Myself and illustrious composer/colleague/friend James Saunders have had an article published in the new music journal MusikTexte (#173, May 2022) entitled ‘What do composers do all day?’. The piece contains additional contributions from composers Joanna Bailie, Freeman Edwards, Larry Goves, Bryn Harrison, Hanna Hartman, Evan Johnson, Michael Maierhof, Cassandra Miller, Caitlin Rowley, Elena Rykova, Charlie Sdraulig, Laura Steenberge, Ming Tsao, and Amnon Wolman. You can buy a copy of the print edition now on the MusikTexte website, with a free online and English version being added next month.
At Bath Spa University we have a weekly series of guest composer talks, our Creative Sound Forum. For a while, with entirely purely playful intentions, I asked each of our guests the same question at the end of their talk - “If I were a fly on the wall, watching you work, what would I actually see? That is, what does the act of composition actually look like for you?”
The answers were unexpectedly varied and fascinating. Some composers described the importance of walks or runs through which to think, some professed boredom, others confessed to working in bed. The only thing that they all seemed to have in common was that none of them bore any genuine resemblance to any romantic image of a composer - that of the artist-genius channeling their brilliance fluently and uninterruptedly on to a page. Somehow, asking this question had unintentionally provided an insight into something simultaneously provocative and humanising, illuminating the interstices of art, everyday life, and personal identity.
This article develops and documents this kind of questioning, replacing my playful quip with a more formalised provocation (re-printed below), to which we invited composers to provide written responses. The goal remained the same, though. We wanted each of the participant-authors to review and reflect on particular aspects of their practice that normally escape attention from prying musicological eyes. The responses we received were once again beautiful in their diversity. Some were brutally frank, others delicately poised. Together they offer a glimpse into the act of composition ‘on the ground’.
For me, what is rendered visible from even in this preliminary survey are the boundaries and power structures that govern what permitted to be considered part of a compositional process. If hexachordal rotation can be discussed as part of a compositional act, surely something like daydreaming can too. Foucault seems to lurk in the background of these pages somewhere.
As always, more questions than answers are revealed by what emerges here and there is much more to explore here. But I hope you reading this insight as much as we did putting it together - huge thanks to everyone who participated.
Matthew
Provocation: What do composers do all day?
In one sense the question posed by the title simply asks how composers make their music. In this more regular sense, this question, especially when framed by a consideration of technique and aesthetic, is a familiar obsession in compositional thought and its discourse. Libraries, journal archives, festival brochures, pamphlets, public talks, and YouTube all abound in answers to it. Much has been written detailing compositional techniques, processes, and workflows, usually with ensuing exotic technical vocabularies: serial arrays; hexachordal combinatorics; FFT protocols; cut’n’paste. The list goes on.
However this more regular sense of the question can occlude some of the fundamentals of what activity actually occupies our composing time: what we really do all day. We might work in mad bursts, interspersed with aimless staring (at the view from our studio window, perhaps). Or we might work slowly and methodically, meticulously making our way across the page, pausing only for meals and bathroom breaks. We might work in a state of stress, or a state of mindful relaxation. We might work at dusk, or at daybreak, or both. There are far fewer words devoted to discussion of this.
Over the past couple of years, the significance of our working routines and environments has changed considerably, causing us to question the way this impacts upon what we do as composers. In discussion with each other, our students, and other composers and practitioners, the importance of the everyday in relation to what we make has become more pressing.
We wanted to know what other composers thought about the where, when, who and what of composing in relation to their own practice. So we made a short provocation (December 2021) and asked composers to respond. The replies we received below reveal a wide-ranging set of concerns from the very personal to the mundane, but in their different ways expose something of the inner life of people making work with sound.