Page 123 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

112 Musicological perspectives on composing

more than something simply made. This was not contested until art
began to experience itself as transient. The confounding of artworks with
their genesis, as if genesis provided the universal code for what has
become, is the source of the alienness of art scholarship to art: for artworks
obey their law of form by consuming their genesis. Specifically aesthetic
experience, self-abandonment to artworks, is indifferent to their genesis.
Knowledge of the genesis is as external to aesthetic experience as is the
history of the dedication of the Eroica to what musically transpires in that
symphony. The attitude of authentic artworks toward extra-aesthetic
objectivity is not so much to be sought in how this objectivity affects the
process of production, for the artwork is in-itself a comportment that
reacts to that objectivity even while turning away from it.
(Adorno 1997: 179)

Admittedly, our research project pursued quite different questions and there-
fore need not attach any importance to Adorno’s disregard for the genesis of
art. And that is certainly true as far as the forming of aesthetic experiences is
concerned, let alone evaluation: neither of these plays a prominent part in our
project. It is not the case, however, as per Adorno’s thesis that artworks
follow a “law of form”. Any examination of their genesis would then have to
focus on the musical material and internal work criteria, but not on the
creators’ forms of knowledge. In the recent past, composers as well as
philosophers have occasionally made similar announcements that artworks
determine their own organisation to a certain extent. In an effort to overcome
subjectivist explanations, the German system theorist Niklas Luhmann (2000:
245f.) regards artworks as entities that “converse with one another”, and by
doing so, contribute to their own “selfprogramming” as well as to the formation
of a collective memory in the art system. Within musicology, the question of
where to locate the artistic subject in such art production has led to general
resistance to, or ignorance of, the system-theory position. For instance the
musicologist Ulrich Tadday (1997: 14) accuses Luhmann of radically
neglecting the role of the artistic subject, its intentions and its poetical ideas.
Luhmann has also been resented in various quarters for degrading the concept
of genius – still not completely vanquished in the art world – to an evolutio-
nistic phenomenon by positing that the term “genius” stands “for the
improbability of emergence [of innovative artworks]” and that geniuses are
“products, not causes, of evolution” (Luhmann 2000: 224).

4.1 Perspectives on composing-as-process: a historical outline

4.1.1 Sketch studies
Most retrospectives of the history of sketch studies point to Gustav Nottebohm’s
(1865) analyses of Beethoven’s sketches as the historical starting-point of this
musicological research topic, and also declare that those same Beethoven