
That would certainly structure the process and also make it possible to find
out what problems and challenges are characteristic to each individual stage.
However, any explanation of processes that uses stage models (e.g. Katz &
Gardner 2012: 110–120) also risks imposing a development structure on the
different composition processes that conceals their contingency and diversity.
As Friedemann Sallis (2015: 7) rightly points out, “[t]he sheer diversity of
working methods should make us sceptical of attempts to define stages of this
activity all too precisely.” In this chapter, we will take a different path and
concentrate on the dynamic unity of cognitive and performative aspects. Thus
our reference point will not be stages, but rather the composers’ activities. We
will examine what precisely composers do during composing, and how their
activities are intertwined.