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Artistic research reports: Composition as Critical Technical Practice
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Artistic research reports
Friday, May 20, 2022
Composition as Critical Technical Practice
Welcome!
As much as artists have always
scrutinized their practice to reevaluate its status and to
explore new paths, the
discipline of artistic research is
In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework results have been released.
a relatively recent one. Much
A simple internet search shows only those institutions eager to display pride in their
ranking (e.g. University of Bristol, Royal Holloway, Guildhall School and
Cambridge). Via (social) media, a more troubling picture can be found, with arts
departments under some type of threat despite seemingly encouraging results.
Wolverhampton University seems to have done well, but intends to slash a
significant number of jobs, reminding us (cynically?) of the many it had added
before submitting its REF report. Similarly, De Montfort University boasts positive
ranking yet its employees cry for help.
musical sector is being
With the financial implications of the results as yet unknown, it is difficult to assess
to what extent this negativity is related to the REF. Anyway, some have stated that
practice-based subjects are not negatively impacted. Indeed, whereas for the
previous REF in 2014, university-employed composers lamented having to seek
approval for their creative work by adding academic output, sparking a debate about
composition-"as"-reserarch (cf. here, here, and here), this time around, such
composers’ sighs seem largely to have dissipated. This may mean that composition
itself is (more) acknowledged as research output than before, at least in the UK.
of this exciting part of the
developed as we write, more
yet is still hotly debated. This
blog is to keep track of what I
come across while riding
through the scenery around
this vibrant new community, of
which I, a classically trained
pianist and post-doc artistic
researcher, have now become
a heavily involved member.
Hop on and enjoy the ride.
Luk Vaes
Surely less coincidental is the 2021 Leuven University Press publication of the 373page multi-authored volume, Sound Work: Composition as Critical Technical
Practice, edited by Jonathan Impett, whose roles as composer, director of research
at the Orpheus Instituut, and associate professor at Middlesex University, makes his
voice(s) especially noteworthy. The book can be acquired for 62,5€ here, where the
table of contents can be viewed. Since the publication represents a constructive
addition to the debate about composition and research, Jonathan’s introduction,
including summaries of the chapters, is reproduced underneath.
Featured Post
Dead or alive
Any performer active in new music has
experienced it when working with living
composers: they aren't necessarily the
Holy Grail of ans...
Music-Making and Storytelling
Jonathan Impett
Popular Posts
This volume is concerned with storytelling: the stories composers tell about
composition, to themselves and to others. In the past, the self-reporting of
composition has tended to consider the areas in which it aspires to be innovative, or
the theories—musical, aesthetic, social, scientific, technological—that have informed
the work, rather than the activity of composition itself. The knowledge presented in
such cases often lies outside composition. There is no lack of accounts by composers
demonstrating how their work embodies this theory or that principle, or introduces a
https://artisticresearchreports.blogspot.com/2022/05/composition-as-critical-practice.html
When composition is
not research
An article by UK
composer and Brunel
University lecturer
John Croft ,
"composition is not
research," was
published in las...
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Artistic research reports: Composition as Critical Technical Practice
new technical concept. There is no shortage of investigation of the ontology and
epistemology of the “work” as a persisting historical cultural phenomenon, but the
technologies and context of composition have undergone a paradigm shift. The
present, to repurpose a phrase, is another country.
In contemporary science, the role of storytelling is increasingly recognised not
only in science communication but also in its self-image and hence in scientific
practice (Davies et al. 2019). In the discussion of music creation, several factors
contribute to the urgent need for new discourse, new voices, and new kinds of story.
The cultural landscape is transformed, and with it the perceived role of “art” music
and the nature of public critical discourse. In a prevailing atmosphere of
individualism, the commonality of creative experience is all the more important—
both among artists themselves and with their audience. And composition is largely
supported as an activity of knowledge-production, as research, rather than as
creative development per se. We need, therefore, to tell more material, honest, and
useful stories—to seed discourse, to find resonances, to encourage critical
engagement.
To paraphrase Brian Ferneyhough ([1982] 1995), composition walks a
tightrope between formalism and the arbitrary, a process informed by theory and
intuition, constraint and contingency, expectation and experience. It is a continuous,
situated, iterative process of inscription and reflection in which its models,
metaphors, aspirations, obligations, tools, and technologies all play a part; it has a
narrative, or rather multiple narratives (Impett 2016). This process and its products
embody assumptions, choices, and intentions that have significant implications for
the position, role, and impact of artist and artwork alike—critical implications,
whether the artist chooses to regard them as such or not. The artefacts of
composition—however notated, improvised, virtual, embodied, or technologically
implemented—are hybrid technical objects and require a technicity of engagement
on the part of artist and listener.
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The hypothesis of this volume is that we might rather consider composition as
a design process, and that we might usefully study its dynamics and decisions in the
spirit of what Philip Agre described as critical technical practice. Agre developed his
ideas in the context of his work in artificial intelligence (AI), at a moment of deep
transformation in that field, of moving from “mentalist” to “interactionist” models.
His fundamental insight is that individual practice— what he described as “the
practical logic of computer work” (Agre 2002)—is indivisible from the social context
and implications of its products; they constitute a single critical activity:
The word “critical” here does not call for pessimism and destruction but rather
for an expanded understanding of the conditions and goals of technical
work.... Instead of seeking foundations it would embrace the impossibility of
foundations, guiding itself by a continually unfolding awareness of its own
workings as a historically specific practice.... It would accept that this reflexive
inquiry places all of its concepts and methods at risk. And it would regard this
risk positively, not as a threat to rationality but as the promise of a better way
of doing things. (Agre 1997a, 22–23)
Agre criticises conventional accounts that present work and theory as a mutually
justifying pair—one as the natural embodiment of the other—as insufficient. Such
accounts hide narrative, decisions, and parameters, avoid critical context. Instead,
he outlines a practice that is reflective in two directions: in terms of what it actually
involves—intentions, conditions, means, theory, actions, constraints, events—and in
terms of its context—cultural, social, technological, and, in our case, artistic and
even personal. He describes a single disciplinary field: “one foot planted in the craft
work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique” (Agre
1997b, 155). This is not the place to hazard a reductive summary of Agre’s concept,
but we must point to a recent resurgence of interest in areas such as software
studies (Kitchin and Dodge 2014), intelligent design (Somerson and Hermano 2013),
architecture (Parisi 2013), and artificial intelligence itself, which has been massively
re-energised with recent advances in machine learning. Like the artefacts of these
fields, music inhabits a liminal material state, is heavily dependent on the means of
its realisation, retains its identity across manifold instantiations, is adaptive to the
context of its embodiment, and is the product of deep concept, abstract imagination,
and painstaking technique and experiment.
In critical technical practice, reflection and its articulation are integral and
essential to the process; there is no single model any more than there is a single
model of composition. This volume explores the potential of critical technical practice
(CTP) as an ethos and discourse for the articulation and sharing of knowledge
production through composition across styles, practices, and contexts. The
technological context, materials, and practices of composition have always been
closely coupled. The wider cultural role and understanding of composition as an
activity has been transformed with each technological paradigm shift. This volume
considers the new cultural, professional, epistemic, and institutional situation of
composition in the particular contexts of the wide range of current technologically
enabled practices: music information retrieval, live coding, live notation, intelligent
instrument-building and hacking, interactive, autonomous, and algorithmic
approaches, distributed creativity, sound art, and computer-assisted composition. As
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an inherently reflexive approach, CTP brings implications for the development of
these same contemporary practices.
The opening chapters consider the relevance and potential of critical technical
practice in music from wide perspectives. Alan Blackwell’s “Too Cool to Boogie” sets
the scene by locating Agre’s thought in the field of artificial intelligence, its issues
and subsequent developments. Critical technical practice presents a critical response
to the impasse of AI in the 1980s; technical and philosophical views are inseparable
if the field is to realise its potential for good, and this relationship is reflected in the
stories practitioners tell about their own work. The author explores Agre’s thought
by situating it in a specific instance of his own practice: studying funk bass. The
interaction of technical methods with the embodied, situated, complexly motivated
narrative of human practice emerges as the object of critical reflection.
David Rosenboom’s magisterial “Illusions of Form” presents a body of creative
thought that has evolved in parallel and kept pace with the developments that have
produced the concept of CTP, the current 4E view of cognition (embodied,
embedded, enacted, extended), and recent advances in biotechnology. Rosenboom
invokes Agre’s ideas to construct a critical reflection on the development and
implications of his own radical concept of propositional music. Received boundaries
of genre or discipline are abandoned, not to indifference but to a new mode of
artistic-technical-scientific endeavour—an artscience, its methodology informed by
the current concept of emergent engineering. Composition becomes an activity of
world-model building, an imaginative process that engages with the cognitive
processes of performers and listeners alike, using means and models derived from
and developed with advances in science and technology. Through examples of
neuromusical propositions, musical configuration spaces and emergent collaborative
projects, Rosenboom lays the ground for a new artscience discourse. In his vision,
critical technicity is in operation throughout the acts of composition, performance,
and listening.
The software-hardware binary central to current technology-based practice is
examined in Nicolas Collins’s “What to Ware?” He suggests a taxonomy, a series of
axes along which their different affordances and constraints might be understood.
This illuminates the artist’s selection of tools as a series of conscious choices, all
informed by a fundamental critical question in art, that of truth to materials—in this
case, whether music made with electronics should sound like electronic music.
Collins’s fine-grained analysis of craft is complemented by Ann Warde’s broad
recontextualising of the very activity of composition. She pursues a process of
substitution to explore the prospect of a “critical musical practice,” such that
composition becomes a way of imagining and modelling “a world we’d like to
perceive and experience—an environment: a social, physical, tactile environment.”
Warde performs a further inversion: by seeing music as a technology, she presents it
as having a wider function in its own present. These substitutions shed new light
both on the wide relevance of Agre’s ideas beyond their apparent subject area, and
on the potential role of music as a critical instrument.
The intimate dance of the technical and the critical is explored in Nicholas
Brown’s “The Composer’s Domain.” The essentially transdisciplinary nature of the
work of composing with computers emerges from two case studies. Such work
becomes a way of interrogating both assumptions about music-making and the
world-views embodied in technology; it proposes alternative ontologies for music
and poses new questions concerning our relationship with the natural, cultural, and
engineered world we inhabit. At the heart of this music is the fulcrum between the
digital and the mechanical, developing the thesis of the chapter by Nicolas Collins.
The abstraction, conditionality, and absolute nature of the digital are balanced by the
situated and responsive materiality of the ways in which the work is shared.
The editor’s “Dissociation and Interference” considers the relevance,
implications, and enactment of critical technical practice in the current environment
of art as knowledge production. Crucial differences emerge between CTP and actor–
network theory: a CTP approach addresses the significant gap in current music
discourse between material and social perspectives. Agre insists on the identification
of moments of dissociation and interference as a key component, and this is
discussed in the context of the practical business of composition.
McLaughlin, Di Scipio, and Romero examine particular aspects of contemporary
composition, as they emerge from the writers’ own practices—aspects with broad
common resonance. Scott McLaughlin pursues the question of material
indeterminacy in “The Impossibility of Material Foundations.” The composer sets the
conditions for the development of a relationship between performer and an
unpredictable and unstable performance environment—a combination of technique
and instrument. This essentialises and micro-examines the situation that effectively
obtains in any “conventional” performance. A touchstone comes from Agre, in his
description of such a process as “embrac[ing] the impossibility of foundations,
guiding itself by a continually unfolding awareness of its own workings as a
historically specific practice” (1997a, 23). Composition is thus acknowledged as a
situated experimental process, the recursive exploration of the infinite possible
networks conceived as a “phase space.”
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Agostino Di Scipio puts forward a view of live electronic music as an inherently
critical practice in “Thinking Liveness in Performance with Live Electronics.” His
chapter begins with a comprehensive historical survey of practice and concepts. Di
Scipio’s concept of liveness involves not simply human presence or “real-time”
operation—itself a very plastic idea—but the real lived time and space of
performance. He proposes the performance ecosystem as an operative unit, such
that system and site are coupled in performance. Critical technicity runs through
practice and performance into their social context: “By way of turning the hybrid
constitution of techno-ecosystems into phenomenologically shared auditory events,
these mediators audibly expose the human, all-too-human reality of our pervasive
technological condition.”
In “Experiment and Experience,” Lula Romero resists the notion of mastery—of
craft or materials. In the pursuit of openness of relationship between composer and
work, she finds Cage’s apparent rejection of the subject insufficient as a response.
Instead she sees a continuous intra-action between composer and materials; the
resulting music is a product of their interference. Such openness becomes a process
of continuous critique, evading commodification and offering alternative world
models. This critique is confronted with each technical decision: the spatial
distribution of multiple possible outcomes, the design of and negotiation with
systems. Romero proposes a reformulation of the composer as a feminist subject.
The accounts of Magnusson, Fantechi, Haddad, and Zattra set out from very
practical aspects of contemporary composition practice. Metacompositional thought
in the design of a performance system is a theme developed in Thor Magnusson’s
account of his development of the Threnoscope, a live coding environment. As a
mode of compositional inscription, code has its own dynamics in terms of imagining
and structuring work—or rather potential work—and in its dissemination and reuse.
Here it becomes a context for experimentation as well as a creative tool;
conventional categories of modes of practice and expertise dissolve as questions of
music theory, cognition, technology, interface, and instrument design provoke and
inform one another. Projects such as the Threnoscope invite us to dynamically reevaluate notions of design, composition, performance, improvisation, and
collaboration.
The activity of com-posing—the putting together of music—is predicated at
some level on a conceptual model of the resources and materials to be used. The
management of resources—their representation, their perceived or ascribed
relationships, their disposition—is so fundamental an activity, so practical, that it
may seem pre-technical and is certainly lost in most accounts of practice. Instead,
the decisions it embodies reflect a critical stance that informs all its artefacts.
Daniela Fantechi explores this topic in “A Few Reflections about Compositional
Practice,” a refreshingly candid account of personal practice as revealed in a series of
case studies. Awareness of choice—of taste, of the changing objects of attention and
of provisional, variable parameters of categorisation— evolves from an
autoethnographic discipline to a guiding critical stance. This generates a narrative of
form emerging from levels of compositional memory and the inherent temporality of
the material.
Karim Haddad’s “Temporal Poetics” presents a way of conceiving musical time
and of manipulating the temporality of musical entities mentioned by Fantechi. This
is contiguous with the roots of Western mensural notation in the ars nova, but also
with Hölderlin’s assertion of rhythm as the essential property of art, of nature, and
of knowledge. Computer-assisted composition restores the flow of time to the
working environment; the temporalities of imagination, experimentation,
composition, and performance modulate each other. Haddad’s approach recognises
the particular temporality of materials while being situated in both the historical flow
of musical culture and a critical exchange with contemporary technology.
Music research has recently focussed on collaborative work in contemporary
music creation; we might more accurately observe that music research has recently
come to take note of the extent to which collaborative or distributed processes are
vital to music creation in general. As the technological possibilities available to
musicians have proliferated, distributed technical expertise has become crucial at the
stage of composition. A very particular mode of collaboration obtains in institutional
studios where composers are invited to work with the assistance of technical
experts. Laura Zattra examines the dynamics of such situations in “Collaborative
Creation in Electroacoustic Music,” by exploring three cases in detail. Useful terms
derive from design practices; workflow, communication, and the co-evolution of
musical imagination with technical experimentation emerge as significant factors.
The complicity, empathy, creativity, and openness of the assistant are crucial, and
yet their professional status is not always resolved.
Finally, Alessandrini and Zhu, Field, and Ciciliani present visions for new
ontologies of music, each taking a unique critical stance and exploring its
ramifications for their technical practice. Patricia Alessandrini’s feminist multimedia
monodrama Parlour Sounds is the case study at the heart of her chapter with Julie
Zhu. In the spirit of Haraway-inspired cyberfeminism, the project challenges
predominant practices of technology, confronting those of music with those of the
domestic environment. Such displacement brings the work into new critical
relationships with many aspects of its production and context: the collaborative
processes of composition, of interface design and construction, the physical location
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of work with music technology, the relationship of art with daily life, and the power
structures at play in the soliciting and production of music. Cyberfeminist principles
inform the proposal of an alternative to dominant paradigms of electronic music, and
a theoretical framework in which roles and distinctions between composition, design,
improvisation, and performance are blurred.
Ambrose Field seeks to change the vocabulary of creative practice from
another perspective. Much compositional activity now happens in an academic
context, where it is supported and expected to explain itself as research. This
transition has been extensively discussed: from the epistemological implications to
the ways in which it reflects a new mode of supporting cultural and creative
development. From the composer’s perspective, however, such discussion has
largely been concerned with defending creative freedom or claiming epistemological
relevance. Instead, Field addresses the question of the practice itself directly. When
creative practice also becomes experimental practice, what are the ramifications for
both the self-image and the practical behaviour of the practitioner? Field considers
the formulation of questions and especially the development of new approaches to
workflow, which he describes as “the creative envelope.”
If the practices of music creation are to enter a more dynamic phase of critical
awareness, the relationship with the listener, audience, or co-participant becomes
crucial. For whom is this work intended? How is it to be received, in what
circumstances and with what expectations of attention or investment? Marko
Ciciliani’s “Designing Audience–Work Relationships” explores this in detail through
three of his audiovisual projects—performance/installation hybrids. They work with
time, space, and multiplicity of phenomenon to experiment with modes of social and
individual interaction. Hall’s “proxemics” provide a metric of intimacy. Patterns of
temporality and attention emerge from the engagement of performers and listeners,
not as an epiphenomenon but within the scope of compositional imagination, design,
and critical reflection.
Through such processes of critical technical reflection, of detailed discussion of
the practical narrative of composition, common themes emerge from this multiplicity
of creative practices. Technology is present not for technology’s sake, but because
our evolving relationship with technology is one of the defining paths of our current
state. A systems view of practice and its artefacts appears often, just as the midcentury visions of cybernetics are informing recent work in the new AI—currently
searching for ways to confront its own hidden assumptions, tastes, and prejudices.
Above all we see references to building models of possible worlds; David
Rosenboom’s propositional music stands as paradigm in this regard.
Composition is not the sudden, unitary embodiment of an idea but a situated,
distributed, time-extensive activity. And the products of this activity, of these
decisions, reflect world views and values; they propose new models. If we are to talk
about music in material ways and music is to do its important work in the world,
then composers must begin to have new kinds of conversation with each other and
with the wider community. It is hoped that this volume will contribute to such a
development.
References
Agre, Philip E. 1997a. Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 1997b. “Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to
Reform AI.” In Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond
the Great Divide, edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William Turner,
and Les Gasser, 131–57. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
———. 2002. “The Practical Logic of Computer Work.” In Computationalism: New
Directions, edited by Matthias Scheutz, 129–42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davies, Sarah Rachel, Megan Halpern, Maja Horst, David Kirby, and Bruce
Lewenstein. 2019. “Science Stories as Culture: Experience, Identity, Narrative and
Emotion in Public Communication of Science.” JCOM: Journal of Science
Communication. 18 (5): A01. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.18050201.
Ferneyhough, Brian. (1982) 1995. “Form—Figure—Style: An Intermediate
Assessment.” In Brian Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and
Richard Toop, 21–28. London: Routledge. Essay written 1982; first published 1984 in
French translation (Labrys 10).
Impett, Jonathan. 2016. “Making a Mark: The Psychology of Composition.” In The
Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, edited by Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and
Michael Thaut, 2nd ed., 651–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. 2014. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Parisi, Luciana. 2013. Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Somerson, Rosanne, and Mara L. Hermano, eds. 2013. The Art of Critical Making:
Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
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Posted by luk at 3:48 AM
Labels: Artistic research, composition, composition-as-research, Jonathan Impett, REF, Research Excellence Framework
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