[ANPPOM-Lista] John Croft: "Composition Is Not Research"

Bruno Angelo bmangelo em yahoo.com.br
Sex Dez 11 11:57:32 BRST 2015


"so​ ​after all the explications of technique, the compositionally important thing would remain​ ​unexplained and untouched".
E quem explica então essa "compositionally important thing"? Ou um conceito de coisa composicional é suficiente, isto é, não pede problematização? 
Bruno Angelo  Músico(51) 8103 9547 epopeiafantastica.wordpress.com 


    Em Sexta-feira, 11 de Dezembro de 2015 7:58, Carlos Palombini <cpalombini em gmail.com> escreveu:
 

 
John Croft​, "Composition is Not Research"​, ​Tempo 69/272​:​ 6-11, April 2015

There are, by and large, two kinds of composers in academia today – those who labour under the​ ​delusion that they are doing a kind of ‘research’, and those who recognise the absurdity of this​ ​idea, but who continue to supervise PhD students, make funding applications, and document their​ activities as if it were true. Composing, of course, might on occasion​​ ​depend on research – how do I make an orchestra sound like a bell? How do I electronically sustain a note from an instrument so that it doesn’t sound mechanical? What is the best way to notate microtones or complex rhythms so that they can be accurately played? But none of these is actually the composition of music. Rameau’s harmonic theory was research, and it surely influenced his music (and music in general),​ but the​ ​Traité de l’harmonie​ ​is not a musical composition​. ​The development of the pianoforte involved research and influenced music in profound ways, but it was not composing.​ 

One might argue that at least the construction of compositional systems is research. Now, even​ ​granting this, it would remain the case that good and bad music can be made from any system – so​ ​after all the explications of technique, the compositionally important thing would remain​ ​unexplained and untouched. But in reality even compositional systems are not research in any​ ​strong sense. This is because the answer to any conceivable ‘research question’ that might be​ ​involved is known in advance. Imagine, if you will, a research funding application from​ ​Schoenberg. Research question: ‘can I make music in which all pitch classes are played equally​ ​often?’. Answer: yes! Or one from Grisey: ‘can I make chords out of the pitches revealed by​ ​spectral​ ​analysis?’ Answer: yes! Can I write a piece by sonifying the human genome? Actually, yes! If the​ ​answer to your ‘research question’ is always (trivially) ‘yes’, then there’s no research going on.

But this is in fact what grant applications, composition PhD abstracts, and the ‘research narratives’​ ​we are required to write for the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (or its equivalents in an​ ​increasing number of other countries) tend to look like. Sometimes, as if aware of the problem, we​ ​insert an evaluative term: ‘can a coherent​ ​musical structure be developed from sonification of the​ ​human genome?’ Without the word ‘coherent’ the answer is of course yes. So we put something in​ ​to make it seem like the result is not a foregone conclusion. But of course it​ ​is​ a foregone​ ​conclusion, because what one generally means by such a question is ‘can I write convincing music​ ​with this technique?’ where the person to be convinced is… me! Can I write music that I think is​ ​good? It turns out I can. Now, we could of course conduct research into questions like this: we​ ​could, for example, empirically test the perceived cohesion of music constructed in a certain way.

But composition in that case would be the test stimulus for a music psychology experiment, not itself research. Alternatively, we might look at how often composers have decided to use certain techniques – but in that case the compositions are data, again not themselves research. Furthermore, if pre-compositional work and system building cannot be classed as research, then it is not possible to avoid this problem by claiming that compositions are in some sense the ‘findings’ of a research process. Indeed, the bizarre idea that the purpose of a musical composition is to report findings brings into stark relief the category error that is at work here.

http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/10922/3/Fulltext.pdf

-- 
carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)
professor de musicologia ufmg
professor colaborador ppgm-unirio
http://www.proibidao.org/
ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini
www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2
scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ

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