Page 71 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

60 The processuality of composing

during its creation – made using appropriate programs – to advance the work.
Composers can only discuss such processes to a limited degree because,
during the re-reading or listening, their attention is focused on the “making”
and not on themselves (see Polanyi 1958: 55ff.).

2.1 Exploring – Understanding – Valuing – Making
Reflective and conceptual activities have a crucial role in artistic practices. In
contrast to the conception of mind as essentially a black box, we conceive
reflective and conceptual activities as inseparable from physical activities and
thus as observable activities (cf. Schatzki 1996, 2001; Schmidt 2017). Fur-
thermore, monitoring – whether during an action or afterwards, whether by
oneself or by others – is, to quote Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012: 100),
“part of, and not somehow outside, the enactments of practice”. As mentioned
previously, the composition process interconnects numerous activities: generating
ideas, collecting material, researching, working out a concept for the time
structure or dramaturgy, exploring sounds or families of sounds by experi-
menting on an instrument or a music computer, tentatively combining existing
ideas, trying to ascertain what preceding steps and current results mean,
making musical marks, linking partially worked-out fragments with each
other, perhaps programming software, making a first written version of the
score, developing certain solo passages and the various instrumental voices,
finishing the fair copy, etc. This great variety of activities can be grouped
together in four categories: exploring, understanding, valuing, making. We
would briefly like to discuss them.
There are numerous examples in the diaries of ideas being generated,
musical material being collected, targeted research, references to other musical
works, etc. We subsume these within the verb “explore”. However, such
exploring cannot be neatly defined since practices of exploring vary. The great
variety of activities and forms of exploring arises firstly because of composers’
habitual approaches and working methods and secondly because of the parti-
cularity of each single composition situation. We thus use the verb “explore”
in the very broad general sense of an activity governed by knowledge and
rules, which employs material and immaterial tools (e.g. pens, paper, software
programs). To say that the practise of composing is rule-governed does not
mean that rules determine it (see Winch 1958/1976: 48ff.; Taylor 1995). For a
start, experienced composers follow rules quite differently from beginners (see
Dreyfus & Dreyfus 1986: 16–51; Neuweg 2004: 300–316). Second, rules
always leave a “back door” open (see Wittgenstein 1969/1975: § 139), mean-
ing that their practical implementation by experts cannot be reduced to a
mastery of the respective implicit and explicit rules. In other words, the prac-
tice exceeds its rules (see Zembylas 2004: 294).
Wherever we use the verb “understand” in what follows, we need to take
into account that understanding has deep roots in the intellectualist, mentalist
and textualist tradition of the humanities and social sciences in Europe. It