Page 85 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

74 The processuality of composing

effects valuing. Like Karlheinz Essl, Marko Ciciliani reports that he repeatedly
listens to what he has created in order to fine-tune it.
In his final diary entries, he mentions work on the video and the fine details
of the composition.

[10 Feb 2014] The last time I stopped at a passage where the drums come
in and where texts are meant to be spoken too, over drum rhythms. Texts
that are derived from pop songs and sing about different areas of the
body. But all pejorative. And it was supposed to be a sort of “before”
section, to be followed by an “after” section. When I say before and after,
I mean those photographs that you often see next to each other, […]
where you see the person’s state before the cosmetic surgery and then
after it. And I’m not sure yet what the “after” section will look like, but
this was the “before” section, where these texts appear, and here the car
on the video will be more prominent. […] I integrated a change in tempo,
which then creeps back into a 5/8 rhythm, like before. And now I’ve
written in cadences with false resolutions, like at the start of the piece.
And these deceptive cadences in a way introduce the “Gloomy Sundays”
that you can hear at the start of the piece and that keep popping up
during the piece, like a background primer coat. […]SoI’ve got these
deceptive cadences connected in a series, which leave behind single notes
in both the violin part and the organ part, which form diatonic clusters,
or in the case of the violin chromatic clusters as well, and in that way
lead back to a sort of compression of the texture. And I don’t know
where exactly this might lead. One idea is to have another large sounds-
cape of “Gloomy Sunday” here. Either in the shape of compressed layers
of “Gloomy Sunday” or, as I’ve done before, by having a spectral freeze
swell very prominently.

The last part of this entry in particular illustrates incremental actions in
composing. The deceptive cadences influence the composing of the violin and
organ parts, which changes the importance of the violin, which in turn has an
effect on the required foundations, meaning the soundscape. In other words,
the change or introduction of a new aspect (the deceptive cadences) changes
the significance of individual parts. Ciciliani repeatedly reports in his diary: “I
don’t know where exactly this might lead.” Changes to individual parts also
imply (at times unpredictable) changes to the whole. When introducing
something, for example when composing a part for an instrument, Ciciliani
gets the feeling that other parts – such as the “background primer coat”–
also need to be looked at anew. Composing is no linear process, but an
incremental and network-like development with several interdependencies.
Ciciliani’s last written notes, from 14 to 20 February 2014, are all about
detailed composition decisions. He is trying to finish the composition process.
On 16 February 2014, four days before the last entry, he fixes the total length
of the piece at 12 to 13 minutes.