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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2015
This reply addresses a number of misunderstandings that have arisen with regard to my argument in ‘Composition is not Research’; notably that it rests on a definition of research derived from ‘scientific method’, and that it somehow entails the view that composers should not be asked to write about their music. It is argued here that referring to composition as ‘research’ is at best a perverse (if institutionally expedient) way of talking about what composers have always done, and at worst leads to a distorted picture of compositional work and musical value.
1 Ian Hacker, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) p. 5.
2 Camden Reeves, ‘Composition, Research and Pseudo-Science: a Response to John Croft’, TEMPO, this issue, pp. 51–2.
3 Reeves, p. 51.
4 Sibley, Frank, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, Philosophical Review 68/4 (1959), pp. 421–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Of course, you can discover things in composition – we do it all the time (that a certain motive can be set against another one without contradicting the harmony; that a certain chord is the complement of another, etc.) But things like this are not a plausible basis for composition as research – compositional questions are of the form: why put these motives together? Why these motives at all?
6 Ian Pace, ‘Composition and Performance Can Be, and Often Have Been, Research’, TEMPO, this issue, pp. 60–70.
7 See Pace, p. 64.
8 Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (London: Macmillan, 2013).
9 Helga Nowotny, ‘Foreword’, in The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, ed. Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. xvii–xxvi.
10 Bruno Latour, ‘On the Partial Existence of Existing and Nonexisting Objects’, in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 247–69, here pp. 248–59.
11 Estelle Barrett, ‘Towards a Critical Discourse of Practice as Research’, in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London: I.B. Taurus, 2010), pp. 135–46, here p. 144.
12 Barrett, ‘Towards a Critical Discourse’, p. 144.
13 Pace, p. 68.
14 Gilbert Ryle, G, ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’ [1946], in Collected Essays (Oxford: Routledge, 2009), pp. 222–35.
15 See, for example, Wallrup, Erik, ‘With Unease as Predicament: On Knowledge and Knowing in Artistic Research on Music’. Swedish Journal of Music Research / Svensk Tidskrift for Musikforskning, 95 (2013), pp. 25–39Google Scholar. It is worth noting that Wallrup's compositional examples are of composers writing theoretical works – I discussed the distinction between this and composition as research in my original article.
16 Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts, p. 8.
17 Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts, p. 5
18 But why would you want to? There is of course a sense in which following the ‘rules’ of sonata form or twelve-note music without this embodied knowing-how would be like trying to ride a bicycle having only read a book about it. To anyone who has taught composition this will seem like an apt analogy. But we can't push it too far, for the point of composing isn't really ‘getting it right’ in this sense. (Did Schubert get composing in sonata form right? Did Berg get twelve-note composing right?) So the corrigibility problem arises here too. This would be better discussed in terms of the Adornian dialectic of universal and particular, rather than in the language of ‘practice as research’.
19 Pace, p. 64.
20 Pace, p. 70. The error of imagining that knowledge-how is ‘implicit’ knowledge that can be made explicit is discussed by Ryle (‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, p. 227).
21 Pace, p. 69.
22 Pace, p. 67. The fear that, if composition is not ‘research’, then it must be merely intuitive, perhaps lies behind the idea that something's being ‘research’ implies a some kind of increased intellectual status.
