Composition as Critical Technical Practice

In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework results have been released.  

A simple internet search shows only those institutions eager to display pride in their ranking (e.g. University of Bristol, Royal Holloway, Guildhall School and Cambridge). Via (social) media, a more troubling picture can be found, with arts departments under some type of threat despite seemingly encouraging results. Wolverhampton University seems to have done well, but intends to slash a significant number of jobs, reminding us (cynically?) of the many it had added before submitting its REF report. Similarly, De Montfort University boasts positive ranking yet its employees cry for help. 

With the financial implications of the results as yet unknown, it is difficult to assess to what extent this negativity is related to the REF. Anyway, some have stated that practice-based subjects are not negatively impacted. Indeed, whereas for the previous REF in 2014, university-employed composers lamented having to seek approval for their creative work by adding academic output, sparking a debate about composition-"as"-reserarch (cf. here, here, and here), this time around, such composers’ sighs seem largely to have dissipated. This may mean that composition itself is (more) acknowledged as research output than before, at least in the UK.

Surely less coincidental is the 2021 Leuven University Press publication of the 373-page multi-authored volume, Sound Work: Composition as Critical Technical Practice, edited by Jonathan Impett, whose roles as composer, director of research at the Orpheus Instituut, and associate professor at Middlesex University, makes his voice(s) especially noteworthy. The book can be acquired for 62,5€ here, where the table of contents can be viewed. Since the publication represents a constructive addition to the debate about composition and research, Jonathan’s introduction, including summaries of the chapters, is reproduced underneath.

 

 

Music-Making and Storytelling

Jonathan Impett

 

This volume is concerned with storytelling: the stories composers tell about composition, to themselves and to others. In the past, the self-reporting of composition has tended to consider the areas in which it aspires to be innovative, or the theories—musical, aesthetic, social, scientific, technological—that have informed the work, rather than the activity of composition itself. The knowledge presented in such cases often lies outside composition. There is no lack of accounts by composers demonstrating how their work embodies this theory or that principle, or introduces a new technical concept. There is no shortage of investigation of the ontology and epistemology of the “work” as a persisting historical cultural phenomenon, but the technologies and context of composition have undergone a paradigm shift. The present, to repurpose a phrase, is another country.

In contemporary science, the role of storytelling is increasingly recognised not only in science communication but also in its self-image and hence in scientific practice (Davies et al. 2019). In the discussion of music creation, several factors contribute to the urgent need for new discourse, new voices, and new kinds of story. The cultural landscape is transformed, and with it the perceived role of “art” music and the nature of public critical discourse. In a prevailing atmosphere of individualism, the commonality of creative experience is all the more important—both among artists themselves and with their audience. And composition is largely supported as an activity of knowledge-production, as research, rather than as creative development per se. We need, therefore, to tell more material, honest, and useful stories—to seed discourse, to find resonances, to encourage critical engagement.

To paraphrase Brian Ferneyhough ([1982] 1995), composition walks a tightrope between formalism and the arbitrary, a process informed by theory and intuition, constraint and contingency, expectation and experience. It is a continuous, situated, iterative process of inscription and reflection in which its models, metaphors, aspirations, obligations, tools, and technologies all play a part; it has a narrative, or rather multiple narratives (Impett 2016). This process and its products embody assumptions, choices, and intentions that have significant implications for the position, role, and impact of artist and artwork alike—critical implications, whether the artist chooses to regard them as such or not. The artefacts of composition—however notated, improvised, virtual, embodied, or technologically implemented—are hybrid technical objects and require a technicity of engagement on the part of artist and listener.

The hypothesis of this volume is that we might rather consider composition as a design process, and that we might usefully study its dynamics and decisions in the spirit of what Philip Agre described as critical technical practice. Agre developed his ideas in the context of his work in artificial intelligence (AI), at a moment of deep transformation in that field, of moving from “mentalist” to “interactionist” models. His fundamental insight is that individual practice— what he described as “the practical logic of computer work” (Agre 2002)—is indivisible from the social context and implications of its products; they constitute a single critical activity:

 

The word “critical” here does not call for pessimism and destruction but rather for an expanded understanding of the conditions and goals of technical work.... Instead of seeking foundations it would embrace the impossibility of foundations, guiding itself by a continually unfolding awareness of its own workings as a historically specific practice.... It would accept that this reflexive inquiry places all of its concepts and methods at risk. And it would regard this risk positively, not as a threat to rationality but as the promise of a better way of doing things. (Agre 1997a, 22–23)

 

Agre criticises conventional accounts that present work and theory as a mutually justifying pair—one as the natural embodiment of the other—as insufficient. Such accounts hide narrative, decisions, and parameters, avoid critical context. Instead, he outlines a practice that is reflective in two directions: in terms of what it actually involves—intentions, conditions, means, theory, actions, constraints, events—and in terms of its context—cultural, social, technological, and, in our case, artistic and even personal. He describes a single disciplinary field: “one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique” (Agre 1997b, 155). This is not the place to hazard a reductive summary of Agre’s concept, but we must point to a recent resurgence of interest in areas such as software studies (Kitchin and Dodge 2014), intelligent design (Somerson and Hermano 2013), architecture (Parisi 2013), and artificial intelligence itself, which has been massively re-energised with recent advances in machine learning. Like the artefacts of these fields, music inhabits a liminal material state, is heavily dependent on the means of its realisation, retains its identity across manifold instantiations, is adaptive to the context of its embodiment, and is the product of deep concept, abstract imagination, and painstaking technique and experiment.

In critical technical practice, reflection and its articulation are integral and essential to the process; there is no single model any more than there is a single model of composition. This volume explores the potential of critical technical practice (CTP) as an ethos and discourse for the articulation and sharing of knowledge production through composition across styles, practices, and contexts. The technological context, materials, and practices of composition have always been closely coupled. The wider cultural role and understanding of composition as an activity has been transformed with each technological paradigm shift. This volume considers the new cultural, professional, epistemic, and institutional situation of composition in the particular contexts of the wide range of current technologically enabled practices: music information retrieval, live coding, live notation, intelligent instrument-building and hacking, interactive, autonomous, and algorithmic approaches, distributed creativity, sound art, and computer-assisted composition. As an inherently reflexive approach, CTP brings implications for the development of these same contemporary practices.

The opening chapters consider the relevance and potential of critical technical practice in music from wide perspectives. Alan Blackwell’s “Too Cool to Boogie” sets the scene by locating Agre’s thought in the field of artificial intelligence, its issues and subsequent developments. Critical technical practice presents a critical response to the impasse of AI in the 1980s; technical and philosophical views are inseparable if the field is to realise its potential for good, and this relationship is reflected in the stories practitioners tell about their own work. The author explores Agre’s thought by situating it in a specific instance of his own practice: studying funk bass. The interaction of technical methods with the embodied, situated, complexly motivated narrative of human practice emerges as the object of critical reflection.

David Rosenboom’s magisterial “Illusions of Form” presents a body of creative thought that has evolved in parallel and kept pace with the developments that have produced the concept of CTP, the current 4E view of cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended), and recent advances in biotechnology. Rosenboom invokes Agre’s ideas to construct a critical reflection on the development and implications of his own radical concept of propositional music. Received boundaries of genre or discipline are abandoned, not to indifference but to a new mode of artistic-technical-scientific endeavour—an artscience, its methodology informed by the current concept of emergent engineering. Composition becomes an activity of world-model building, an imaginative process that engages with the cognitive processes of performers and listeners alike, using means and models derived from and developed with advances in science and technology. Through examples of neuromusical propositions, musical configuration spaces and emergent collaborative projects, Rosenboom lays the ground for a new artscience discourse. In his vision, critical technicity is in operation throughout the acts of composition, performance, and listening.

The software-hardware binary central to current technology-based practice is examined in Nicolas Collins’s “What to Ware?” He suggests a taxonomy, a series of axes along which their different affordances and constraints might be understood. This illuminates the artist’s selection of tools as a series of conscious choices, all informed by a fundamental critical question in art, that of truth to materials—in this case, whether music made with electronics should sound like electronic music.

Collins’s fine-grained analysis of craft is complemented by Ann Warde’s broad recontextualising of the very activity of composition. She pursues a process of substitution to explore the prospect of a “critical musical practice,” such that composition becomes a way of imagining and modelling “a world we’d like to perceive and experience—an environment: a social, physical, tactile environment.” Warde performs a further inversion: by seeing music as a technology, she presents it as having a wider function in its own present. These substitutions shed new light both on the wide relevance of Agre’s ideas beyond their apparent subject area, and on the potential role of music as a critical instrument.

The intimate dance of the technical and the critical is explored in Nicholas Brown’s “The Composer’s Domain.” The essentially transdisciplinary nature of the work of composing with computers emerges from two case studies. Such work becomes a way of interrogating both assumptions about music-making and the world-views embodied in technology; it proposes alternative ontologies for music and poses new questions concerning our relationship with the natural, cultural, and engineered world we inhabit. At the heart of this music is the fulcrum between the digital and the mechanical, developing the thesis of the chapter by Nicolas Collins. The abstraction, conditionality, and absolute nature of the digital are balanced by the situated and responsive materiality of the ways in which the work is shared.

The editor’s “Dissociation and Interference” considers the relevance, implications, and enactment of critical technical practice in the current environment of art as knowledge production. Crucial differences emerge between CTP and actor–network theory: a CTP approach addresses the significant gap in current music discourse between material and social perspectives. Agre insists on the identification of moments of dissociation and interference as a key component, and this is discussed in the context of the practical business of composition.

McLaughlin, Di Scipio, and Romero examine particular aspects of contemporary composition, as they emerge from the writers’ own practices—aspects with broad common resonance. Scott McLaughlin pursues the question of material indeterminacy in “The Impossibility of Material Foundations.” The composer sets the conditions for the development of a relationship between performer and an unpredictable and unstable performance environment—a combination of technique and instrument. This essentialises and micro-examines the situation that effectively obtains in any “conventional” performance. A touchstone comes from Agre, in his description of such a process as “embrac[ing] the impossibility of foundations, guiding itself by a continually unfolding awareness of its own workings as a historically specific practice” (1997a, 23). Composition is thus acknowledged as a situated experimental process, the recursive exploration of the infinite possible networks conceived as a “phase space.”

Agostino Di Scipio puts forward a view of live electronic music as an inherently critical practice in “Thinking Liveness in Performance with Live Electronics.” His chapter begins with a comprehensive historical survey of practice and concepts. Di Scipio’s concept of liveness involves not simply human presence or “real-time” operation—itself a very plastic idea—but the real lived time and space of performance. He proposes the performance ecosystem as an operative unit, such that system and site are coupled in performance. Critical technicity runs through practice and performance into their social context: “By way of turning the hybrid constitution of techno-ecosystems into phenomenologically shared auditory events, these mediators audibly expose the human, all-too-human reality of our pervasive technological condition.”

In “Experiment and Experience,” Lula Romero resists the notion of mastery—of craft or materials. In the pursuit of openness of relationship between composer and work, she finds Cage’s apparent rejection of the subject insufficient as a response. Instead she sees a continuous intra-action between composer and materials; the resulting music is a product of their interference. Such openness becomes a process of continuous critique, evading commodification and offering alternative world models. This critique is confronted with each technical decision: the spatial distribution of multiple possible outcomes, the design of and negotiation with systems. Romero proposes a reformulation of the composer as a feminist subject.

The accounts of Magnusson, Fantechi, Haddad, and Zattra set out from very practical aspects of contemporary composition practice. Metacompositional thought in the design of a performance system is a theme developed in Thor Magnusson’s account of his development of the Threnoscope, a live coding environment. As a mode of compositional inscription, code has its own dynamics in terms of imagining and structuring work—or rather potential work—and in its dissemination and reuse. Here it becomes a context for experimentation as well as a creative tool; conventional categories of modes of practice and expertise dissolve as questions of music theory, cognition, technology, interface, and instrument design provoke and inform one another. Projects such as the Threnoscope invite us to dynamically re-evaluate notions of design, composition, performance, improvisation, and collaboration.

The activity of com-posing—the putting together of music—is predicated at some level on a conceptual model of the resources and materials to be used. The management of resources—their representation, their perceived or ascribed relationships, their disposition—is so fundamental an activity, so practical, that it may seem pre-technical and is certainly lost in most accounts of practice. Instead, the decisions it embodies reflect a critical stance that informs all its artefacts. Daniela Fantechi explores this topic in “A Few Reflections about Compositional Practice,” a refreshingly candid account of personal practice as revealed in a series of case studies. Awareness of choice—of taste, of the changing objects of attention and of provisional, variable parameters of categorisation— evolves from an autoethnographic discipline to a guiding critical stance. This generates a narrative of form emerging from levels of compositional memory and the inherent temporality of the material.

Karim Haddad’s “Temporal Poetics” presents a way of conceiving musical time and of manipulating the temporality of musical entities mentioned by Fantechi. This is contiguous with the roots of Western mensural notation in the ars nova, but also with Hölderlin’s assertion of rhythm as the essential property of art, of nature, and of knowledge. Computer-assisted composition restores the flow of time to the working environment; the temporalities of imagination, experimentation, composition, and performance modulate each other. Haddad’s approach recognises the particular temporality of materials while being situated in both the historical flow of musical culture and a critical exchange with contemporary technology.

Music research has recently focussed on collaborative work in contemporary music creation; we might more accurately observe that music research has recently come to take note of the extent to which collaborative or distributed processes are vital to music creation in general. As the technological possibilities available to musicians have proliferated, distributed technical expertise has become crucial at the stage of composition. A very particular mode of collaboration obtains in institutional studios where composers are invited to work with the assistance of technical experts. Laura Zattra examines the dynamics of such situations in “Collaborative Creation in Electroacoustic Music,” by exploring three cases in detail. Useful terms derive from design practices; workflow, communication, and the co-evolution of musical imagination with technical experimentation emerge as significant factors. The complicity, empathy, creativity, and openness of the assistant are crucial, and yet their professional status is not always resolved.

Finally, Alessandrini and Zhu, Field, and Ciciliani present visions for new ontologies of music, each taking a unique critical stance and exploring its ramifications for their technical practice. Patricia Alessandrini’s feminist multimedia monodrama Parlour Sounds is the case study at the heart of her chapter with Julie Zhu. In the spirit of Haraway-inspired cyberfeminism, the project challenges predominant practices of technology, confronting those of music with those of the domestic environment. Such displacement brings the work into new critical relationships with many aspects of its production and context: the collaborative processes of composition, of interface design and construction, the physical location of work with music technology, the relationship of art with daily life, and the power structures at play in the soliciting and production of music. Cyberfeminist principles inform the proposal of an alternative to dominant paradigms of electronic music, and a theoretical framework in which roles and distinctions between composition, design, improvisation, and performance are blurred.

Ambrose Field seeks to change the vocabulary of creative practice from another perspective. Much compositional activity now happens in an academic context, where it is supported and expected to explain itself as research. This transition has been extensively discussed: from the epistemological implications to the ways in which it reflects a new mode of supporting cultural and creative development. From the composer’s perspective, however, such discussion has largely been concerned with defending creative freedom or claiming epistemological relevance. Instead, Field addresses the question of the practice itself directly. When creative practice also becomes experimental practice, what are the ramifications for both the self-image and the practical behaviour of the practitioner? Field considers the formulation of questions and especially the development of new approaches to workflow, which he describes as “the creative envelope.”

If the practices of music creation are to enter a more dynamic phase of critical awareness, the relationship with the listener, audience, or co-participant becomes crucial. For whom is this work intended? How is it to be received, in what circumstances and with what expectations of attention or investment? Marko Ciciliani’s “Designing Audience–Work Relationships” explores this in detail through three of his audiovisual projects—performance/installation hybrids. They work with time, space, and multiplicity of phenomenon to experiment with modes of social and individual interaction. Hall’s “proxemics” provide a metric of intimacy. Patterns of temporality and attention emerge from the engagement of performers and listeners, not as an epiphenomenon but within the scope of compositional imagination, design, and critical reflection.

Through such processes of critical technical reflection, of detailed discussion of the practical narrative of composition, common themes emerge from this multiplicity of creative practices. Technology is present not for technology’s sake, but because our evolving relationship with technology is one of the defining paths of our current state. A systems view of practice and its artefacts appears often, just as the mid-century visions of cybernetics are informing recent work in the new AI—currently searching for ways to confront its own hidden assumptions, tastes, and prejudices. Above all we see references to building models of possible worlds; David Rosenboom’s propositional music stands as paradigm in this regard.

Composition is not the sudden, unitary embodiment of an idea but a situated, distributed, time-extensive activity. And the products of this activity, of these decisions, reflect world views and values; they propose new models. If we are to talk about music in material ways and music is to do its important work in the world, then composers must begin to have new kinds of conversation with each other and with the wider community. It is hoped that this volume will contribute to such a development.

 

References

 Agre, Philip E. 1997a. Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1997b. “Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI.” In Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide, edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William Turner, and Les Gasser, 131–57. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

———. 2002. “The Practical Logic of Computer Work.” In Computationalism: New Directions, edited by Matthias Scheutz, 129–42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Davies, Sarah Rachel, Megan Halpern, Maja Horst, David Kirby, and Bruce Lewenstein. 2019. “Science Stories as Culture: Experience, Identity, Narrative and Emotion in Public Communication of Science.” JCOM: Journal of Science Communication. 18 (5): A01. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.18050201.

Ferneyhough, Brian. (1982) 1995. “Form—Figure—Style: An Intermediate Assessment.” In Brian Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and Richard Toop, 21–28. London: Routledge. Essay written 1982; first published 1984 in French translation (Labrys 10).

Impett, Jonathan. 2016. “Making a Mark: The Psychology of Composition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, edited by Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut, 2nd ed., 651–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. 2014. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Parisi, Luciana. 2013. Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Somerson, Rosanne, and Mara L. Hermano, eds. 2013. The Art of Critical Making: Rhode Island School of Design on Creative  Practice. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. 

 

CfP: composition as critical practice

For its 10th Research Seminar, "Sound Work", the Orpheus Institute is investigating "composition as critical technical practice". 

Jonathan Impett

The seminar is convened by composer-performer-researcher Jonathan Impett, and will take pace on 21-23 November 2016, in Ghent, Belgium. At about that time, the last installment of the hot 2015 UK debate on "composition as research" will have been a year old (see here and here for more on that debate). The Orpheus Seminar "will consider composition as a research activity - a process informed by theory and intuition, constraint and contingency, expectation and experience. It is a continuous iterative process of inscription and reflection in which its models, metaphors, aspirations, obligations, tools and technologies all play a part. This process is distributed temporally, socially and materially. The artefacts of composition – however notated, improvised, virtual, embodied or technologically implemented – are hybrid technical objects. Neither pure ‘inspiration’ not unmediated formalism account for what they contribute. We might rather consider composition as a design process, and study its dynamics and decisions in the spirit of critical technical practice – a term coined by Philip Agre in his work on the creation of the artefacts of artificial intelligence."

Keynote speakers are Nicolas Collins (Art Institute of Chicago) and Alan Blackwell (interdisciplinary design - University of Cambridge). The call aims at proposals by practitioners from all disciplines, particularly welcoming "presentations that explore the demonstration of composition as research in innovative ways." The deadline for proposals, to be sent to info@orpheusinstituut.be, is August 17, 2016.

More information can be read here.

IRCAM PhD positions in compositional research²

As almost two years ago, IRCAM announces a call for its "music doctorate".

Contrary to 2014, the call is now issued in English as well as in French. (In the French version it says "from September 2015 onwards", but that is most likely a mistake due to the almost word for word copying of the previous call.) New also: the preliminary selection, the fact that there is no mentioning of a maximum number of contracts to be awarded (nor whether there will be contracts, i.e. paid positions), and two additional categories of possible topics.

Unchanged is the vague position IRCAM takes in the ongoing debate on research and/through/as composition. It purports its program to be "distinct from a doctorate in musicology", but only the importance of the candidates being "high-level composers" (however that will be assessed) and of a technological dimension of the proposed research project is stressed.

We are curious to learn of the current IRCAM doctorandi.

  

Mind the gaps: Roels' study on AR in composition

In comments on a post about the relationship between composition and research (here), musician and archaeologist Roya Arab suggested it would be helpful to have some empirical studies investigating composition-research projects "so that applicable knowledge, theories, techniques and tools that have been gained from these research projects can be established (or not as the case may be)". As it happens, Flemish composer-researcher Hans Roels took a comparative look at research projects by composers in Flanders. I asked him to introduce his study for this blog.

Hans Roels

Developing meaningful relations – a study of artistic research in music composition in Flanders

This text is a summary of a study that I have made on research in music composition in Flanders. It is the result of a collaboration between the Orpheus Institute and the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (Artesis Plantijn University College) within the MAO meetings (Module Artistiek Onderzoek). The study is based on the concept that artistic research is characterized by a close interaction between research and artistic practice. Therefore, I examine how artistic practice and fields of knowledge, including artistic research, are integrated in the design and method of the research outputs. Although I focus on the results and proposals in this text, I'll start by giving a short overview of the design of my study.

My sources consist of five Ph.D. dissertations and eleven master theses in music composition from the five institutions for Higher Music education in Flanders. These outputs were all made between January 2011 and July 2014. I have also set up an online survey in which 23 composers participated. These composers were performing or supervising research. This survey provided me with additional background information for the analysis of the dissertations and theses.

My first finding in this study is that the disclosure and dissemination of research outputs is not yet optimal. It is not obvious to obtain a full paper or digital copy of all the dissertations or master theses. There may be several reasons:

• different library systems and databases;
• no uniform requirements for the artistic parts of the research outputs: some dissertations contain scores, others don't, and yet others only contain a selection of scores;
• some editors object to disclose scores and recordings;
• some composers-researchers object to disseminate their dissertation or score, e.g. because the composition wasn't performed yet.

The next insights relate to the integration of research and artistic practice. Although the composers/researchers underline the importance of a close interaction between practice and research in their discourse and the online survey, the dissertations and theses demonstrate a considerable influence from established disciplines such as musicology, music history, or music cognition. The research questions are mostly answered in the text part on these established disciplines. Only in one of the five dissertations is there a clear interaction between practice and research and to a lesser degree in two other ones. In general, the text about the personal practice is relatively short compared to the part based on music cognition or  history.

In the master theses the gap isn't that wide: generally, the items and problems are more closely related to artistic practice, and the text about the personal practice is as extensive as the other parts. Master research also shows more diversity in design and methods . Together with the Ph.D. dissertations, they could form a larger corpus (to develop artistic research in music composition) with a wider array of research approaches. But, in fact, master research is undervalued, and its results and insights are not used in post-master research.

Another gap reveals itself between the discourses on artistic research on the one hand and results of artistic researchers on the other. The number of references to artistic research literature in the dissertations is never more than five, although there are always at least 100 references in the bibliography. Moreover, the general argumentation and content of these dissertations and theses does not build upon other artistic research. There are of course a few exceptions, i.e. positive examples, and there are also original and fascinating designs and methods, but, generally, there are almost no references to artistic research, and the argumentation about the relation between research and artistic practice is short and simple.

The same remark applies to the reasoning about the role of the researcher. Although reflection is acknowledged to be important in the online survey, it is absent or idiosyncratic in the dissertations and master research, simple and without references to the extensive literature on reflective research, and to the literature on the position of the researcher in his/her research.

The results in this study can be summarized as three gaps that exist between:

1.   master and postmaster research;

2.   discourses on artistic and reflective research on the one hand and results of artistic researchers on the other;

3.   text/research part and the artistic practice.

What can we do to bridge these gaps in music composition research? How can we ensure that the work of a researcher has an impact on another researcher or composer? That they read and discuss each other's work? I have three proposals , partly based on practices, examples and suggestions, that I discovered during this study.

The first proposal is very basic and straightforward: the results of research in music composition need to become more accessible. This is a conditio sine qua non if we want to improve the impact of research and have composer-researchers listen to each other's production. Also, minimum requirements and control mechanisms need to be set up by institutions to assure that the research output contains all the artistic productions, and that it ends up in libraries. On an inter-institutional level, a dissemination procedure could be set up to select the most valuable outputs of the master research.  Together with the Ph.D. dissertations, the master theses create a larger corpus of research output, which helps future researchers to consciously choose their own approach and foresee problems. In the 'corpus' of my study, three research approaches can be distinguished: a theoretical approach, in which new compositional concepts are conceived of and elaborated upon; an analytical approach, in which personal compositions are based on insights from the analyses of historical compositions; and, finally, a 'non-western' one, in which ethnic music is studied.

This last approach faces serious challenges, as these projects did not manage to transcend the trivial, all the while describing the links between their research and artistic practice (e.g. non-western scales or rhythms that are described to be part of the compositions). The larger collection of master and postmaster outputs helps to spot challenges of specific research approaches. Finding artistically relevant research questions and situating them in the current music practice, seem to be urgent, especially in this 'non-western' approach.

My second proposal concerns the individual researchers’ responsibility to develop a more elaborate discourse in dialogue with other texts on the overall design of the research. The parts of the dissertations and theses that deal with a specialized topic could be shortened in favour of a well-argued positioning of the research project within a diverse and rich tradition of reflective and artistic research and practice. A way to realize this could consist of expressing the position as an artistic researcher towards existing, strong knowledge domains in music composition. In this study two such domains were identified: (score) analysis and the (research) history of composition. This 'research history', pre-dating the official launch of 'artistic research', consists of a large and diverse collection of texts, compositional practices and products, documented by various people and researchers. Examples are the 'recherche musicale' at the GRM institute in France in the second half of the 20th century, or a book such as Henry Cowell’s 'New Musical Resources'.

The other knowledge domain is analysis, and I use this term for the discipline that examines the result (or product) of the compositional practice. Especially the analysis of the score has a long and strong tradition in the music conservatories.

In the dissertations and theses of this study, both analysis and the history of composition pop up regularly, as could be expected from an influential knowledge domain. These domains appear both traditional and new forms. However, these new forms are often implicit, rather than articulated and elaborated in order to develop the discourses on artistic research in composition.

Let me illustrate this with score analysis. In the theses and dissertations of my study, a kind of 'reflective' analysis deals with the scores of the composer-researcher. These are analysed to obtain new insights on what s/he is doing while composing, on the inspirational sources or on the relation with other composers and compositions. Nevertheless, in most cases, the researcher/composer (safely) relies on a traditional score analysis (pitch scales, structure, etc.) without explicitly asking how the reflection and self-learning capacity through an analysis of the score can be enhanced. The goal is new, but the method is conventional. At this point, the lack of knowledge of the relevant literature hinders the researcher in elaborating this new form of analysis and asking challenging questions about the role of 'reflective' analysis.

My third proposition is a call to create a real research environment for music composition research, and to rely less on an individual approach. An environment that allows for experiences and practices that are shared and discussed between researchers and artists. On the one hand, such a network should support and stimulate a researcher in experimenting with unknown research designs and methods, to make room for diversity in research styles. This diversity would be welcome in Flanders, especially, where certain types of composition research are lacking. For instance, no reflective enquiry based on dialogue was found in any of the studied dissertations and theses, even though this is a widespread practice outside of composition. On the other hand, such an environment should also challenge a researcher to develop a thoroughly argued and an elaborate stance on the fundamental concepts and methods in his/her project.

Although the current study was constrained to the situation in Flanders and considered a limited number of dissertations and master theses, it served to create a global overview of composition research and to discuss the requirements for developing these individual research practices into a research community or discipline. I hope that these findings and ideas can inspire other people outside Flanders.

Finally, I’d like to make propose three -perhaps unrealistic- research plans for artistic research in music composition.

First, the “+1” plan, creating an extra research year for the most valuable master theses.

Second, the “-1” plan, to convince Ph.D. students to finish their dissertation one year before the end of their deadline. During the 'extra' year, the main part of the master thesis or the 'finished' dissertation remains the same, but time is spent on:

·       discussing and refining the concepts and design of the research project together with other researchers and composers;

·       expressing the relation with (score) analysis and the history of research in composition;

·       publishing and disseminating the research output.

Third, the “1+1=3” project, negotiating with several institutions to come to an overview and spot the gaps in current research. (For instance, there is no composition research using an 'emergent' method in Flanders.) Next, create an experimental research project which focuses on developing a research design, on performing the actual research during a short period, and on evaluating this design and its results.

I am convinced that these three plans -or mild provocations- could advance the current research in music composition, increase the impact of the individual research outputs and give artistic research in composition a more distinct shape.

This text is an adapted version of a presentation by the author on the EPARM 2015 conference (Graz, Austria). An extensive article on the study of music composition research in Flanders is currently (January 2015) under review. 

The UK debate / the AEC White Paper

2015 is in the past. As far as this blog goes, that year has certainly been marked by the composition-is-(not-)research debate. My response to John Croft’s article, the follow-up posts, and Scott McLaughlin’s report on the London discussion, have by far garnered most of the readers of all the texts on this site.

There has been a distinct feeling of closure: for composer Christopher Fox, editor of TEMPO (where John’s initial article was published), the journal’s freshly published 275th issue, with articles by Camden Reeves and Ian Pace, and with John Croft’s rebuttal to them, marked "the final innings […] of the great practice-as-research test match"; Ian published "final thoughts" on his blog, followed by what he called a "last post" on "300-word statements" (here for that post). On the other hand, an announcement came in through the mail, this week, of a combined live/online conference at the University of West London (see here) - dealing with such fundamental aspects of the matter as, for instance, "what is good output", echoing Scott's request for deciding on "what we think good research is" (here). Clearly, the last word has not been said, just yet.

Some such aspects have already been touched upon in this blog, e.g. why I thought composition should be debated especially (feeling uncomfortable with the fact that, as phrased elsewhere, "it is tacitly accepted that a musical composition is likely to qualify as some type of research much more than is the case for musical performances and recordings"), and, years ago, definitions, dissemination platforms, peer review systems, etc., all particular to AR.

The debate at City University "Can composition and

performance be research? Critical perspectives."

There are certainly aspects still worthwhile going into, such as the need to distinguish between a composition/performance and the act of composing/performing (including preparations) when talking about composition/performance-as-research. Or that stretch in the City University panel video (1h 06’25” – 1h 11’10”) where Ian Pace plays an excerpt from the Paul Dukas piano sonata “in light of some research”, which he briefly indicated to consist of his analysis of the work, his study of the relevant 17 recordings, and especially his consideration of late 19th-Century French pianism and distinct compositional aesthetics and approaches from that time. An applause followed his performance, and reports on the debate were written, but I find it strange that such an important statement - and I mean the performance - was not picked up on anywhere. I don’t want to doubt that Ian did analyze the work and the recordings, and that he dug deeply into the historical contexts, although that is only because I know him well enough to trust what is otherwise a mere assumption of mine. But am I to take the insights that his research established to be situated in his seemingly odd approach to the tempo change (perhaps relating to the "amorphous musical composition" that he mentioned in his introduction), or in his ignoring a two-bar long diminuendo (in order, maybe, to stress a more "strongly hierarchical approach to musical composition")? What options did he decide not to integrate into his interpretation, and why? Why play the trio section? How did the difference between looking at 19th century French pianism (and how did he do that?) and compositional aesthetics play out? Or were certain parameters such as timbre involved? (I can’t tell, as the microphone set-up doesn’t allow any serious assessment.) And so on. I am sure the above will sound like I am trying to be facetious, but I am genuinly at a loss. I cannot but think of Ian's statement (from here) that 

a sensitive listener with some familiarity with the work in question and performance practice might very well be able at least to assess, if not necessarily reconstruct in every detail, the research process which has given rise to one of David Milsom’s performances. A 40 000 word dissertation would certainly elaborate the process to a high degree, if done well, but I am not really sure that a 300 word statement could – or rather, if some point can be elucidated in 300 words but not clearly heard from the performance without such guidance, I would question the extent to which it is embodied in that performance

Ian's verbal introduction was a bit less than half of 300 words, but the excerpt he played was very limited in scope as well, and I do think I can consider myself familiar with the work in question (I have listened with the score, have compared other recordings, etc.). I cannot say that I have analysed 17 recordings, or that I have studied the particular context as vigourously as I suspect Ian did, but that would be against the point of listening to someone communicate the results of his research, anyway. So, I end up desperately trying to give his performance research credit while being aware that I achieve no more than committing intentional fallacies.

As I indicated above, I trust Ian enough to be sure that, if/when he publishes about his research, all will become clear. What I am interested in, at this point, is the hesitance with which positions seem to be taken. I do not think that "I am not really sure that a 300 word statement could [...]" and "a sensitive listener might" are a matter of understatement so often found in British English. As I don't think the silence of so many professionals involved in the debate is a coincidence. Or the fact that nobody from the UK has come forward (to my knowledge) with an answer to Piers Hellawell's question of the relation between composition and research when both are not equated (here), which was at the core of my response to John's article, and which led to the titles of four of my blog entries. 

Liduino Pitombeira

I did receive one reaction, however, from composer Liduino José Pitombeira de Oliveira, who sent me a +/-1400 word article Composition of Two Works for Woodwind Quintet based on the Systemic Modelling of Guarnieri’s Ponteio No. 25, which he wrote with Marcel Macedo de Castro Lima (downloadable here). The article proposes a compositional-analytical method

in order to identify a hypothetical compositional system that would have given rise to Camargo Guarnieri’s Ponteio No.25 [for piano], which was analyzed from the perspective of its harmonic and melodic structure. The resulting model allowed us to create two applications in MATLAB, which helped us during the compositional planning of two new works that are distinct from the original but still similar from the point of view of the selected parameters.

The article contains a referenced theoretical context, a report on the analysis, and details on the related planning for the new compositions. That the latter is still descriptive ("we started by", "next we have", "…was added", etc. ), and that the conclusions as well as other parts leave important questions wide open, certainly provides room for criticism. But, at least, with this verbal explication, critical assessment of the research is possible. With only the pieces (in their scores and/or performances), it would not be.

But I have made this argument before. More important for this post is the fact that Liduino Pitombeira is from Brazil, where a similar debate seems to be going on, and which was the reason for him to contact me. In hindsight, much of how the 2015 debate on the matter evolved – the expectance (or hope?) that all is said and done, probing fundamentals, the polarization, the latent thin ice, the tacit acceptances, etc. – is odd because this has all been taking place in a country where the composition-research degree is said to have been invented already in the 1960s (as Christopher Fox explains after 8’30” in the video of the November 2015 debate), and where there are now so many composers in academic positions (see Ian Pace’s numbers here). Even if the continuous references to past and future UK Research Excellence Framework exercises keep explaining most of the 2015 peak of interest in these matters, the historical background and critical mass of professional artist-researchers make it difficult not to wonder why this debate has not taken place long ago. And if it has, why was it unsuccesful enough to have to have it again? Despite all the legitimate criticism on the recent REF assessment, it seems that it can at least be credited with having reinvigorated the discourse.

Across the channel from the UK, I have witnessed the same debates in countless instances already within less than the first decade after AR was institutionally introduced at the beginning of this century. Some of it is ongoing, certainly in countries that hopped onto the bandwagon at a later stage than others. Nevertheless, last November, at the time of the City University debate, and even on the same island, the Association of European Conservatoires and Hochschules (AEC) held their Annual Congress and General Assembly, during which they presented their "White Paper on Artistic Research". (Downloadable in English, German, French, Italian, and even Polish.)

The organization, comprising over 300 member institutions for professional music training in 57 countries, has planned to set out "key concepts that are relevant in the sphere of higher music education, especially those where there may be some confusion or controversy as to their meaning or how they should be interpreted." (See here.) The first action concerns AR.

The AEC defines AR as solidly based in artistic practice, and as creating new knowledge within the arts. Features include critical dialogue (within the artistic field, with other relevant fields of knowledge, and between the scholarly and professional domains), critical reflection (on content and/or context, and on methods and processes), and the sharing of professional knowledge with the wider artistic community.

This endeavor equally shows signs of wanting to be politically correct: it recognizes that, while AR is seen to grow in importance, not every conservatoire will necessarily wish to participate in explicit research activities, nor use the term 'artistic research', and that precise definitions should not limit valid research ambitions. Also, that AR should be multi-facetted, and inclusive rather than tied to a particular orthodoxy.

Nevertheless, while the diversity is made explicit as including "a wide range of component activities, some of which may count as pure research, others as applied, and still others as developmental or translational research", and while, as stated, research should not to be understood as incompatible with more traditional forms of research, nor be without its distinctive emphasis upon the integral role of the artist in its research processes, it should "aspire to the same procedural standards that apply across the whole research spectrum – replicability (especially of procedures), verifiability, justification of claims by reference to evidence, etc."

The AEC furthermore considers the need for explaining both the process and the outcome of research "in ways that conform to the normal standards of comprehensibility among peers that are found in more traditional research". It allows for the exploration of new ways that are more closely embedded in the artistic component, but sees "the obligation of clear communication and dissemination" to be overriding. In other words, "It is not enough to perform a work and call this a 'communication of research results'".

There is much more in the White Paper, including views on pedagogical benefits in different educational cycles, the intention to help AR become a fully established discipline, to see it as complementary to the conservatoires’ main artistic focus, how the AEC envisions itself supporting its member institutions towards these causes, etc.

Several UK institutions are active members of the AEC: Birmingham Conservatoire, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Leeds College of Music, Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and the Royal Northern College of Music. Some of these are represented at the conference that opens tomorrow; in Leeds, the university has established a center in practice-as-research. I shall be interested to hear of how such parties position themselves and interact with their colleagues in the present UK landscape and ongoing discourse.