Abstract
This chapter seeks to question the ontology and underpinning discourse of ‘composition as research’, proposing that for too long the artistic community has accepted without modification an uneasy mapping of questions and frameworks from the sciences onto the processes, contexts and situations of artistic creativity. However, this is not a straightforward claim for inapplicability, rather a call to action to address the contemporary demands of an interdisciplinary research landscape where complexity, context, risk and emergence play a significant part of research that exceeds the boundaries of that which can be described by technical systems alone.
The chapter notes that artistic creation is articulated through culture by a complex and networked service-dominant logic, rather than a linear supply chain of artistic ‘goods’ from creator to perceiver. In doing so, it suggests that the arts function as a complex system and that traditional research models for creative practice - often themselves based on linear relationships between research process and research outputs - have consequently become crystallised around nineteenth century values of artefact production and singular points of knowledge ownership.
A starting point to disrupt these links is offered through a modification of the vocabulary of how creative research is framed in scholarly practice. The straightforward idea of the creative question is introduced to supplement the classical notion of research question, so that a dependence on the act of translation between textual and non-textual domains in encapsulating enquiry in creative research can be reassessed. Risk, within this untranslated remit, changes behaviour from a force to be mitigated to an agent for enabling emergence and exploration. Broader, interdisciplinary research domains today encompass an experimental system far wider than that which can be described by technical rationality alone. To this end, artistic accountability is proposed as a challenge to procedural justification in the academic presentation of musical composition research, with a view to enabling contextual discourse which is outward-looking and connective by default.
The chapter notes that artistic creation is articulated through culture by a complex and networked service-dominant logic, rather than a linear supply chain of artistic ‘goods’ from creator to perceiver. In doing so, it suggests that the arts function as a complex system and that traditional research models for creative practice - often themselves based on linear relationships between research process and research outputs - have consequently become crystallised around nineteenth century values of artefact production and singular points of knowledge ownership.
A starting point to disrupt these links is offered through a modification of the vocabulary of how creative research is framed in scholarly practice. The straightforward idea of the creative question is introduced to supplement the classical notion of research question, so that a dependence on the act of translation between textual and non-textual domains in encapsulating enquiry in creative research can be reassessed. Risk, within this untranslated remit, changes behaviour from a force to be mitigated to an agent for enabling emergence and exploration. Broader, interdisciplinary research domains today encompass an experimental system far wider than that which can be described by technical rationality alone. To this end, artistic accountability is proposed as a challenge to procedural justification in the academic presentation of musical composition research, with a view to enabling contextual discourse which is outward-looking and connective by default.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Sound Work |
| Subtitle of host publication | Composition as Critical Technical Practice |
| Editors | Jonathan Impett |
| Place of Publication | Leuven |
| Publisher | Leuven University Press |
| Pages | 303-317 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Edition | Orpheus Institute Series |
| ISBN (Print) | 9789462702585 |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 2021 |