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Clemens Gadensttter
The teaching and learning of composition
The unopposed,
uncritically accepted,
hollow Beauty continues, here and now
to haunt and to constrain.
(Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Theresienstadt, 1942)
With this text, I hope to develop a poetics of teaching/learning that runs parallel to one of composition. It is based on my experience as a learner, as a teacher, but also as a composer, and is thus inspired by my own teachers and by colleagues who are learning under my guidance.
1.
Art is not a closed system; it is defined by constantly being in motion. Its motor is artistic work, which applies its forces to the status quo of the moment. Learning and teaching if one understands these terms as meaning the conveyance and reception of knowledge can only include that which has already been said, thought, and created. Yet a pedagogy that is in motion must encourage the discovery of paths that lead away from the defining Zeitgeist to possibilities of art-making that is of its time. To do this, one must use knowledge to foster a sensitivity for what art of the present moment could mean. Only through an art concept that is of its time can one develop and encourage the inner drive to see that concept as a point of departure, to literally depart from there, and to not just produce a variant of that which already subsists.
2.
To paraphrase Plato, I claim that a poetics or a theory of creation an essential prerequisite to any creativity can only develop through dialogue. A motion away from familiarity can only succeed with proper reflection. And a rejection of the familiar through my own particular viewpoint succeeds only when uncritically adopted perspectives have been set aside. This requires a stronger ability to both listen to ones own impulses and regard them with continual skepticism. Reflection reveals the materials and their meaning, but also changes them and myself through my particular method of rejection. Thus reflection needs to be practiced and trained through dialogue. The more sparring partners are available in this discipline, the better. There cannot, after all, be any such thing as a static notion of reflection, nor of anything else in art. So the term reflection would signify a persons cognitive and sensitive interaction with the elements that surround us. Such reflection aims for esprit a joyfully experienced form of ones own person as creation and creator.
3.
Let us say this: the musical means are material both on a sensory level (in the sense of exhibiting qualities, etc.), and on a cognitive level (in the sense of the inscribed connotations of sonic events). Change can thus only come about when the means are seen not as means to an end but made palpable as a source of friction for the mind and for the hand/handling, when the way in which they change during the act of handling is attained and experienced. Composing is a handling of sounds. When I adopt this notion of grasping, which has received strong support from recent brain research, then what is at stake is precisely this sensuous, surprising experience, namely that one materiality can be transformed into another and that I can bring about this transformation, this surprise. Material is thus not just selections from an available pool of elements.
4.
The haptic quality of material: its nature comes about in most cases through the context wherein it appears. Sugar in coffee tastes differently than the famous spoonful of sugar in Viennese salad dressing, and in many cases a dash of salt is what brings out the natural sweetness of a vegetable. Trying out what connotations the materials have in a familiar context, experiencing the way in which these meanings come about, experimenting with the meanings of these materials when the contexts change that is the purpose of exercises. This must be tried and emphasized in private lessons: the student takes an important step away from the ability to incorporate pre-formed things, to let ones natural talents play, and toward specificity, which is called forth through a personally defined notion of context. Style imitation, arrangement, composition under the yoke of ones influences, fashions, the creation of music under the spell of the zeitgeist, the absorption of craft as knowledge of the traditional instrumental and instrumentational idioms these anthropological techniques of sound manipulation are essential to the learning process, but on the other hand are precisely what needs to be shed during the learning process if the goal is to compose music which seeks to give a voice to something specific in the material, and thereby re-define its tools and techniques.
5.
Back to the crucial matter of personal reflection: the individual takes existent music and reflects it back in his own way, subjecting it and himself to transformation. Ideally, this leads to a personalized compositional approach. This should not, however, be confused with what we like to call personal style. Style can be nothing more than a calcification of the search for what is possible, a neutralization of the friction between the subject and its environment. The friction turns to persiflage, a kind of meta-history attached to the surface like a bubble, and all rough surfaces are eliminated and along with them, the energy of friction and of change. Teaching ought to foster continuous self-reflection and keep the individual flexible. An obligatory discussion of the notion of style would imply a discussion of how one sees ones own creativity, and the attitude one adopts when relating to the world and to music. Style and the label are (seemingly) compulsory elements in the economic life cycle of the art market like a sort of corporate design, but in the field of art it means stasis, and mass production. Thus heightening the students sensitivity to the thin line between style and personality is just as important a dimension of the work of teaching as a frank discussion of the conditions they will encounter on the art market.
6.
The idea of an arrangement or treatment of material should be to investigate the particular qualities of the chosen material in an as yet unknown manner. The creative approach thus begins from a specific perspective, and develops a transformation strategy, a method of connecting materials, from there. The end result represents a changed view of the original materials. Creation is thus not just placing elements into a scene, accentuating their aptitudes and inherent forces. This is where art differs from mere design. Teaching/learning thus also means: developing a sensibility for such inherent forces, and simultaneously recognizing that artistic force can only come about when these inherent qualities pass through the vision which is shaping them, and emerge from their naturalness or self-evident character in a constantly self-reflexive dialogue between the shaping subject, the object to be shaped, and the resulting shapes themselves.
7.
So practicing sensitivity is crucial: sensibility for the tactility, the feel of sound qualities, their kinesthetic energy, the relation between sound and time; experimentation in guiding the listeners attention. That which is perceived obtains a kind of magnetism through its treatment. One can thus create a kind of skin or a hand, with specific functions, with which to grasp inherent qualities. One retraces body-oriented choreographies, in order to experience their inscribed patterns of meaning. The study of understanding of sonic events is practiced as a type of mimesis. Embodied memory of the experience is simultaneously awakened and transformed (through new contexts) by re-living it directly. The direct influence of sound, the bodily awareness of sound movement and quality, the retraced bodily movement of sound production, gesture this is one side of sense-oriented musical perception. On the other hand, the tactility and the feel will (synaesthetically) stimulate recall of other levels of comprehension; between these runs the central axis of shaping, which must be recognized and rendered.
8.
One must give the same degree of attention to grasping the temporal dimension. Here, the act of arranging takes the bodys sense of time into account. Here one would practice a kind of demarcation of this experience not demarcation in order to achieve a higher plane, but in relation to the possibilities that the human body has to offer.
9.
The type of understanding discussed above implies a development of music out of its own conditions. Instruments and their idioms, in their role as sound producers, could, for example, become a point of departure for work on sound. Sound could allow itself to be reshaped purely on the basis of instrumental idiom. The instrument would thus act not so much as a medium of presentation, but as a topic. The thematization and compositional treatment of musics conditions would no longer permit any single element to act as the mere representation of another. The meanings inscribed into sound events would become legible as such through the compositional treatment, that is, they would no longer act subcutaneously, but rather be laid bare and transformed into the realm of the possible.
10.
I find it important to regard the historical consciousness, as it is being cultivated, as the interaction of personal and collective modes of interpretation of that which is, which is itself already something reconstructed, previously interpreted. Students bring along their own specific kind of musical socialization, often a cultural predisposition very far from my own. The active comparison between personal and collective (music) history, up to and including the history/ies of new music (this very particular phenomenon of modernism, of the avant-garde, but also of postmodern tendencies, etc.) should become historical consciousness and must also become self-consciousness. The question is: what sort of historically formed and history-forming entity am I?
11.
Exactitude of listening, absorption, working-out, thinking; valuing all aspects of the chosen medium; testing ones sensory impressions, achieving as comprehensive an awareness as possible of that which one wishes to say through ones treatment and what one actually says; a lucid relationship with instinct; a rapprochement with ones awareness of the sub-, pre-, and juxta-conscious ... all of these should be aspects of the attitude of a composing individual. To develop such an attitude, and not merely adopt it, is for me almost an ideal definition of compositional ethos. Such an ethos would accept nothing as given, no sound element, no technique, no structure. Some radical steps in this direction might seem small with twenty years of hindsight, while other more inconspicuous changes can even after a long time come to be regarded as epoch-making redefinitions of existent questions.
12.
A part of this question of attitude, both in composition and in teaching, is the relation between the composer and the interpreter. To see the performers as collaborators on the project of a piece is very different from seeing them as mere executors. If the use of an instrument is no longer an option, if instead the instrument and its playing mode become agents for questioning the nature of sound, then an interpreter becomes that kind of collaborator. Considering the state of new music today (fantastic interpreters, chamber ensembles, even a few orchestras, approaching newly composed music with the fresh enthusiasm of discovery), developing this kind of sense seems to be a particularly significant aspect of education.
13.
An attitude which regards hierarchic organization as obsolete, because it is unable to develop a reflexive-transformative dialogue, would be the foundation on which a relationship between the student and the instructor should be built. A process of interaction/communication intended to encourage change cannot be organized one-sidedly.
14.
For me the most important question of all, one which thus should predominate during lessons as well, is the question of why. Honing the sense for that which one wants to say, simply thinking or just woolgathering about what it really means to write music, why one does it, to ask what a piece of music is, what it has to offer to a listener. Is the necessity to say something really so self-evident? What about the urge to write this exact piece and no other? Especially in consideration of trying to justify the luxury of confronting musical problems in the world we inhabit, when indeed far more concrete existential problems are abundantly in evidence, it is crucial to make art that at least attempts to contribute to basic epistemological research (in the area of aesthetic experience). If we dont want art to devolve into being one of many wellness products, an island of pleasures for people who simply want to feel validated in their artistic or intellectual credibility, when in fact the situation seems urgently to call for self-scrutiny, then a sharpening of ones sense for sensemaking ought to be the goal.
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