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The influence of the extra-musical on the composing process
Article by
Shira Lee Katz
The Act of Musical Composition
(2012)
Copland1 wrote that many composers believe that the meaning of music is the
music itself and nothing more. Yet what if, instead of analysing composers’ scores
in an attempt to find meaning, we attempted to see what material or mental models
were important to composers as they set out to write? This chapter analyses
the writing process of three contemporary composers whose creative work is
heavily influenced by content outside of the musical domain. In this context, the
term ‘creative’ is a synthesis of Csikszentmihalyi’s,2 Gardner’s3 and Perkins’s4
characterisation of creativity, expressed in individuals who have forged new
territory in a particular domain and have demonstrated tenacity in exploring the
questions and problems of this area from different vantage points.
Knowledge about the creative process has increased dramatically over the last century, with a burgeoning literature on creativity together with a growing amount of research on the composing process. Despite this, there is still a gap in understanding the prototypical ways in which musical compositions come to fruition. What role do extra-musical factors play? Are composers even aware of the factors that influence their work? If composers do employ extra-musical influences as they compose, what is the role of this material in their work? In other words, there has been little investigation around the factors that inspire music composers when they write or about how initial ideas are synthesised as compositions develop.
Knowledge about the creative process has increased dramatically over the last century, with a burgeoning literature on creativity together with a growing amount of research on the composing process. Despite this, there is still a gap in understanding the prototypical ways in which musical compositions come to fruition. What role do extra-musical factors play? Are composers even aware of the factors that influence their work? If composers do employ extra-musical influences as they compose, what is the role of this material in their work? In other words, there has been little investigation around the factors that inspire music composers when they write or about how initial ideas are synthesised as compositions develop.
1
Copland, Aaron, Richard Kostelanetz and Steven Silverstein, Aaron Copland: A
Reader: Selected Writings 1923–1972 (New York: Routledge, 2004).
note text.
2
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York, 1996).
3
Howard Gardner, Creating Minds (New York, 1993).
4
David Perkins, The Mind’s Best Work (Cambridge, 1981)
Copland, Aaron, Richard Kostelanetz and Steven Silverstein, Aaron Copland: A
Reader: Selected Writings 1923–1972 (New York: Routledge, 2004).
note text.
2
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York, 1996).
3
Howard Gardner, Creating Minds (New York, 1993).
4
David Perkins, The Mind’s Best Work (Cambridge, 1981)
In a research study, 24 interviews were conducted with composers, three
of whom are the subjects of this chapter since they draw heavily from content
domains outside of music. This chapter explores how non-music domains (for
example, landscape architecture, poetry) influence the musical structure of these
composers’ output, within sections or movements, and with two of these three composers the more granular elements, such as instrumentation and chord choice, the smaller musical details.
For the three composers discussed in this paper, the extra-musical influences on their work are ones they have been familiar with and have valued for many years. In addition, they are characterised by a strong element of modularity, since they are already divided into discrete sections (such as architectural structures); each extra-musical influence has a unique character or physicality such that they may provide a useful ‘frame’ as the composers organise inchoate masses of musical materials.
In addition to making an argument about the way composers map non-music models onto their music, this chapter also makes claims more broadly about models of the creative process, in particular, stage theory. Stage theory5 is a widely accepted model of the creative process that hinges on the idea that the creative process is propelled forward in large part during what is known as the ‘illumination stage’, after ‘preparation’ and ‘incubation’ stages, and is characterised by rapid insight and even abandon. In light of the findings from these three composers, it is argued in this chapter that the illumination stage may more aptly be described as a period when the creator incorporates models from his or her past as opposed to making wholly new insights.
Instantaneous Creation or Involved Process?
There are three key questions about the creative process which contextualise the discussion in this chapter. Firstly, to what extent does a creator revise and revisit during the act of creation; secondly, what prominent theories of the creative process describe the stages of creative development; and thirdly, what is the role of metaphor, lateral thinking and constraint in creative synthesis?
The first question is essentially concerned with whether groundbreaking works come about quickly, as if in a split second, or whether the ideas and impulses that feed these creations unfold over time. The Ancient Greeks believed that creativity was a gift of the Muses6 – that God was whispering into the ears of creators as if giving breath to their creations. Despite some lingering notions of the mystica surrounding the act of creation, there is far more agreement now that ‘logic, method, and techniques’ underlie the creative process.7 Gruber and Davis,8 in their case studies reviewing doctoral dissertations over a period of 20 years, argued thatwhat had been thought of as creative breakthroughs could actually be seen in the earlier work or ideas of these creators.
While there now appears to be much agreement that the creative proces happens to some degree over a period time, there are differing ideas about the way in which it unfolds. Wallas,9 in his stage theory,identifies four stages of the creative process based on creators’ autobiographical accounts: preparation, incubation,illumination and verification. Simply put, preparation is the period when a creator assesses the creative arc or problem to be solved. Incubation occurs when the creator takes a mental break from the problem at hand. Illumination is sometimes referred to as the ‘flash of insight’ when there are signs that a solution is imminent, and verification is the stage of further refinement and conclusion. While many studies are still premised on Wallas’s original stage theory, there are a number of theories that have since emerged to challenge his model. For example, Ghiselin10 argues that there is no such clear distinction between the stages. Cawelti, Rappaport and Wood11 postulate that many of the processes that are supposedly unique to each stage actually take place to some extent during all stages.
It is without question that composers work idiosyncratically, and that no one model can capture the full range of experience. For instance, in contras to Beethoven, whose work was characterised by continuous and painstakin reworking, composers such as Mozart and Schubert seemed to write music, particularly the main themes and their subsequent development, ‘with great eas and rapidity’.12 Highlighting a dichotomy similar to that of Beethoven and Mozart/Schubert, research by Galenson13 argues for a model in which creative works can be made either expeditiously or over long periods of time. Galenson examined the careers of pre-eminent visual artists, plotting their age against their productivity, and determining at what point during their lifespan they were most productivw. Galenson identifies two major types of creators: Experimental Innovators and Conceptual Innovators. The work of Experimental Innovators evolves gradually over time and involves constant revision, while Conceptual Innovators’ work is characterised by efficiency and decisiveness, demonstrated most commonly earlier
in their career.14 Galenson’s theory may provide two modes of working, but Wallas’s
is probably more useful for examining how works are created from start to finish.
The discussion presented thus far centres on whether the creative process happens precipitously or extends over time, and also how different phases of the creative process are characterised. Some researchers have considered the influence of initial inspirational factors on the whole of the creative process. For example. Beardsley15 offers a dichotomous framing of initial inspiration, encapsulated in his ‘Propulsive’ and ‘Finalistic’ theories. According to Propulsive theory the first stage of the creative process dominates (or has the most influence) over the rest. In Finalistic theory, the creator defines his or her end point and then allows the preceding steps of creating to be driven by this aim.
Similar in conclusion to Beardsley’s Propulsive theory, Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels16 point to the importance of the initial conceptualisation of works of art in a study focusing on fine art students training at top art schools in the USA. The artists were asked to make still-life drawings. The authors found that much of the experimentation that students did before committing to a direction was a good indication of the ultimate novelty of students’ artwork, more so than continuous reworking that might take place over a longer period of time. In a three-year case study of a single composer, Collins17 found that what they wrote during the beginning stages of composing highly influenced the work’s ultimate development. Collins collected the composer’s scores at different stages of the writing process and interviewed the composer several times to chart progress over time.
Metaphor, Association and Constraint
In addition to investigating how compositions unfold over time, it is also important to understand more about the mental models that creators employ since many draw from concepts and material that are not obviously related to the musical material themselves. In fact, some composers draw from extramusical domains as sources of inspiration for their pieces18 by using metaphor to connect information within and between domains. Gruber and Davis describe metaphor as a synthesising agent – helping to express the relationship between two different realms.19 They argue that metaphors are not simply a linguistic phenomenon, but are a conduit for connecting and mapping concepts onto oneanother in which an aspect of the initial domain is preserved when considered in the context of the target domain.
De Bono20 also discusses a way of thinking that highlights making connections across domains as opposed to thinking within one domain. De Bono refers to this as ‘lateral thinking’, problem solving with information that is not overtly related to the initial problem or solution.
Metaphor and association, in making a bridge between seemingly disparate information, can help creators define what is and is not important. It is shorthand of sorts, and is perhaps a way of making the creative process more economical. In 1988, Calvino21 spoke of six themes he believed would eventually be considered common to the great works of literature as we approached the year 2000: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. Calvino’s conceptualisation of ‘quickness’ in particular relates to the desire for efficiency. He argues that one of the most salient characteristics of folk tales is their economy of expression: folk tales move along efficiently against time as the protagonist swiftly defeats the villain or neatly identifies a ‘moral lesson’. Calvino’s prediction is relevant to this discussion of metaphor and lateral thinking, as it underscores the importance of efficiently zeroing in on what is most important in a creative setting. Schoenberg22 explains too how he actively thinks about economy and efficiency in his own writing; in what is now referred to as 12-tone music, he saw himself efficiently imposing constraints on his process. He explains:
These forms became possible because of a limitation I had been unconsciously imposing on myself from the very outset – limitation to short pieces, somethingwhich at the time I explained in my own mind as a reaction against the “extended” style. (262)
Upon reflection, Schoenberg realised that he was trying to create the building blocks of a style and had to identify the most essential features of this form before it could be extended. He describes this impulse or decision as a ‘question of economy’.23
In sum, claims about inspiration have historically hinged on the question of whether creations evolve gradually or instantaneously. As I have already pointed out, psychologists have come to believe that this activity is best characterised as a ‘drawn-out’ process. Furthermore, from Wallas’s stage theory to research from Beardsley,24 Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, and others, a convincing case could be made about the worthwhileness of examining the weight and nature of various phases in the process. This chapter argues that some composers reach to nonmusic domains for ‘inspiration’, and evaluating the role of key drivers such as metaphor and association in the process could provide additional insight into the creative process.
Composers Discuss their Process
At this point we can explore the role of non-musical mental models in the unfolding composing process in the work of three composers: Michael Gandolfi, Shulamit Ran and Ken Ueno. Michael Gandolfi is a Massachusetts-born male composer and currently Professor of Composition at the New England Conservatory of Music. Gandolfi’s Impressions from The Garden of Cosmic Speculation25 forms the major part of this exploration. Shulamit Ran, an Israeli-born female composer, is Professor of Composition at the University of Chicago and received a Pulitzer Prize for music in 1991. Her composition O The Chimneys26 is the key part of discussion. Finally, we center in on composer Ken Ueno’s Kaze-no-Oka27 in the process of evaluating other influences on creative musical output. Ueno is a Japanese-American composer and Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has won both the Rome and Berlin Prizes.
Gandolfi, Ran, and Ueno are part of a sample of some 24 composers varying in age, level of professional development and genre. They were selected not only because their work was considered to be novel, according to peers, but also because they were able to fluently talk about their writing process in interview settings.28 Extensive research on the composers’ backgrounds, written works and audio-recordings was conducted in advance, and composers were asked to select for discussion two pieces that they particularly liked from their own repertoire. Interview questions focused on the factors influencing them as they wrote these and they were encouraged to ‘free-associate’ as they talked through their process of writing each piece. They were asked to describe how these associations and ideas related to specific points in the music, and to discuss how they made their decisions. They were also asked to discuss how they incorporated inspirational sources or ideas into the piece and summarise what they considered to be their general process for creating a new piece.
Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a form of grounded theory,29 by which themes emerged inductively from the raw data30 This approach was both ‘emic’ and ‘etic’; conclusions were drawn about the factors that influenced composers both by trying to understand their mindsets and by inferring about some aspects of their process divorced of the language and conceptualisation that they put forth directly. Transcripts were coded and analysed based on guidelines by Boyatzis.
After determining the similarities and differences in the chronology of the writing process for each of the three composers, each step was coded, often both in extra-musical and musical terms if the composer described the relationship as such. This first wave of codes was quite broad, encompassing large groups of information that informed some of the overarching findings that emerged. A second wave of analysis was then conducted in order to understand some of the finer-grained distinctions. For instance, a broader finding was that composers drew from extra-musical domains that were associated with the macro-musical (large scale) structure of the pieces. In order to understand more about the nature of these extra-musical domains, however, these passages had to be recoded to determine the nature of these domains (for example, related to architecture, visual art). In sum, two waves of coding were conducted: one for macro-level themes and one for micro-level ones.
Inspiration from Outside of Music
Although no single prototype could represent all three composers’ trajectories from the birth to the synthesis of their ideas, as stated previously, this group of three composers seemed to draw heavily from non-musical content domains to which each composer had been attracted long before they began composing. The representations that these composers envision within these extra-musical content domains help provide an overarching roadmap for their pieces, usually influencing the form of the piece as a whole. The specific model that the composer chooses from this content domain often has an element of modularity built in as well, meaning that the composer has conceptualised this domain with clearly demarcated physical or conceptual compartments within that translate into the different movements or sections of the piece. After determining the form of the piece, the composers’ associations from this non-music model then inform the more specific elements of the piece, such as chord choice or rhythm, but particularly the instrumentation of each movement or segment. This prototype certainly cannot characterise all composers, but it does provide a foundation for identifying variations on this process or other prototypes.
After determining the similarities and differences in the chronology of the writing process for each of the three composers, each step was coded, often both in extra-musical and musical terms if the composer described the relationship as such. This first wave of codes was quite broad, encompassing large groups of information that informed some of the overarching findings that emerged. A second wave of analysis was then conducted in order to understand some of the finer-grained distinctions. For instance, a broader finding was that composers drew from extra-musical domains that were associated with the macro-musical (large scale) structure of the pieces. In order to understand more about the nature of these extra-musical domains, however, these passages had to be recoded to determine the nature of these domains (for example, related to architecture, visual art). In sum, two waves of coding were conducted: one for macro-level themes and one for micro-level ones.
Non-musical Models that Dictate Form
To illustrate key characteristics of this prototype, composers’ general descriptions of how they developed their initial ideas or creative ‘spark’ are integrated with a more specific investigation of the process undertaken in writing their music. Gandolfi’s piece, Impressions from The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, is an orchestral piece inspired by a sprawling garden designed by Scottish architect and critic, Charles Jencks. The garden merges fundamental principles of modern physics (such as quantum mechanics, super-string theory and complexity theory) with nature. The landscape of Jencks’s garden ‘bring[s] out the basic elements of nature that recent science has found to underlie the cosmos’.31 The piece has four parts: ‘Introduction: Zeroroom’, ‘Soliton Waves’, ‘Interlude: The Snail and the Poetics of Going Slow’ and ‘The Nonsense’. Gandolfi’s piece is tied together at a conceptual level by the overarching physics and architectural principles of the garden, where each part of the garden is designed with a distinct character and aesthetic.
Like Gandolfi, Ran developed the main idea for her piece through extra-musical means. Ran describes how she was in New York City when she came across a book of poetry by Nelly Sachs32 – the basis for O The Chimneys. Sachs’s writing is concerned with the Holocaust, a subject about which Ran says she had always known she would write music. The first poem that Ran encountered in the book happened to be the poem, ‘A dead child speaks’, which became the first poem of O The Chimneys. In interview, Ran says she was deeply moved by the poetry and spent a large amount of time reading every poem in the book, deciding which ones she would use for her piece and how to shape them into a larger totality: ‘That was the first really important decision in the case of this piece’. On the whole, Ran indicates that she did adhere to the architectural plan that she had intended for the piece, with each movement of the piece corresponding to a different poem from Sachs’s collection: ‘A dead child speaks’, ‘Already embraced by the arms of heavenly solace’, ‘Fleeing’, ‘Someone comes’ and ‘Hell is naked’ (from Glowing Enigmas II). In a similar way to the compartmentalisation that Gandolfi observed in Jencks’s garden, Ran’s poems also provide a series of demarcations. All of Sachs’s poems are concerned with the Holocaust, but each one provides a different perspective on this horrific event. For example, the first and second poems deal with similar subject matter, but told from the point of view of child and mother, respectively. In her interview Ran articulates that she knew it was going to be a relatively large-scale piece that was going to be profoundly tragic and dark, but she also felt that it needed to have a measure of contrast, the unrelenting intensity of the subject matter notwithstanding.
The succession and ordering of the pieces was also very important to Ran as she wrote. The pairing of the first and second poems Ran thinks of as a sort of single unit, where the first flows directly into the second. She views this unit as ‘the one heavy pillar point of the piece’. Ran contrasts the beginning and end anchor points with the two middle poems with a juxtaposition of two moods. She insists that the poems conjured powerful images conveyed in her music with a distinct ‘architecture’.
Similar to Gandolfi, Ueno’s conceptualisation of his piece, Kaze-no-Oka, stemmed from the domain of architecture. When commissioned to write it, Ueno offered that the task was very difficult since it was expected to be both a commemorative memorial piece in honour of the renowned Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu, and a lively, upbeat concert opener. Ueno says that, prior to the composition, he had come across a structure of the architect, Maki, who had built a beautiful complex of three buildings meant to serve as a crematorium. The character of these buildings was ‘totally in sync with the memorial character [of the piece]’. Embodied in the structures, says Ueno, was an irresolvable tension between multiplicities: ‘The buildings can be seen as separate as well as belonging to the same complex; they are individual and together at the same time’. These buildings were situated on ancient burial mounds, and the name of the complex, Kaze-no-Oka, resonated poetically with the incorporation of the Japanese instruments biwa and shakuhachi, as well as the juxtaposition of these ancient Japanese instruments with the new – the ‘modern’ orchestra.
Unlike Gandolfi and Ran’s pieces, Ueno’s is not separated into movements. Instead, the overarching ideas encapsulated in the three buildings influenced the overall structure of his piece. Ueno points out that, while each building had a different structure, the whole musical piece still had to work as a unit. The structure of the buildings, says Ueno, maps out onto the piece (except for the cadenza); Ueno decided to make the cadenza a piece complete in itself, so that it could be extracted as a separate work for chamber orchestra. Much as he described the crematorium buildings, Ueno describes the piece as a singular form, which at the same time embodies a multiplicity. While the piece was a memorial, he still had to begin it ‘with a character that foreshadowed the energy to come’.
How Associations Influence the Micro-musical Landscape
After determining the overall structure of their work, the composers’ associations from the main content domain then informed the more specific elements of a given movement, such as chord choice, rhythmic figures and instrumentation. While the structure of Impressions from the The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is influenced by the principles and physical layout of the garden, Gandolfi says that each movement is distinct and has a unique colour. ‘The Zeroroom’, the title of the formal entranceway to the garden, provided inspiration for the first movement. Of the structure of ‘The Zeroroom’, Gandolfi describes a ‘fanciful, surreal cloakroom flanked by an orderly procession of tennis racquets that appear to be traveling through the wall in a “quantum dance,” and large photographs that progress from our place in the universe, galaxy, solar system, planet, to the precise position of the garden in the north of Scotland’. Gandolfi’s music in ‘The Zeroroom’ mirrors the progression from the macro view of space to the myopic view of the yew tree in the garden. Gandolfi says he represents the cosmic vision of space in the opening with a delicate chord played by just the strings, which ‘represents this kind of mystery’. As the piece progresses, the music becomes more present – with syncopated percussion and distinct repetition and more marked notes in the brass. The instruments continue to layer until they are undeniably insistent.
The second movement, ‘Soliton Waves’, is a depiction of soliton waves (waves that interact with other waves, pass through them, and then exit with no memory of the passage), which are omnipresent in the garden, the fence-work, the stonework and the shapes of the earth. Gandolfi decided to represent these waves in the piece through the staging of the strings, so that the melody is passed from the low to high strings and the choice notes of the basic chords change minimally as they are passed through the strings while the basic chords stay constant.
The following movement, ‘Interlude: The Snail and the Poetics of Going Slow’, refers to a mound of green grass that does a spiral turn in the earth of Jenck’s garden. Gandolfi described the movement as going very slowly and it ‘kind of turns – just like the snail mound’. The beginning mirrors his own feelings towards the piece, as he was trying to feel his way into the piece and ‘respond to this big, pyramid-like object’, hopefully creating a more emotional connection to it. His unfamiliarity is represented by the strings, which figuratively grunt at each other at the piece’s outset, but develop a more harmonious dialogue as the piece progresses. The discordance at the beginning is achieved through a metaphorical dialogue between the families of strings.
The final movement, ‘The Nonsense’, Gandolfi says, started as ‘one of these out-of-the-ether kind of ideas’ – a pure gut response to the Nonsense building in the garden. The garden’s Nonsense building was designed as an architectural model by James Stirling at the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Gandolfi suggests that he connected immediately with the building as a postmodern/modernist building structure in which there are ‘beams that block your view at the top of the stairs and a stairway that leads nowhere’. In the same way that Gandolfi perceived that it was exciting for Stirling to construct ‘The Nonsense’, he wanted his movement to be energetic. The first thing that struck him about the music was that there was ‘something kinda goofy about it … and fun’.
Similar to the pattern arising with Gandolfi’s work, where the architectural structure of Jenck’s garden informed at both a macro and micro level, Ran indicates that all of her musical choices in O The Chimneys were natural outgrowths of the topic of the Holocaust. In the first poem by Sachs, ‘A dead child speaks’, Ran points out that she wanted to preserve the experience she had when she first read the poem; her choice to encapsulate forward momentum in this movement is brought to being in large part through the rush of the spoken voice of the mezzo soprano, accompanied by a cymbal following an intense instrumental opening of the ensemble of five instruments and the voice that subsequently disintegrates into shriek. The second movement, based on Sachs’s poem, ‘Already embraced by the arm of heavenly solace’, is ‘the same horrible tale [of the first poem] told from the point of view of the mother’, says Ran, which is why she envisioned the first and second together as an anchor for the piece. For the third poem, the first of the inner two movements, Ran used ‘a preponderance of lower sounds’, achieved in this case with the combination of piano, bass clarinet, cello and timpani: ‘those very same instruments in other music, in other music of mine, can be screaming out loud too, so the intimacy really is a matter of using them in a particular way’. Ran achieves much of the intensity and horror of the Holocaust through stark contrasts that range from haunting soft whispers to the shrillest, piercing highs.
Of the last movement of the piece, which is based on Sachs’s poem, ‘Hell is naked’ (from Glowing Enigmas II), Ran exclaims, ‘All hell breaks loose! … a powerful, powerful poem’. Everything that was held back in the third and fourth poems is now realised in this last poem, says Ran. When she finished scoring this movement, she says she realised that it required a dynamic intensity extrapolating beyond the sound that the instruments could produce. In order to realise the more powerful sound that she now heard even after the last notes of the piece, Ran added recorded tape at the end to both literally and figuratively extend beyond the sound that the instruments could produce.
In a manner reminiscent of Ran and Gandolfi, many of the smaller elements that Ueno describes in Kaze-no-Oka centre on associations with the architectural burial grounds on which the piece is based, conveyed in large part through instrumentation. Kaze-no-Oka translates into, ‘Wind over the hill’. Ueno wanted to show the contrast between the wind and the hill (or the earth) by emphasising the juxtaposition of the airy woodwinds and the earthy strings. He felt that this stark contrast efficiently encapsulated many of the contradictory factors that he had to ‘solve’ in the piece. Ueno felt that it was also important to convey the notion of loss through the dramaturgy. He says:
My experience has been that when you lose someone, you go through different stages of disbelief. One of those stages is that you are waiting for that person to come back. Eventually, by letting go, it is possible to arrive at a beatific transcendence. Then you realize that as long as there is a memory, then that person … those sounds … are always with you.
Loss, in one sense, is conveyed through the piece’s structure, says Ueno. The orchestra bows out before the cadenza and does not re-enter as one might expect. Ueno explains that a western audience is used to hearing a recapitulation, or the re-entry of the theme. While he knew that most people’s references were concerti by western composers such as Beethoven and Mozart – those pieces that ‘are always referencing the past’ – he wanted the structure of his piece to ‘mirror the psychological effect … the temporality of loss’. Thus, Ueno says, ‘At a certain point they [the orchestra] can’t come back’; instead, the audience hears scratch tones, pizzicatos, Bartók pizzicatos (the plucking of the strings so hard that they hit the fingerboard), the biwa scrapings and the breath of the shakuhachi.
While a set of architectural buildings was of great inspiration to Ueno, he states that his greatest extra-musical influence is the playwright, Samuel Beckett, whose work relates to concepts of musical structure and temporality. Ueno references the play, Catastrophe, in which the main character stays virtually silent with a downward gaze until the very end of the play, when he finally looks up. Ueno compares the end of Kaze-no-Oka with the main character’s actions in Catastrophe: here is one breath (of silence) in the piece, which is supposed to signify a return of sorts, as with Beckett’s character. Selecting to highlight the absence of sound (or a breath of silence), as opposed to the grand re-entry of the theme, allows Ueno to pay homage to Japanese culture and the strong value it places on silence. The piece in fact ends with the quote, ‘Keep Silence’ from Takemitsu’s piece, November Steps; it acts as an homage to Takemitsu (representing one of Takemitsu’s most important musical understandings, and the silence since his passing).
What to Make of these Extra-musical Influences?
This chapter centres on a group of three composers who, in the act of musical composition, draw heavily from extra-musical ideas and concepts to dictate the form of their pieces. Gandolfi draws on Jencks’s garden, relating locations in the garden to movements of the piece. Ran creates different movements of her piece from different poems on the same Holocaust theme, and Ueno translates the characteristics in different buildings of the memorial onto different parts of his piece. The frames in these extra-musical domains are often characterised by both an element of compartmentalisation and a sense of cohesion. For the smallerscale aspects of the music (for example, instrumentation, rhythms, pitch choices), these composers drew on associations from the same extra-musical domain that informed the work’s overall structure.
A crucial next step in more fully understanding what factors influence the composition process would be to identify other prototypical processes besides the one outlined in this chapter. Armed with information about these prototypical processes, one might better: (1) evaluate and compare existing theories of the creative process; (2) identify prototypical processes within the composition domain that could inform composers’ processes; and (3) experiment with how these processes could inform musical pedagogy.
How might the prototype described in this chapter increase knowledge about the creative process more generally, though? For one, what might be needed to spur the creative process for some people is a powerful stimulus from outside of the ‘home’ domain in which a creator is working. For Gandolfi, the extra-musical content comprised the principles of physics conceptualised in a formal garden landscape. For Ran it was poetry inspired by the Holocaust. For Ueno it was a set of memorial structures. As with these three composers, the outside-domain content might already hold significant meaning for the creator. Thus there may be benefits for a creator who draws on content that is removed from the home domain. For one, a creator might feel freer to take risks if he or she were not directed into a known stereotypical musical pathway. In addition, the inspirational extra-musical framework that a creator looks for might also be non-musically structured, each with a different characteristic or character, such as was the case with the three composers discussed here. Finally, when establishing these frameworks, or starting-off points, it could be useful to actively draw on the concept of metaphor and lateral thinking, the rearrangement of information that is already available into new configurations.
A crucial next step in more fully understanding what factors influence the composition process would be to identify other prototypical processes besides the one outlined in this chapter. Armed with information about these prototypical processes, one might better: (1) evaluate and compare existing theories of the creative process; (2) identify prototypical processes within the composition domain that could inform composers’ processes; and (3) experiment with how these processes could inform musical pedagogy.
And how might the findings have a bearing on existing models of the creative process? Let us avoid the discussion of whether these models click into place at the outset, middle or end of the process. Several key models of the creative process describe a phase of rumination or pre-work and also point to a stage of insight. The nature of this insight is often described as an increase of momentum that gives birth to new ideas. If the experiences of the three composers in this chapter represent some commentary upon the creative trajectory or direction of an unfolding musical composition, then it is important to consider that perhaps the most significant rumination or insight has been made before the composer actively works on their piece. It would be the formation of schema over time before the actual process of composition, then, that would be the key to insight. The transformational quality, in this case, would be the creator’s ability to make connections between what has come before and what could be. In contrast to the current characterisation of the illumination stage, the work at this stage might actually be the sifting through existing extra-musical influences – albeit, unconsciously – and determining which ones provide the most useful frameworks for a new creation.
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Copland, Aaron, Richard Kostelanetz and Steven Silverstein, Aaron Copland: A
Reader: Selected Writings 1923–1972 (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and
Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996).
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Jacob W. Getzels, ‘Discovery-oriented behavior
and the originality of creative products: A study with artists’, Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 19/1 (1971), 47–52.
De Bono, Edward, Lateral Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
Dickinson, Peter (ed.), Copland Connotations: Studies and Interviews
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002).
Duchesneau, Louise, The Voice of the Muse: A Study of the Role of Inspiration in
Musical Composition (New York: Peter Lang, 1986).
Foss, Lukas with Leon Kirchner, ‘Learning from performers’, lecture series at
Harvard University’s Kirkland House (Cambridge, MA, 1985).
Galenson, David W., ‘The two life cycles of human creativity’, National Bureau of
Economic Research Report (2003), Research summary, http://www.nber.org/
reporter/fall03/ galenson.html.
Gandolfi, Michael, Impressions from the Garden of Cosmic Speculation
(Cambridge: M51 Music, 2004).
Gardner, Howard, Art, Mind, and Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
Gardner, Howard, Creating Minds (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
Ghiselin, Brewster, The Creative Process: A Symposium, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1980).
Gruber, Howard E. and Sara N. Davis, ‘Inching our way up Mount Olympus: The
evolving-systems approach to creative thinking’. In: R.J. Sternberg (ed.), The
Nature of Creativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 243–69.
Jencks, Charles, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (London: Frances Lincoln,
2003).
Maxwell, Joseph A., Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach, 2nd
edn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005).
Ortony, Andrew, Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979).
Patrick, Catherine, ‘Creative thought in artists’, Journal of Psychology:
Interdisciplinary and Applied, 4 (1937), 35–73.
Perkins, David, The Mind’s Best Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1981).
Ran, Shulamit, O the Chimneys (New York: C. Fischer, 1973).
Sachs, Nelly, O the Chimneys; Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli,
transl. from the German by Michael Hamburger et al. (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1967).
Schoenberg, Arnold, ‘Opinion or insight?’ In: L. Stein (ed.), Style and Idea
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975), 258–64.
Seidman, Irving, Interviewing as Qualitative Research, 2nd edn (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1988).
Simonton, Dean Keith, ‘Creativity as a constrained stochastic process’. In: R.J.
Sternberg, E.L. Grigorenko and J.L. Singer (eds), Creativity: From Potential
To realization (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2004),
83–101.
Strauss, Anselm L. and Juliet M. Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research (Newbury
Park, CA: Sage, 1990).
Ueno, Ken, Kaze-no-Oka (Cambridge: New Jack Modernism Music, 2005).
Wallas, G., The Art of Thought (London: Watts, 1926).
Audio Recordings
Gandolfi, Michael, Design School [CD] (Cambridge: M51 Music, 1995).
Gandolfi, Michael, Impressions from the Garden of Cosmic Speculation [CD]
(Cambridge: M51 Music, 2006).
Ran, Shulamit, O The Chimneys [CD] 20th Century Voices in America (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Vox Box, 1995).
Ueno, Ken, Kaze-no-Oka [CD] (Cambridge: New Jack Modernism Music, 2005).
Interviews
Gandolfi, Michael, 31 May 2006. Cambridge, MA.
Ueno, Ken, 26 June 2006. Cambridge, MA.
Ran, Shulamit, 5 June 2006. Chicago, IL.
For the three composers discussed in this paper, the extra-musical influences on their work are ones they have been familiar with and have valued for many years. In addition, they are characterised by a strong element of modularity, since they are already divided into discrete sections (such as architectural structures); each extra-musical influence has a unique character or physicality such that they may provide a useful ‘frame’ as the composers organise inchoate masses of musical materials.
In addition to making an argument about the way composers map non-music models onto their music, this chapter also makes claims more broadly about models of the creative process, in particular, stage theory. Stage theory5 is a widely accepted model of the creative process that hinges on the idea that the creative process is propelled forward in large part during what is known as the ‘illumination stage’, after ‘preparation’ and ‘incubation’ stages, and is characterised by rapid insight and even abandon. In light of the findings from these three composers, it is argued in this chapter that the illumination stage may more aptly be described as a period when the creator incorporates models from his or her past as opposed to making wholly new insights.
Instantaneous Creation or Involved Process?
There are three key questions about the creative process which contextualise the discussion in this chapter. Firstly, to what extent does a creator revise and revisit during the act of creation; secondly, what prominent theories of the creative process describe the stages of creative development; and thirdly, what is the role of metaphor, lateral thinking and constraint in creative synthesis?
The first question is essentially concerned with whether groundbreaking works come about quickly, as if in a split second, or whether the ideas and impulses that feed these creations unfold over time. The Ancient Greeks believed that creativity was a gift of the Muses6 – that God was whispering into the ears of creators as if giving breath to their creations. Despite some lingering notions of the mystica surrounding the act of creation, there is far more agreement now that ‘logic, method, and techniques’ underlie the creative process.7 Gruber and Davis,8 in their case studies reviewing doctoral dissertations over a period of 20 years, argued thatwhat had been thought of as creative breakthroughs could actually be seen in the earlier work or ideas of these creators.
While there now appears to be much agreement that the creative proces happens to some degree over a period time, there are differing ideas about the way in which it unfolds. Wallas,9 in his stage theory,identifies four stages of the creative process based on creators’ autobiographical accounts: preparation, incubation,illumination and verification. Simply put, preparation is the period when a creator assesses the creative arc or problem to be solved. Incubation occurs when the creator takes a mental break from the problem at hand. Illumination is sometimes referred to as the ‘flash of insight’ when there are signs that a solution is imminent, and verification is the stage of further refinement and conclusion. While many studies are still premised on Wallas’s original stage theory, there are a number of theories that have since emerged to challenge his model. For example, Ghiselin10 argues that there is no such clear distinction between the stages. Cawelti, Rappaport and Wood11 postulate that many of the processes that are supposedly unique to each stage actually take place to some extent during all stages.
It is without question that composers work idiosyncratically, and that no one model can capture the full range of experience. For instance, in contras to Beethoven, whose work was characterised by continuous and painstakin reworking, composers such as Mozart and Schubert seemed to write music, particularly the main themes and their subsequent development, ‘with great eas and rapidity’.12 Highlighting a dichotomy similar to that of Beethoven and Mozart/Schubert, research by Galenson13 argues for a model in which creative works can be made either expeditiously or over long periods of time. Galenson examined the careers of pre-eminent visual artists, plotting their age against their productivity, and determining at what point during their lifespan they were most productivw. Galenson identifies two major types of creators: Experimental Innovators and Conceptual Innovators. The work of Experimental Innovators evolves gradually over time and involves constant revision, while Conceptual Innovators’ work is characterised by efficiency and decisiveness, demonstrated most commonly earlier
in their career.14 Galenson’s theory may provide two modes of working, but Wallas’s
is probably more useful for examining how works are created from start to finish.
The discussion presented thus far centres on whether the creative process happens precipitously or extends over time, and also how different phases of the creative process are characterised. Some researchers have considered the influence of initial inspirational factors on the whole of the creative process. For example. Beardsley15 offers a dichotomous framing of initial inspiration, encapsulated in his ‘Propulsive’ and ‘Finalistic’ theories. According to Propulsive theory the first stage of the creative process dominates (or has the most influence) over the rest. In Finalistic theory, the creator defines his or her end point and then allows the preceding steps of creating to be driven by this aim.
Similar in conclusion to Beardsley’s Propulsive theory, Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels16 point to the importance of the initial conceptualisation of works of art in a study focusing on fine art students training at top art schools in the USA. The artists were asked to make still-life drawings. The authors found that much of the experimentation that students did before committing to a direction was a good indication of the ultimate novelty of students’ artwork, more so than continuous reworking that might take place over a longer period of time. In a three-year case study of a single composer, Collins17 found that what they wrote during the beginning stages of composing highly influenced the work’s ultimate development. Collins collected the composer’s scores at different stages of the writing process and interviewed the composer several times to chart progress over time.
Metaphor, Association and Constraint
In addition to investigating how compositions unfold over time, it is also important to understand more about the mental models that creators employ since many draw from concepts and material that are not obviously related to the musical material themselves. In fact, some composers draw from extramusical domains as sources of inspiration for their pieces18 by using metaphor to connect information within and between domains. Gruber and Davis describe metaphor as a synthesising agent – helping to express the relationship between two different realms.19 They argue that metaphors are not simply a linguistic phenomenon, but are a conduit for connecting and mapping concepts onto oneanother in which an aspect of the initial domain is preserved when considered in the context of the target domain.
De Bono20 also discusses a way of thinking that highlights making connections across domains as opposed to thinking within one domain. De Bono refers to this as ‘lateral thinking’, problem solving with information that is not overtly related to the initial problem or solution.
Metaphor and association, in making a bridge between seemingly disparate information, can help creators define what is and is not important. It is shorthand of sorts, and is perhaps a way of making the creative process more economical. In 1988, Calvino21 spoke of six themes he believed would eventually be considered common to the great works of literature as we approached the year 2000: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. Calvino’s conceptualisation of ‘quickness’ in particular relates to the desire for efficiency. He argues that one of the most salient characteristics of folk tales is their economy of expression: folk tales move along efficiently against time as the protagonist swiftly defeats the villain or neatly identifies a ‘moral lesson’. Calvino’s prediction is relevant to this discussion of metaphor and lateral thinking, as it underscores the importance of efficiently zeroing in on what is most important in a creative setting. Schoenberg22 explains too how he actively thinks about economy and efficiency in his own writing; in what is now referred to as 12-tone music, he saw himself efficiently imposing constraints on his process. He explains:
These forms became possible because of a limitation I had been unconsciously imposing on myself from the very outset – limitation to short pieces, somethingwhich at the time I explained in my own mind as a reaction against the “extended” style. (262)
Upon reflection, Schoenberg realised that he was trying to create the building blocks of a style and had to identify the most essential features of this form before it could be extended. He describes this impulse or decision as a ‘question of economy’.23
In sum, claims about inspiration have historically hinged on the question of whether creations evolve gradually or instantaneously. As I have already pointed out, psychologists have come to believe that this activity is best characterised as a ‘drawn-out’ process. Furthermore, from Wallas’s stage theory to research from Beardsley,24 Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, and others, a convincing case could be made about the worthwhileness of examining the weight and nature of various phases in the process. This chapter argues that some composers reach to nonmusic domains for ‘inspiration’, and evaluating the role of key drivers such as metaphor and association in the process could provide additional insight into the creative process.
Composers Discuss their Process
At this point we can explore the role of non-musical mental models in the unfolding composing process in the work of three composers: Michael Gandolfi, Shulamit Ran and Ken Ueno. Michael Gandolfi is a Massachusetts-born male composer and currently Professor of Composition at the New England Conservatory of Music. Gandolfi’s Impressions from The Garden of Cosmic Speculation25 forms the major part of this exploration. Shulamit Ran, an Israeli-born female composer, is Professor of Composition at the University of Chicago and received a Pulitzer Prize for music in 1991. Her composition O The Chimneys26 is the key part of discussion. Finally, we center in on composer Ken Ueno’s Kaze-no-Oka27 in the process of evaluating other influences on creative musical output. Ueno is a Japanese-American composer and Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has won both the Rome and Berlin Prizes.
Gandolfi, Ran, and Ueno are part of a sample of some 24 composers varying in age, level of professional development and genre. They were selected not only because their work was considered to be novel, according to peers, but also because they were able to fluently talk about their writing process in interview settings.28 Extensive research on the composers’ backgrounds, written works and audio-recordings was conducted in advance, and composers were asked to select for discussion two pieces that they particularly liked from their own repertoire. Interview questions focused on the factors influencing them as they wrote these and they were encouraged to ‘free-associate’ as they talked through their process of writing each piece. They were asked to describe how these associations and ideas related to specific points in the music, and to discuss how they made their decisions. They were also asked to discuss how they incorporated inspirational sources or ideas into the piece and summarise what they considered to be their general process for creating a new piece.
Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a form of grounded theory,29 by which themes emerged inductively from the raw data30 This approach was both ‘emic’ and ‘etic’; conclusions were drawn about the factors that influenced composers both by trying to understand their mindsets and by inferring about some aspects of their process divorced of the language and conceptualisation that they put forth directly. Transcripts were coded and analysed based on guidelines by Boyatzis.
After determining the similarities and differences in the chronology of the writing process for each of the three composers, each step was coded, often both in extra-musical and musical terms if the composer described the relationship as such. This first wave of codes was quite broad, encompassing large groups of information that informed some of the overarching findings that emerged. A second wave of analysis was then conducted in order to understand some of the finer-grained distinctions. For instance, a broader finding was that composers drew from extra-musical domains that were associated with the macro-musical (large scale) structure of the pieces. In order to understand more about the nature of these extra-musical domains, however, these passages had to be recoded to determine the nature of these domains (for example, related to architecture, visual art). In sum, two waves of coding were conducted: one for macro-level themes and one for micro-level ones.
Inspiration from Outside of Music
Although no single prototype could represent all three composers’ trajectories from the birth to the synthesis of their ideas, as stated previously, this group of three composers seemed to draw heavily from non-musical content domains to which each composer had been attracted long before they began composing. The representations that these composers envision within these extra-musical content domains help provide an overarching roadmap for their pieces, usually influencing the form of the piece as a whole. The specific model that the composer chooses from this content domain often has an element of modularity built in as well, meaning that the composer has conceptualised this domain with clearly demarcated physical or conceptual compartments within that translate into the different movements or sections of the piece. After determining the form of the piece, the composers’ associations from this non-music model then inform the more specific elements of the piece, such as chord choice or rhythm, but particularly the instrumentation of each movement or segment. This prototype certainly cannot characterise all composers, but it does provide a foundation for identifying variations on this process or other prototypes.
After determining the similarities and differences in the chronology of the writing process for each of the three composers, each step was coded, often both in extra-musical and musical terms if the composer described the relationship as such. This first wave of codes was quite broad, encompassing large groups of information that informed some of the overarching findings that emerged. A second wave of analysis was then conducted in order to understand some of the finer-grained distinctions. For instance, a broader finding was that composers drew from extra-musical domains that were associated with the macro-musical (large scale) structure of the pieces. In order to understand more about the nature of these extra-musical domains, however, these passages had to be recoded to determine the nature of these domains (for example, related to architecture, visual art). In sum, two waves of coding were conducted: one for macro-level themes and one for micro-level ones.
Non-musical Models that Dictate Form
To illustrate key characteristics of this prototype, composers’ general descriptions of how they developed their initial ideas or creative ‘spark’ are integrated with a more specific investigation of the process undertaken in writing their music. Gandolfi’s piece, Impressions from The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, is an orchestral piece inspired by a sprawling garden designed by Scottish architect and critic, Charles Jencks. The garden merges fundamental principles of modern physics (such as quantum mechanics, super-string theory and complexity theory) with nature. The landscape of Jencks’s garden ‘bring[s] out the basic elements of nature that recent science has found to underlie the cosmos’.31 The piece has four parts: ‘Introduction: Zeroroom’, ‘Soliton Waves’, ‘Interlude: The Snail and the Poetics of Going Slow’ and ‘The Nonsense’. Gandolfi’s piece is tied together at a conceptual level by the overarching physics and architectural principles of the garden, where each part of the garden is designed with a distinct character and aesthetic.
Like Gandolfi, Ran developed the main idea for her piece through extra-musical means. Ran describes how she was in New York City when she came across a book of poetry by Nelly Sachs32 – the basis for O The Chimneys. Sachs’s writing is concerned with the Holocaust, a subject about which Ran says she had always known she would write music. The first poem that Ran encountered in the book happened to be the poem, ‘A dead child speaks’, which became the first poem of O The Chimneys. In interview, Ran says she was deeply moved by the poetry and spent a large amount of time reading every poem in the book, deciding which ones she would use for her piece and how to shape them into a larger totality: ‘That was the first really important decision in the case of this piece’. On the whole, Ran indicates that she did adhere to the architectural plan that she had intended for the piece, with each movement of the piece corresponding to a different poem from Sachs’s collection: ‘A dead child speaks’, ‘Already embraced by the arms of heavenly solace’, ‘Fleeing’, ‘Someone comes’ and ‘Hell is naked’ (from Glowing Enigmas II). In a similar way to the compartmentalisation that Gandolfi observed in Jencks’s garden, Ran’s poems also provide a series of demarcations. All of Sachs’s poems are concerned with the Holocaust, but each one provides a different perspective on this horrific event. For example, the first and second poems deal with similar subject matter, but told from the point of view of child and mother, respectively. In her interview Ran articulates that she knew it was going to be a relatively large-scale piece that was going to be profoundly tragic and dark, but she also felt that it needed to have a measure of contrast, the unrelenting intensity of the subject matter notwithstanding.
The succession and ordering of the pieces was also very important to Ran as she wrote. The pairing of the first and second poems Ran thinks of as a sort of single unit, where the first flows directly into the second. She views this unit as ‘the one heavy pillar point of the piece’. Ran contrasts the beginning and end anchor points with the two middle poems with a juxtaposition of two moods. She insists that the poems conjured powerful images conveyed in her music with a distinct ‘architecture’.
Similar to Gandolfi, Ueno’s conceptualisation of his piece, Kaze-no-Oka, stemmed from the domain of architecture. When commissioned to write it, Ueno offered that the task was very difficult since it was expected to be both a commemorative memorial piece in honour of the renowned Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu, and a lively, upbeat concert opener. Ueno says that, prior to the composition, he had come across a structure of the architect, Maki, who had built a beautiful complex of three buildings meant to serve as a crematorium. The character of these buildings was ‘totally in sync with the memorial character [of the piece]’. Embodied in the structures, says Ueno, was an irresolvable tension between multiplicities: ‘The buildings can be seen as separate as well as belonging to the same complex; they are individual and together at the same time’. These buildings were situated on ancient burial mounds, and the name of the complex, Kaze-no-Oka, resonated poetically with the incorporation of the Japanese instruments biwa and shakuhachi, as well as the juxtaposition of these ancient Japanese instruments with the new – the ‘modern’ orchestra.
Unlike Gandolfi and Ran’s pieces, Ueno’s is not separated into movements. Instead, the overarching ideas encapsulated in the three buildings influenced the overall structure of his piece. Ueno points out that, while each building had a different structure, the whole musical piece still had to work as a unit. The structure of the buildings, says Ueno, maps out onto the piece (except for the cadenza); Ueno decided to make the cadenza a piece complete in itself, so that it could be extracted as a separate work for chamber orchestra. Much as he described the crematorium buildings, Ueno describes the piece as a singular form, which at the same time embodies a multiplicity. While the piece was a memorial, he still had to begin it ‘with a character that foreshadowed the energy to come’.
How Associations Influence the Micro-musical Landscape
After determining the overall structure of their work, the composers’ associations from the main content domain then informed the more specific elements of a given movement, such as chord choice, rhythmic figures and instrumentation. While the structure of Impressions from the The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is influenced by the principles and physical layout of the garden, Gandolfi says that each movement is distinct and has a unique colour. ‘The Zeroroom’, the title of the formal entranceway to the garden, provided inspiration for the first movement. Of the structure of ‘The Zeroroom’, Gandolfi describes a ‘fanciful, surreal cloakroom flanked by an orderly procession of tennis racquets that appear to be traveling through the wall in a “quantum dance,” and large photographs that progress from our place in the universe, galaxy, solar system, planet, to the precise position of the garden in the north of Scotland’. Gandolfi’s music in ‘The Zeroroom’ mirrors the progression from the macro view of space to the myopic view of the yew tree in the garden. Gandolfi says he represents the cosmic vision of space in the opening with a delicate chord played by just the strings, which ‘represents this kind of mystery’. As the piece progresses, the music becomes more present – with syncopated percussion and distinct repetition and more marked notes in the brass. The instruments continue to layer until they are undeniably insistent.
The second movement, ‘Soliton Waves’, is a depiction of soliton waves (waves that interact with other waves, pass through them, and then exit with no memory of the passage), which are omnipresent in the garden, the fence-work, the stonework and the shapes of the earth. Gandolfi decided to represent these waves in the piece through the staging of the strings, so that the melody is passed from the low to high strings and the choice notes of the basic chords change minimally as they are passed through the strings while the basic chords stay constant.
The following movement, ‘Interlude: The Snail and the Poetics of Going Slow’, refers to a mound of green grass that does a spiral turn in the earth of Jenck’s garden. Gandolfi described the movement as going very slowly and it ‘kind of turns – just like the snail mound’. The beginning mirrors his own feelings towards the piece, as he was trying to feel his way into the piece and ‘respond to this big, pyramid-like object’, hopefully creating a more emotional connection to it. His unfamiliarity is represented by the strings, which figuratively grunt at each other at the piece’s outset, but develop a more harmonious dialogue as the piece progresses. The discordance at the beginning is achieved through a metaphorical dialogue between the families of strings.
The final movement, ‘The Nonsense’, Gandolfi says, started as ‘one of these out-of-the-ether kind of ideas’ – a pure gut response to the Nonsense building in the garden. The garden’s Nonsense building was designed as an architectural model by James Stirling at the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Gandolfi suggests that he connected immediately with the building as a postmodern/modernist building structure in which there are ‘beams that block your view at the top of the stairs and a stairway that leads nowhere’. In the same way that Gandolfi perceived that it was exciting for Stirling to construct ‘The Nonsense’, he wanted his movement to be energetic. The first thing that struck him about the music was that there was ‘something kinda goofy about it … and fun’.
Similar to the pattern arising with Gandolfi’s work, where the architectural structure of Jenck’s garden informed at both a macro and micro level, Ran indicates that all of her musical choices in O The Chimneys were natural outgrowths of the topic of the Holocaust. In the first poem by Sachs, ‘A dead child speaks’, Ran points out that she wanted to preserve the experience she had when she first read the poem; her choice to encapsulate forward momentum in this movement is brought to being in large part through the rush of the spoken voice of the mezzo soprano, accompanied by a cymbal following an intense instrumental opening of the ensemble of five instruments and the voice that subsequently disintegrates into shriek. The second movement, based on Sachs’s poem, ‘Already embraced by the arm of heavenly solace’, is ‘the same horrible tale [of the first poem] told from the point of view of the mother’, says Ran, which is why she envisioned the first and second together as an anchor for the piece. For the third poem, the first of the inner two movements, Ran used ‘a preponderance of lower sounds’, achieved in this case with the combination of piano, bass clarinet, cello and timpani: ‘those very same instruments in other music, in other music of mine, can be screaming out loud too, so the intimacy really is a matter of using them in a particular way’. Ran achieves much of the intensity and horror of the Holocaust through stark contrasts that range from haunting soft whispers to the shrillest, piercing highs.
Of the last movement of the piece, which is based on Sachs’s poem, ‘Hell is naked’ (from Glowing Enigmas II), Ran exclaims, ‘All hell breaks loose! … a powerful, powerful poem’. Everything that was held back in the third and fourth poems is now realised in this last poem, says Ran. When she finished scoring this movement, she says she realised that it required a dynamic intensity extrapolating beyond the sound that the instruments could produce. In order to realise the more powerful sound that she now heard even after the last notes of the piece, Ran added recorded tape at the end to both literally and figuratively extend beyond the sound that the instruments could produce.
In a manner reminiscent of Ran and Gandolfi, many of the smaller elements that Ueno describes in Kaze-no-Oka centre on associations with the architectural burial grounds on which the piece is based, conveyed in large part through instrumentation. Kaze-no-Oka translates into, ‘Wind over the hill’. Ueno wanted to show the contrast between the wind and the hill (or the earth) by emphasising the juxtaposition of the airy woodwinds and the earthy strings. He felt that this stark contrast efficiently encapsulated many of the contradictory factors that he had to ‘solve’ in the piece. Ueno felt that it was also important to convey the notion of loss through the dramaturgy. He says:
My experience has been that when you lose someone, you go through different stages of disbelief. One of those stages is that you are waiting for that person to come back. Eventually, by letting go, it is possible to arrive at a beatific transcendence. Then you realize that as long as there is a memory, then that person … those sounds … are always with you.
Loss, in one sense, is conveyed through the piece’s structure, says Ueno. The orchestra bows out before the cadenza and does not re-enter as one might expect. Ueno explains that a western audience is used to hearing a recapitulation, or the re-entry of the theme. While he knew that most people’s references were concerti by western composers such as Beethoven and Mozart – those pieces that ‘are always referencing the past’ – he wanted the structure of his piece to ‘mirror the psychological effect … the temporality of loss’. Thus, Ueno says, ‘At a certain point they [the orchestra] can’t come back’; instead, the audience hears scratch tones, pizzicatos, Bartók pizzicatos (the plucking of the strings so hard that they hit the fingerboard), the biwa scrapings and the breath of the shakuhachi.
While a set of architectural buildings was of great inspiration to Ueno, he states that his greatest extra-musical influence is the playwright, Samuel Beckett, whose work relates to concepts of musical structure and temporality. Ueno references the play, Catastrophe, in which the main character stays virtually silent with a downward gaze until the very end of the play, when he finally looks up. Ueno compares the end of Kaze-no-Oka with the main character’s actions in Catastrophe: here is one breath (of silence) in the piece, which is supposed to signify a return of sorts, as with Beckett’s character. Selecting to highlight the absence of sound (or a breath of silence), as opposed to the grand re-entry of the theme, allows Ueno to pay homage to Japanese culture and the strong value it places on silence. The piece in fact ends with the quote, ‘Keep Silence’ from Takemitsu’s piece, November Steps; it acts as an homage to Takemitsu (representing one of Takemitsu’s most important musical understandings, and the silence since his passing).
What to Make of these Extra-musical Influences?
This chapter centres on a group of three composers who, in the act of musical composition, draw heavily from extra-musical ideas and concepts to dictate the form of their pieces. Gandolfi draws on Jencks’s garden, relating locations in the garden to movements of the piece. Ran creates different movements of her piece from different poems on the same Holocaust theme, and Ueno translates the characteristics in different buildings of the memorial onto different parts of his piece. The frames in these extra-musical domains are often characterised by both an element of compartmentalisation and a sense of cohesion. For the smallerscale aspects of the music (for example, instrumentation, rhythms, pitch choices), these composers drew on associations from the same extra-musical domain that informed the work’s overall structure.
A crucial next step in more fully understanding what factors influence the composition process would be to identify other prototypical processes besides the one outlined in this chapter. Armed with information about these prototypical processes, one might better: (1) evaluate and compare existing theories of the creative process; (2) identify prototypical processes within the composition domain that could inform composers’ processes; and (3) experiment with how these processes could inform musical pedagogy.
How might the prototype described in this chapter increase knowledge about the creative process more generally, though? For one, what might be needed to spur the creative process for some people is a powerful stimulus from outside of the ‘home’ domain in which a creator is working. For Gandolfi, the extra-musical content comprised the principles of physics conceptualised in a formal garden landscape. For Ran it was poetry inspired by the Holocaust. For Ueno it was a set of memorial structures. As with these three composers, the outside-domain content might already hold significant meaning for the creator. Thus there may be benefits for a creator who draws on content that is removed from the home domain. For one, a creator might feel freer to take risks if he or she were not directed into a known stereotypical musical pathway. In addition, the inspirational extra-musical framework that a creator looks for might also be non-musically structured, each with a different characteristic or character, such as was the case with the three composers discussed here. Finally, when establishing these frameworks, or starting-off points, it could be useful to actively draw on the concept of metaphor and lateral thinking, the rearrangement of information that is already available into new configurations.
A crucial next step in more fully understanding what factors influence the composition process would be to identify other prototypical processes besides the one outlined in this chapter. Armed with information about these prototypical processes, one might better: (1) evaluate and compare existing theories of the creative process; (2) identify prototypical processes within the composition domain that could inform composers’ processes; and (3) experiment with how these processes could inform musical pedagogy.
And how might the findings have a bearing on existing models of the creative process? Let us avoid the discussion of whether these models click into place at the outset, middle or end of the process. Several key models of the creative process describe a phase of rumination or pre-work and also point to a stage of insight. The nature of this insight is often described as an increase of momentum that gives birth to new ideas. If the experiences of the three composers in this chapter represent some commentary upon the creative trajectory or direction of an unfolding musical composition, then it is important to consider that perhaps the most significant rumination or insight has been made before the composer actively works on their piece. It would be the formation of schema over time before the actual process of composition, then, that would be the key to insight. The transformational quality, in this case, would be the creator’s ability to make connections between what has come before and what could be. In contrast to the current characterisation of the illumination stage, the work at this stage might actually be the sifting through existing extra-musical influences – albeit, unconsciously – and determining which ones provide the most useful frameworks for a new creation.
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Gandolfi, Michael, 31 May 2006. Cambridge, MA.
Ueno, Ken, 26 June 2006. Cambridge, MA.
Ran, Shulamit, 5 June 2006. Chicago, IL.
5
Wallas, Graham, The Art of Thought (London, 1926).
6
Dean Keith Simonton, ‘Creativity as a constrained stochastic process’. In: R.J.
Sternberg, E.L. Grigorenko and J.L. Singer (eds), Creativity: From Potential to Realization. (Washington, DC, 2004), 83–101.
7
Simonton, Creativity, 83–101.
8
Howard E. Gruber and Sara N. Davis, ‘Inching our way up Mount Olympus: The evolving-systems approach to creative thinking’. In: R.J. Sternberg (ed.), The Nature of Creativity (New York, 1988), 243–69.
9
Wallas, The Art of Thought.
10
Ghiselin, Brewster, The Creative Process: A Symposium, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1980).
11
Scott Cawelti, Allen Rappaport and Bill Wood. ‘Modeling artistic creativity: an
empirical study’, Journal of Creative Behavior, 2(26) (1992), 83–94.
12
Howard Gardner, Art, Mind, and Brain (New York, 1982), 359.
13
David W. Galenson, ‘The two life cycles of human creativity’, National Bureau of Economic Research Report (2003), Research summary, http://www.nber.org/reporter/
fall03/galenson.html.
14
For more detail, see Chapter 2 by Aaron Kozbelt.
15
Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘On the creation of art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23/3 (1965), 291–304.
16
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jacob W. Getzels, ‘Discovery-oriented behavior and the originality of creative products: A study with artists’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 19/1 (1971), 47–52.
17
David Collins, ‘A synthesis model of thinking in music composition’, Psychology of Music, 32/2 (2003), 193–216.
18
Louise Duchesneau, The Voice of the Muse: A Study of the Role of Inspiration in Musical Composition (New York, 1986).
19
In Andrew Ortony, Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge, 1979).
20
Edward De Bono, Lateral Thinking. (New York, 1970).
.
21
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA, 1988).
22
Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Opinion or insight?’ In: L. Stein (ed.), Style and Idea (Berkeley, CA, 1975), 258–64.
23
Ibid., 262–3.
24
Beardsley, ‘On the creation of art’.
25
Michael Gandolfi, Impressions from the Garden of Cosmic Speculation (Cambridge, 2004).
26
Shulamit Ran, O the Chimneys (New York, 1973).
27
Ken Ueno, Kaze-no-Oka (Cambridge, 2005).
28
Irving Seidman, Interviewing as Qualitative Research (New York, 1988).
29
Anselm L. Strauss and Juliet M. Corbin. Basics of Qualitative Research (Newbury Park, CA, 1990).
30
Richard E. Boyatzis, Transforming Qualitative Information: Thematic Analysis and Code Development (San Francisco, CA, 1988).
31
Charles Jencks, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (London, 2003).
32
Nelly Sachs, O the Chimneys; Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli, transl. from the German by Michael Hamburger et al. (New York, 1967).