Page 82 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

The processuality of composing 71

Sunday” could play as a kind of ad music, with a film showing at the
same time. […] And that’show I finally realised – since “Gloomy
Sunday” is a fairly melancholy song – that it probably isn’t best suited for
affirming cosmetic surgery. So I composed a version in a major key,
which could work very well for that. But most of all, this version makes it
possible to flow into a minor version and do a nifty transposition. And
that would clear the way for stacking all the other cover versions on top
of each other. […] And I really quite like that, somehow. Somehow the
piece is starting to take shape after all, even though I still don’t know
what the piece is… well, how it will continue. […] I also want to watch a
documentary about plastic surgery today. And in parallel, I’m also
watching a DVD put out by the ZKM [Centre for Art and Media,
Karlsruhe, Germany] about the history of video art in Germany from the
1960s to today.

This is the first time a musical making – in other words, an action of musical
bringing-to-fruition – comes into play, based on Ciciliani’s knowledge of
musicology and structural techniques. This making correlates with a compo-
sition idea: creating a “background texture” of sound (see Figure 4.6, Chapter
4). However, his actual treatment of the song “Gloomy Sunday” does not put
an end to the process of exploring. Rather, this aspect is displaced onto the
video recording. Ciciliani’s research aims to generate ideas for this. Here,
exploring means finding out what might be on offer, what Marko Ciciliani
might do.
The following diary entry shows that in Ciciliani’s as in Karlheinz Essl’s
composition process, hearing is an act of valuing and verifying as well as a
generation of ideas.

[3 Nov 2013] This morning I first listened to the sequence of the cover
versions again and then looked for reverb variations that ended up
replacing the real recordings to make the whole thing a bit fluffier and
muffled, so that it can act as more of a background texture. I like the
result now. I mean, there will probably always be small things to do here,
but I think I’ll consider it finished for now.

Ciciliani’s diary does not report how he listens or how the directedness of his
listening differs from case to case. This creates a blind spot in our empirical
material, which is understandable since, when listening, the composer focuses
his attention on the sounds and does not explicitly inform us whether the lis-
tening is valuing, verifying or generating ideas. These aspects of listening
remain tacit and leave hardly any traces in the diary entries.
Other situations reveal additional functions alongside the valuing, verifying
and generating functions of listening. Marko Ciciliani has to find his way
back into the composition after an involuntary break brought about by
another commission lasting several weeks. This is an experience-governed