Page 73 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

62 The processuality of composing

are also composition activities. Here, however, making explicitly refers to
bringing to fruition and thus to genuine acts of creating the musical work.
These include not only writing and inserting musical notes, but also deleting
them. Writing is a particular kind of conceptual practice. It depends on
knowing how to use characteristic symbols (e.g. different notations) to realise
a musical score. Without making – in other words without the specific objec-
tification of the work – the composition process would remain unfinished.
Andrew Pickering (1995: 115) calls this competence “disciplinary agency”,
since symbolic systems and forms (discourses, notation systems, etc.) “discipline”
and “force” the human agent to undertake actions. However, we do not wish to
overstate the importance of making. During most composition processes, there
are days of few ideas and very meagre work results. Such work days are just as
important as days with clearly measurable outputs: composers eliminate spe-
cific options by heading into impasses, as it were – by trying out things and
then discarding them. These acts mean that the “unproductive” days are
simply productive in a different way. Making cannot be reduced to efficient and
effective action.
These four clusters of activity are to some extent comparable to an
analytical schema proposed by Hans Roels (2016), which also posits four
main composing activities: planning, exploring, writing and rewriting. But
there are notable differences. We merge the activities related to planning
and exploring into our concept of exploring since most composers in the
real world act in a way that partakes of both ideal types (where the first
type works more deductively, starting from a synoptic plan, and the
second type proceeds fragmentarily and heuristically). Furthermore, we
subsume writing and rewriting within one category – making. Finally,
while Roels (2016: 422f.) emphasises the difference between activities
“outside the sequence” (planning and exploring) and “in sequence” (writ-
ing and rewriting), we highlight the blurred boundaries and the inter-
penetration of such sequential moments, e.g. reflecting and acting,
exploring and creating.
Regardless of the designation of various activities and the way they are
divided, however, we stress that composition processes take place in an
emotional atmosphere, often one of tension. John Dewey (1934/1980: 50) com-
ments on the “anticipation of what is to come” as follows: “This anticipation
is the connecting link between the next doing and its outcome for sense. What
is done and what is undergone are thus reciprocally, cumulatively, and con-
tinuously instrumental to each other.” Our interviewees spoke of the agony of
success, the frustration of daily distractions, the fear of spiteful critics, and the
uncertainty of how collaborators would react to their suggestions. Obviously,
there are positive states of mind too – such as happiness at a good idea,
contentedness with progress made and feeling moved by realising content that
feels very personal to them. This means we need to consider the immanent
goal-directedness of processes as well as their mood. We encompass both in
the concept of teleo-affectivity, which consists of the integration of ends,