Composing in the World: a phenomenological model of composing music
Pedro Amorim Filho – [email protected]
Universidade Federal da Bahia
“The world is everything that is the case”1, says Wittgenstein in the first proposition of his Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus. And following the logic enchainment he affirms that the world is “the totality of facts, not of things”. The original first proposition, in german, is: “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist”. In a slightly different (but still correct) translation, we could say that the world is all that happens, and this way we can achieve a more precise glimpse of the phenomenon we are dealing with. Music is not a thing in itself, it happens; it is not just an object, but a phenomenon. So, to create music is to cause something to happen, or, as Herbert Brün would state: “Composition: to bring about that which without human intent would not happen”.
To propose a phenomenology of composition is to assume that the intentional acts of some beings are focused on the goal of creating music. In our western traditions these beings are called composers. But, the question remains: what do different composers do in common to each other? Which are the essential traits of this activity? Which attitudes allow us to point to someone and call him or her a composer?
Archaeology of musical composition
First of all, we should proceed to an investigation of the terms themselves. The foucaultian method of archaeology should provide the appropriate tools for this task. This method, by focusing on finding discontinuities in terms and ennoncés (statements), allows us to take a look at our level of misunderstanding of some historically conditioned conceptions. Let us start for the very word music.
In ancient Greece, the collection of phenomena called mousiké tekhné, had to do not only with something sounding, but, moreover, with things happening on time. The Muses inspired men in such distinct “artistic” activities as dance, songs, poetry, theatre, but not only what we should call arts nowadays: they were also responsible for conducting the fields of Astronomy and History. Moreover, within the total corpus of phenomena under the category of mousiké, only a part thereof (though a significant one, indeed) had to do with sound, but all of them dealt with time. On the other hand, many other tekhné that we nowadays consider as belonging to the arts – like painting and sculpting – were not mousiké as they were fixed in space, not requiring a development on time to be appreciated.
In the early Middle Ages, Boethius’ De Institutone Musica would synthesize some centuries of theory on musical thought by establishing the “three musicas”: 1 — musica instrumentalis, that one made with instruments and voices (i.e.: actually sounding music); 2 — musica humana, the music resulting from our bodily processes, like blood circulation, digestion, etc. and 3 — musica mundana, the music resulting from the movements of celestial objects, a development of the concept of Music of the Spheres and an actualization of the astronomic aspect of mousiké. These three musicas together provided the basis for a complete musical science that, before the Newtonian/Cartesian scientific paradigm, configured an efficient reading of the worldly phenomena.
As instrumental reason takes power over enchantment (as Daniel Chua and Penelope Gouk say, to mention but two authors) music’s broad spectrum influence on human thought and life is reduced to the modern field of the arts. This means that, after the analytical imperative took predominance as the hegemonic thinking system in western world, music could not anymore be considered a science or a knowledge field per se, but had to be categorised among the arts, although it is considered, by many classical authors, as Schopenhauer and Hegel, as the model for all the arts. This opens way to the paradigm of absolute music, in which the contextual frameworks tend to be neglected in favour of an essentialist conception of the musical phenomenon as purely sonorous and, in some way, abstract.
It is of interest here the anthropological homology between music and myth, proposed by Claude Levi-Strauss in his seminal work “The Raw and The Cooked”, and his suggestion that western music in the period known as “common practice” came to fulfil the role left by ancient myths in western world, relegated as non-science in the modern paradigm.
Fundamentals of composition
So, if music is not exactly the “art of sounds” and if absolute music is a myth, but a strong one to the extent that it survives in many intellectual discourses to this day, what can be said about composition as an activity along this many centuries? What is there in common between the acts of Machaut and those of Boulez? What did Guido D’Arezzo mean by ‘componere’ in his Micrologus (ca. 1030) and what has it to do with a composer like Webern? Why are J.S. Bach end John Cage called composers the same way? In short: what makes some human activity to be considered composing music?
In this case, the discontinuities go further by taking a different way of that of the concept of music. Composing, as a term, was first employed about a thousand years ago defining a simple method to put melodies together. But, if we incorporate the ancient meaning of poiésis (creation), as the Greeks employed it, into the semantic field of composing, we should pay attention to what Aristoxenus says in his Rhythmikon Stoicheion (or Elements of Rhythm, ca. 300 B.C). With the concept of rhythmizomenon, (“that which is rhythmizable”), Aristoxenus provides the grounds on which a phenomenology of composition can be developed. For rhythmopoeia (rhythmic creation) is omnipresent wherever and, better said, whenever can there be music, because music means always ‘events disposed on time’. And the art or the techniques of disposing such events on time is, nowadays, roughly what we call composition. It is crucial for this work to pay also attention to the fact that, according to Aristoxenus, the elements of musical rhythm are: melos (melodic sounds), lexis (words and sentences) and kinesis somatiké (bodily movements), and so we have access to a different notion of music in its very western roots.
This notion allows us to incorporate musical expressions outside the canon of common ‘absolute’ musical practice, which is characterised by the central role of sound and a presumed exclusion of body and of contextual meanings. The expressions to be awarded with musical citizenship include not only avant-garde and experimental trends in western “art music”, but also many ethnic and popular manifestations.
So, when we think about the creative act, there are some essential aspects that can be found in all of the referred phenomena above. Thinking of the act of composing as an open system, we can list two categories of aspects that are (presumably) always present: the internal aspects: those that constitute the very act of composing — and its external conditions: the environmental and idiosyncratic data belonging to the being-in-the-world that composes.
Internal aspects of composing
The internal aspects of composing, here proposed, can be reduced to three: material, processes and form. These terms are found abundantly in literature about composing. Roger Reynolds2, for example, makes reference to “appropriate materials”, “overall shape” and “elaborating procedures”. If we observe the contextual framework of his statements, it is kind of easy to convey that the adjectives (appropriate, overall, elaborating…) are just qualifying the rawer terms: materials, shape, and procedures.
Form
But, the terminology of Reynolds doesn’t lack precision. We must only think of it as a more applied approach, while we are looking for a broader and more theoretical construction. Let us take “shape” as an allegory of form, being form (or schema in Aristoxenian terminology) anything that can be perceived as separated or isolated from the rest of phenomena we experience. A broad phenomenological view of musical form should not be based on a virtual reference, like a score, or a partial one, like an analysis. So, as the score or the analysis of a particular sonata is not the sonata itself, to talk about ‘overall shape’ is, in the same way, to make reference to one level of actualization of musical forms, among plenty of possible others. This is why we propose the instances of “formation” (when the “total” form is being achieved in the very process of composition), “meta-form” (a form representing a form, the main example being the score in western tradition), and “performance”: the ultimate phenomenological actualization of a virtual musical form, when the form is actually experienced by someone.
Material
Should we proceed to an oversimplification, one can conceive material as anything (sensorial, physical, conceptual) that can be collected to compose. A note or a chord, are materials, as is the idea of sadness or a piece of wood. All depends on how this stuff is to be grabbed by the intention of composing. When a composer creates a new instrument to deliver new sounds, the physical objects he uses (wood, wire, electronic components) are materials of composing, since they have been collected to create music. The same for conceptual objects such as the above mentioned (chords, scales, styles, etc) and for sensorial references (loudness, pitch, feelings).
Processes
Through the same perspective, process would be anything that the composer actually does with the material collected. If I organize the 12 notes of the tempered system in a row, this is a process of composing. The same for such distinct activities as to make a field recording, to edit the same recording, to generate an algorithm, to toss coins or dice or to construct an experimental instrument with the piece of wood that was caught in the last paragraph.
Finally, completing the cycle3 form is always the result of the processes taken over the materials. But, as form is a heavily abstract concept, because everything has or can be perceived as having a form we are treating it here as a perceptual concept, being the composer, in this case, much more a proposer than a true creator of musical forms. All depends on what happens to these forms in the world.
External Conditions of Composing
All the system above described, yet coherent as it can be, is not sufficient to surround the phenomenon of composing music in the world. It lacks precisely the two main elements that make it all possible: the being and the world. Every time a composer composes he or she is involved in a process of resynthesizing the materials that have been caught from the world around. The capability of grabbing stuff from the environment is what we call here “inspiration”. The generic name for all the possible environments is “context”.
So, context and inspiration are the two minimal necessary conditions of composing. No composer works without an inspiration or outside some context. Here we must rehabilitate the word ‘inspiration’, to scratch out the core of conceptual prejudice it is covered with. By inspiration we refer to the ability of any creative being (such as a composer) to bring information from the world inside his conscience. The Latin roots of the word — in-spiratio = breath in — provides a good phenomenological metaphor. Otherwise, what we call inspiration has a lot to do also with the husserlian term Erschlossenheit, commonly translated as disclosure: an active openness to the lifeworld. This openness (or un-close-ness, to be more etymologically fundamentalist) is a condition to anybody who creates anything and so the same to somebody who intents to compose music.
But, this raw inspiration (slightly different from the romantic inspiration paradigm) needs to have an outside framework to refer. As obvious as it can be, it is necessary to reaffirm that this outside reference is what we are calling context. In the inside/outside transport here mentioned, the in is the composer’s consciousness and the out is the world he or she lives in. Both these conditions are present not only in the compositional act, of course, but to emphasize them in this field is something that urges to help devoid music from the superstition of absoluteness.
No creation (other than God’s, for the believers) is absolute since there is always a framework of reference it is immerse. This helps us to be able to observe and analyse different musical contexts in their needs and characteristics, and prevents us to impose canonical or “colonialist” hermeneutics over specific cultural objects.
So, finally, if we are to deal with compositional processes that do not respond to the western art music canon, the implication of context (the world around) and inspiration (the composer’s prerogatives) is an indispensable tool of analysis. Moreover, this tool is also useful for us composers to deconditioning our rooted and invisible habits.
The proposition of a phenomenology of composing is yet open to experimentation. The field of conceptualization is large enough to incorporate myriads of terms and exegetical discussions, but this is not the point. The implicit hope of this proposition is that we can achieve a more direct relationship with the compositional processes themselves, not submitted to hegemonic contexts of authority (such as western music canon, or others like jazz, for example). Each composing act has its own contexts and inspirations and it should be a right to be regarded taking this into consideration.
