Page 155 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

144 Musicological perspectives on composing

from the composing activity (the performance score gives noticeably fewer exact
instructions than a conventionally notated score). Body conditions, however,
can potentially play a role in all compositional phases, as a passage in compo-
ser Isabel Mundry’s essay (Mundry 2014: 76 – our translation) reveals:

My body is present while I feel out the shape of my music. It creates ten-
sions or reflexes, shivers or breathes with the sounds, and participates while
the musical ideas are being formed – to the extent that I can get sore
muscles while composing. And yet the tangible presence of the body hardly
shows on the outside. It does not dance, run or shout while I am producing
comparable structures in the music. There is a rift in composing between
the body’s internal presence and external stillness. That can range from
being exhausting to painful, but it can just as well be exhilarating too. We
often make a mystery of the bodily aspect of music; often it is also trivia-
lised. If the former, it is deemed to be a quantity that is beyond question; if
the latter, an expression of naive inhibition that hardly does justice to the
requirements of New Music. When I was younger, I was embarrassed by
my linking of sound ideas and body perception, but I don’tknowthatI
ever had the choice. Today, the question no longer seems relevant to me.
Instead I concentrate on the perspective the bodily aspect of my music
should take. The question of whether may be beholden to the individual’s
disposition; but the question of how is deliberate. It is a question of
aesthetic thought and artistic decision.

With Marko Ciciliani, I focus on the phase of his composing process during
which he tackled the transformation of his initial conceptions into musical
structures. The decisive impetus was his finding of the song “Gloomy
Sunday”, along with its many cover versions, on the Internet (29 September
2013). This may have been chance, but it can ultimately also be seen as a
result of his existing interest in the topic of identity. Ciciliani developed the
idea of weaving a background texture out of the layered cover versions, which
could serve as a foundation for the whole piece (27 October 2013). How did
he get this idea? The fact that he had already used similar layering techniques
in two earlier works of the same cycle (namely “Screaming my Simian Line”
and especially “All of Yesterday’s Parties”, where he layered cover versions of
a Beatles song) seems to have been pivotal. This also clamps the cycle’s indi-
vidual pieces together formally. Given that Ciciliani referenced Luciano
Berio’s “Sinfonia”, I also think it possible that he was stimulated by this
work. In the interviews, Ciciliani mentioned Berio’s piece – which had
impressed him already as a young composer – by remarking that he did not
intend to round off his five-part cycle with a final movement, unlike the
“Sinfonia”, which also has five parts. He found Berio’s attitude of giving a
summarising coda to a heterogenous combination of parts “really extremely
academic and somehow cowardly”. Given the special role played by the