Composition as Research (original) (raw)

Composition and Performance Can Be, and Often Have Been, Research

Tempo, 2015

John Croft's article ‘Composition is not Research’ challenges a conception and ideal of compositional work in academia which has grown in prominence over several decades in the UK. As a performer-scholar, who also writes non-performance-related scholarship, I welcome this challenge, share some of Croft's reservations about the ways in which these conceptions often manifest themselves, and also have concerns about the rushed integration of practitioners into academia and the implications for more traditional forms of scholarship. However, I find many of Croft's formulations and assumptions too narrow, and instead argue that a good deal of the process of composition and performance does constitute research – grappling with difficult questions, exploring solutions, and producing creative work which embodies these solutions and from which others can draw much of value.

Rewriting Composition: Moving beyond a Discourse of Need

2015

If oppositional strategies are conducted from within the same framework as that which they oppose, they run the danger of reproducing those same positions.-Alastair Pennycook ("English as a Language Always in Translation" 43)Just because [compositionists] have been funded with a reductionist notion of our task has not meant that we have been bound to follow through in a reductionist way.-Charles Bazerman ("Response" 252)Composition is an ongoing historical project: the name given to work done in colleges and universities, mostly in the United States, by students and teachers as they engage and mediate differences in written language. That is the definition I am willing to offer, knowing that it is at best only a beginning and necessarily incomplete.Composition's difficulties arise in part out of the tension built into the term itself as a referent for not only an activity and the product of that activity, but also the material social conditions of that activi...

Exploring a Fourth Space for Composition Studies Research

Rupkatha Journal, 2020

The research methods landscape has the potential to be quite diverse. However, the paradigmatic battles between the two empirical research camps (quantitative and qualitative) and the more recent embracement of mixed-methods research has narrowly focused many fields’ attention, including that of composition studies, away from other sorts of useful methods, such as theoretical research. To address this, this sequential two-part study compares and contrasts the (a) purpose, (b) instruments, (c) data, and (d) structure of quantitative and qualitative research. Drawing on this four-part structure, this study advances composition studies research methods literature by posing and testing a definition of theoretical research through an examination of full-length core composition studies texts (N = 12). The article concludes by explaining the study’s relevance to the field and offering directions for future research. Keywords: Theoretical Research, Composition Studies, Rhetoric

Performing the Practice of Composition

2020

In this paper I discuss challenges towards our understanding of the role and ontology of the score, in relationship to the roles of composer, performer, audience and performance space. I consider the role of these actants within three situated aspects of the Western art music tradition as proposed by Coessens and colleagues: the ecological, epistemic and social. What emerges from this deliberation, is the reification of the score as the 'work', the expectation of a 'genius' (male) composer, hierarchic and stultifying conditions for both musicians and audience members, and performance spaces that encourage these stratifications. Modes of engagement are explored that might foster alternative roles for all actants and the notions of sympoiesis, and the anarchive are presented as potentially useful conceptual tools when imagining an alternative ontology of the score. Moreover, developing on Isabelle Stengers' ideas on an ecology and interdependence of practices I spe...

Discussing the teaching of composition at the university

Vortex Music Journal, 2020

The challenge involved in the teaching of musical composition is somewhat analogous to the issue of reconciling theory and practice; this is when the teacher-student relationship triggers a flow of information that leads to the construction of new concepts that are established by either or both sides. The present paper emerged from a roundtable held at the "The Teaching of Composition at the University" colloquium, which took place at the State University of Paraná in November 2019. The authors did not attempt to arrive at definitive conclusions but, rather, point out directions for critical reflection and practical approaches about the issue of teaching composition. The occasion was also an excellent one for sharing didactic experiences taking place at universities in Brazil and abroad.