The Act of Musical Composition

Studies in the Creative Process

Dave Collins, Dave Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317045571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The study of musical composition has been marked by a didactic, technique-based approach, focusing on the understanding of musical language and grammar -harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and arrangement - or on generic and stylistic categories. In the field of the psychology of music, the study of musical composition, even in the twenty-first century, remains a poor cousin to the literature which relates to musical perception, music performance, musical preferences, musical memory and so on. Our understanding of the compositional process has, in the main, been informed by anecdotal after-the-event accounts or post hoc analyses of composition. The Act of Musical Composition: Studies in the Creative Process presents the first coherent exploration around this unique aspect of human creative activity. The central threads, or key themes - compositional process, creative thinking and problem-solving - are integrated by the combination of theoretical understandings of creativity with innovative empirical work.

Chapter 1
Empirical and Historical Musicologies of Compositional Processes: Towards a Cross-fertilisation

Nicolas Donin

The study of compositional processes is often deemed a poor relative of the psychology of music. Yet, if included in the general domain of musicology, would this judgment continue to hold? One particular branch of musicology – sketch studies – has devoted itself over the last half-century to documenting the creative processes of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers. These reconstructions, being almost exclusively based on archived collections containing the material traces of a composer’s activity, seldom, if ever, include commentary from the composer or any other real-time-generated data. Consequently, they rarely bear any resemblance to the results of an empirical study of a present-day composer’s creative process. Nevertheless, the nature of these two types of study is essentially the same: a complex creative activity involving various cognitive skills and emotions, embedding technical and (nowadays) technological artefacts, which then produce tangible public outcomes (like a consistent musical text) that go on to become part of a culture, influencing the subsequent creative cognition of other composers.

Can empirical and historical musicologies merge, or at the very least confront their respective findings regarding creative processes, despite highly differentiated sets of approaches? In this chapter I will plead for a cross-fertilisation, and demonstrate how these subfields of musicology might establish a common ground upon which concepts, results or methods could be exchanged. I would propose that, in order for knowledge about musical creativity to move forward, it is necessary to imagine how a general musicology of the compositional process could benefit from both a historical approach and an empirical one. I shall begin by discussing the difficulties faced by those who seek cognitive analyses of present-day composers that are comparable in detail to the ones found in history regarding great musicians of the past. I will then present a research method based upon musicology’s historical and empirical branches, and further elaborate upon the types of knowledge such a method might offer. I will conclude this chapter with the presentation of a collective project in which an integrative epistemological approach is used to study the creative processes of the past and present.

Studying Compositional Practices in the Real World?

Prior to discussing the present, let us briefly focus on the past. In line with nineteenth-century philological tradition, musicologists have sought to identify and compile every written trace left behind by great composers of the past. Critical editions of masterworks, Urtext scores, and the publication and commentary of Beethoven’s sketchbooks are all the results of such a heritage. Sketch studies of composer’s studies truly gained momentum as a musicological discipline in the 1970s in the United States.1 These comprehensive genetic studies are similar in aim and in method to critique génétique (genetic criticism) studies taking place at the same time in literature studies, in France and elsewhere. Both seek to define a corpus of avant-textes or pre-texts (sketches, drafts, etc.).2 The most successful of these studies, from a musical analysis standpoint, demonstrate how elements of the compositional process determined qualities such as the coherence or the novelty of a final opus; each draft, deletion or legible alternative is then interpreted as a possible window into both the composer’s mental processes and the variation space surrounding each musical element included in the final work.

However, a model of creative cognition (defining its possible patterns, time-scales, variability, balance of divergent and convergent thinking, etc.) governs even the most limited rendering of a sequence of compositional actions. As long as this model remains implicit (and undoubtedly linked to the analyst’s personal experience as both a musician and a writer), no serious discussion can afford to satisfy questions linked to cognition, and the study of the creative process keeps focusing on philology and music analysis. In order to analyse composition as a creative act, documents drawn from the creative process should not only be considered with respect to the final musical product; they should also be viewed as temporary components of a cognitive act-in-progress, as they interact within a specific, constantly evolving environment. A number of authors, from Bahle to Harvey,3 have sought to use accounts of past creative processes in order to build models of creativity. Although we shall not describe this approach in detail, we must stress the difficulties inherent to any secondary data analysis that involves verbal materials heterogeneously collected and situated within a variety of cultural contexts (musical, historical, geographical). The models of creative cognition emerging from this approach are severely limited in scope, coherence and extensibility.

Despite its abundance, documentary evidence alone is unable to provide all the necessary insight into mental processes, so it seems natural to shift our attention towards present-day composers. However, as little of their work is conserved in libraries or museums and they themselves often avoid divulging their own creative processes, their practice often appears even more mysterious than that of past composers.4 How then might one collect significant data regarding their compositional processes? Both an oft-cited chapter in John Sloboda’s text, The Musical Mind, devoted to composition and improvisation, and an essay from the same author5 concluded that the psychology of composition is fraught with difficulties. Composition was deemed too complex and personal to realistically be subjected to a scientific research programme. More recently, Collins’s exhaustive literature review6 illustrated the scarcity of work carried out in the past century: only a few studies have presented the work of expert composers, featuring most often the compositional outputs of students and novices. Although Sloboda’s resistance is an extreme example, in many case studies the mystique of the lone creator, not to be disturbed under any circumstance, is seemingly difficult to relinquish. This seems odd, at a time when musicology seeks to deconstruct the founding myths of western musical tradition.

Nonetheless, there are some exceptions: a small number of relatively unknown studies have been carried out across a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, most often unaware of each other’s existence. These include Thomas and Mion’s seminal study, at the GRM,7 which focused on the compositional process of Parmeggiani’s De Natura Sonorum, a study inspired by Piagetian psychology and Nattiez’s musical semiology, in addition to Jean-Pierre Richard’s (literary) thematic critique.8 Several years later, another GRM study by Delalande, compared the creative processes of composers working with identical musical tasks and identical compositional environments.9 Surveys led at the University of Sheffield from questionnaires and activity analysis (inspired by cognitive ergonomics) focused on the role of computers at different stages of the composition process.10 We also see Roger Reynolds’s collaboration with a team of researchers led by Stephen McAdams on the topic of both the perception and composition of his The Angel of Death.11 A number of composers have also chosen to analyse their own individual creative processes. Choosing to forsake more traditional styles of theoretical writing or aesthetic manifestos, the few published texts more closely resemble compositional journals,12 essays13 or occasionally a combination of both.14

The scarcity of such attempts should come as no surprise given that they are inevitably confronted by the evanescence and irreducibility of the creative act. As Pascal Dusapin, a noted contemporary composer, describes in his inaugural address before the Collège de France:

How might one bear witness to musical creation as it took place? Can we indeed convey a composition-in-progress? I do not believe so. Composing has taught me that the invention of sounds is a phenomenon one cannot distil into an exposé. (...) Describing the procedure through which a work of music evolves cannot capture the essence of the creative act as it occurs. It is only a description.15

Dusapin’s choice of vocabulary – ‘convey a composition-in-progress’ or ‘describe the procedure’ – voluntarily and accurately mirrors the cold and distanced posture musicologists tend to adopt when discussing particular composition processes. Nevertheless, such an approach is not inevitable: one might imagine analysing an activity, instead of ‘convey(ing)’ a ‘procedure’. To ‘analyse’ is to use relevant criteria in breaking something down, in order to understand the logic that governed its construction. To do so with regards to an ‘activity’ distinguishes it from a closed procedure, as the former presupposes an free, open-ended and hardly formalisable process.

These difficulties are further complicated by researchers’ attempts to strip their object of any subjectivity and avoid provoking a disturbance in the creative activity, otherwise known as, according to Dusapin, the centipede syndrome: ‘as soon as this small crawling creature begins to question the mechanics of its own motion it ceases to move forward’.16 Similar statements exist in both the empirical literature and other composers’ writings, and their concerns seem legitimate. If the production of knowledge about composition implies its disruption or even its failure, then one might understand a reticence to develop such knowledge. Yet, this frightening danger may be no more than an illusion. In any case, one thing is certain: all composers do not value this emphasis on spontaneity vs reflexivity, which essentially likens them to animals. For instance, Jonathan Harvey believes that artistic activity, as opposed to a craftsmanship, possesses a specific dynamic, which begins with the raised awareness of what was once only a semi-conscious thought and leads to the latter’s subsequent development.17 Therefore, if the phenomenon described by Dusapin exists, it is neither documented nor widespread.

An approach that accounts for the epistemological and methodological aspects of such a dilemma remains to be determined. Obviously, the scientific approach and the studied activity are both implicitly subject to interference when the composer is involved in collecting data in order to produce specific knowledge of his/her own activity, known for its private and tacit nature. However, interferences between the observer and the observed occur often in both the social sciences and the humanities, as well as in experimental ‘hard’ science. Therefore, the implementation of guidelines meant to control and evaluate this obstacle is essential to the empirical study of composition as an activity. In other words, composers and analysts need to establish observation methods that provide reliable data without crippling or distorting the creative compositional process.

In their introduction to Musical Creativity, Deliège and Richelle point out that the refusal to approach creativity as anything other than an inherent global aptitude measurable through standard empirical studies involving a group of subjects has deprived the cognitive sciences of information about this very phenomenon.

It was assumed [by Guilford] that a special aptitude, labelled creativity, is measurable per se. The obvious fact that creativity is always in one specific domain, using a certain material, resulting in some type of product, was ignored. As a consequence, individuals with high scores in tests of creativity were reputed to be creative, irrespective of their creative activities in real life.18

In order to reduce the existing gap between creativity as studied in a laboratory and real-life creative activity, these same authors suggest that we ‘look at those behaviours that eventually lead to novelty in a given field of arts or science’ and ‘account for them by identifying the processes involved’; hence the authors’ proposal to ‘get rid of creativity and look at creative acts’.19

Such a proposal offers new perspectives that can intertwine, on the one hand, psychological research which focuses on the general creative potential of a population of ‘ordinary’ subjects across a variety of competences, and, on the other hand, specialised fields (literary criticism, art history, musicology) that only study the life and work of history’s most noteworthy creators. We endorse Deliège and Richelle’s will to transgress, or at the very least blur, the line between the study of induced (and presumably replicable) phenomena and that of socio-historically situated ones, selected because of their exceptional nature – a difficult task since epistemological doubt occurs on either side of this l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• 1 Empirical and Historical Musicologies of Compositional Processes: Towards a Cross-fertilisation
• 2 Process, Self-evaluation and Lifespan Creativity Trajectories in Eminent Composers
• 3 Musical Imagery in the Creative Process
• 4 Meaningful Engagement with Music Composition
• 5 The Practice of Diverse Compositional Creativities
• 6 Constraint, Collaboration and Creativity in Popular Songwriting Teams
• 7 The Influence of the Extra-musical on the Composing Process
• 8 Improvisation as Real-time Composition
• 9 On Computer-aided Composition, Musical Creativity and Brain Asymmetry
• 10 Defining Inspiration? Modelling the Non-conscious Creative Process
• 11 Rules, Tactics and Strategies for Composing Music
• Index