Page 96 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Orchestrating different forms of knowledge 85

During their training, composers learn some of the technical knowledge
required to select and apply algorithms for creating or transforming certain
sounds. Ultimately, however, they have to acquire the processes through
practice. And yet the application of technical knowledge in any given com-
posing situation remains subtle. It is barely necessary for composing to theo-
rise or formalise technical and practical knowledge because its application is
usually coupled with the composer’s sense of hearing. And his or her actual
situative hearing experience in turn cannot be grasped theoretically because it
is fundamentally case-specific and tacit.

3.1.2 Hearing: auditory knowledge as experiential knowledge and
knowing-in-action
Up to this point, we have dealt with experiential knowledge or knowledge of
work processes that derives from past experiences. The concept of experi-
ence, however, has one further meaning: it also refers to sensory perceptions.
Sensory knowledge guided by perception develops passively when we per-
ceive something in our environment that we did not intentionally or actively
cause to happen. It also develops actively when we deliberately participate
in the perception of the phenomenon – listening, pricking up our ears,
looking closely (see Szivós 2014b). Acts of perception generate a situative
form of experiential knowledge that, drawing on John Dewey and Arthur
Bentley (Dewey & Bentley 1949) as well as Donald Schön (1983), we will
call “knowing-in-action”. Feeling an instrument while playing it (the result
of tactile, proprioceptive and kinaesthetic perception) and hearing the
sounds that the instrument directly produces are corporeal transactional
events that endow with meaning – because the relationship between the
perceived object and the act of perception is not a one-way relationship (see
also Noë 2012: 22; Leman & Maes 2014: 83f.). The meaning of the percep-
tion is integrated into the practical accomplishment of an action and does
not develop through reflective thinking. Making, sensory experience and
situative knowing (for instance, of the actual sequence of sounds) form an
amalgam. From a praxeological perspective, we must therefore emphasise
that composers create primarily through trying-out. The following quota-
tions both refer to this fact:

Hearing is important because it makes the things I’m trying out somehow
not abstract. I listen to them, and my hearing is the control function that
tells me whether it actually works. It’s a sort of interactive loop.
(Karlheinz Essl)

I’m writing it for three wind instruments. And I’m taking part myself as
well. I play bassoon, zither and two clarinets. So of course I try it out to
see whether it makes sense or not. 2
(Christof Dienz)