Page 87 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

76 The processuality of composing

Individual cases can be connected and compared in different ways. We did
not present the work processes of Karlheinz Essl and Marko Ciciliani as
contrasting cases (cf. Roels 2016) because our primary purpose was to bring
out their incremental dimension. By incrementality we mean the gradual
development of a network of interdependencies between parts of the work
during the creative process. This network is barely tangible and only develops
slowly. Composers often begin by working out the details of individual segments
that are separate from each other. At some point thereafter, however, a point
almost impossible to determine, every further making – meaning every new
creation, insertion, displacement, deletion or reworking of existing segments –
has a significant effect on the already existing work. This situation requires a
comprehensive perspective, which reveals the composers’ experience. They
know that “the individual segments of the composition cannot be viewed in
isolation” and that “interaction between the various parameters” (Essl) must
be critically examined and understood. As long as the emerging shape of the
work is still mutable, the creative process remains open until all segments have
been shaped or even fully composed and work on the details can be fore-
grounded. During the long phase of openness – when new things are still
being added and when the understanding and valuing of what has already
been created could change, and even change significantly – everything
remains provisional. Marko Ciciliani’s repeated comments in his diary that he
did not know whether something would remain as it was, or did not know
where something might lead, are an exemplary proof of the plasticity and
contingency of exploratory creative processes.
Figure 2.1 neatly presents the cohesion of several different activities that
people may consciously experience as primarily mental or corporeal. This
dualistic division – the body-mind dualism – is conceptually misleading. In
every search for ideas, in every pausing and concentrated listening, in every
reflection and weighing-up, in every playing or experimenting, and in every
act of writing, several activities occur at the same time and with varying pre-
dominance (see also Gelineck & Serafin 2009: 3f.; Roels 2016: 426–431). For
the sake of simplicity, we have grouped these activities into four categories:
exploring, understanding, valuing and making. We use the broken arrows to
hint that the connections between the various activities depend on several
factors or events: experience, knowledge, previous understanding, habituated
ways of seeing and hearing, ideas, aesthetic preferences, technical ability and
skill in artistic practice, situated feeling. These factors are the subject of the
next chapter. During acts of exploring, understanding, valuing and making,
constitutively different forms of knowledge are at work, which the composers
appropriate and continually update and expand in their composition practice.

Notes

1 The compositions can be heard on our project website at http://www.mdw.ac.at/ims/
kompositionsprozesse