Page 91 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

3 Orchestrating different forms

of knowledge

In our chapter on the processuality of composing, we discussed the intertwining
of exploring, understanding, valuing and making. All these activities are
simultaneously corporeal and cognitive, a fusion perfectly articulated by the
expression “embodied mind” (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Shapiro 2014).
Their objective is the primary goal of composers: to create a musical work of
art. The score as symbolic form and its realisation-in-sound during a perfor-
mance are meaningful; they signify because they make aesthetic experience
possible. Experiences are closely linked to our conceptual, sensual and practical
understandings, competences and skills (cf. Noë 2012: 2). Moreover, experi-
ences are not fleeting episodes. They leave traces that shape our actions and
thoughts, as John Dewey (1934/1980: 44) emphasises: “The scope and content
of the relations [between action, its consequences and the perception of both]
measure the significant content of an experience.” We depend on corporeal,
sensory, practical or communicative experiences and, as a rule, rely on them
because as basic “excerpts of the world, they do not leave us indifferent. Such
excerpts of the world are meaningful for an agent because he or she pursues
goals, follows inclinations and tries to implement plans, and because these
excerpts concern the agent in some way” (Taylor 1986: 195 – our translation).
Composing as an artistic activity is – sentimental though it might sound – a
sensory and feeling approach to perceiving the world; a way of exploring,
understanding, valuing and making the world; and a way of intervening in the
social realm (see Merleau-Ponty 1964/1993; Noë 2004).
In this chapter, we will concentrate on forms of knowledge that shape the
composing agency. By agency, we mean the ability to carry out something
corporeal and intelligible or corporeal and cognitive, such as calculating,
imagining, desiring or formulating something. Here, we adhere to a central
thesis of contemporary social sciences: that the human capacity for action
presupposes, as Hans Joas (1996: 148) writes, a “specific corporeality and
primary sociality”. It is inseparably and reciprocally connected to shared
social practices and regimes of competence (Wenger 2002: 136f.) or rather to
socially organised activity fields (see Bourdieu 1992/1996). Michael Lynch
(1997: 337) is right to emphasise that “[p]ractices are associated with socially
credited skills”. Dvora Yanow and Haridimos Tsoukas (Yanow & Tsoukas