Page 74 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

The processuality of composing 63
preferences, interests,
generated criteria
Understanding Valuing
intuition

prior understanding,
imagination
abilities
gestalt perception

Exploring Making
experience,
knowledge

Figure 2.1 The interrelatedness of various partial activities

projects, aims, tasks, beliefs, desires, commitments and emotions in the
accomplishment of practices (see Schatzki 1996: 89f., 99–101). (“Emotion”
contains the word “motion”, indicating that emotions also contain impulses
and motives for actions: “I’m moved.” Similarly, an affect is something that
affects both us and others. From a praxeological perspective, affects are
closely linked to actions – see Reckwitz 2012: 250).
Composers undertake various activities, which are practically interconnected.
They are set in motion in order to advance work on the composition and in
order to bring it to completion. Figure 2.1 clarifies this “in-order-to” relationship
of various activities and relations. Partial activities are always connected
with each other and only attain their full significance in their unity and
interrelatedness.

2.2 The cohesion of activities inherent in processes
1
In this section, using two of our empirical case studies, we will illustrate the
cohesion of activities inherent in processes. We will take into account the
particularity of every composition process that shapes the interrelation and
configuration of the activities. The particularity of Karlheinz Essl’s composi-
tion process, for instance, consists among other things of the fact that he was
the intended performer of his composition “Herbecks Versprechen”. That left
him with two challenges to meet: to create a work as a composer and to
perform it as a musician. His diary begins on 30 November 2013 and ends on
18 February 2014.
For raw material, Karlheinz Essl has a tape from the 1980s, which contains
2
a recording of Ernst Herbeck reading his own poems. In his diary, Essl notes
that he was familiar with Herbeck’s poems from his school days and that he
was “moved” by the poet’s voice when listening to the recording. How