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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2021
The organising of tools, whether real or virtual, is an essential part of composition that is often overlooked. This article aims to generate a discussion about how a composer's working environment can permeate the compositional process and contribute to or inform their ideations. Central to this understanding, in terms of agency, has been to consider workflow as a subset of Actor–Network Theory. Here, a musical composition is viewed as a multiplicity of relationships between workflow and ideations, and suggests an expanded practice of musical creation that explores the various agencies that shape a composition. Nevertheless, this article is not intended as a comprehensive account, but only, as Bruno Latour would put it, ‘to add in a messy way to a messy account of a messy world’.
1 Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. xxixGoogle Scholar.
2 Composing in Co-Operation with the Computer – Lecture from Johannes Kreidler – YouTube, published 25 September 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaSbAbFVTOE&t=247s (accessed 15 October 2018.
3 Byrne, David, How Music Works (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2012), p. 16Google Scholar.
4 Rose, François, ‘Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music’, Perspectives of New Music, 34 (1996), p. 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Bruno Latour, and Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation Bruno LaTour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
6 In the work of Algirdas Julien Greimas and Gérard Genette.
7 All these actors are, in turn, the result of networks of people and technology in manufacturing or farming.
8 Judith Lihosit, ‘Breaking Down the Black Box: How Actor Network Theory Can Help Librarians Better Train Law Students in Legal Research Techniques’, Law Library Journal, 106 (2014), p. 213.
9 Latour, and Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation Bruno LaTour, Reassembling the Social, p. 53.
10 Hay wrote that the ‘mattering of TV’ refers not only to its materiality but to its effects of social interaction. See James Hay, ‘Locating the Televisual’, Television & New Media, 2/3 (2001), pp. 205–34.
11 Brian Ferneyhough, Collected Writings (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), p. 2.
12 Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), p. 164.
13 Gilbert Ryle, ‘Knowing How and Knowing That: The Presidential Address’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 46 (1945), pp. 1–16.
14 Jeremy Fantl, ‘Knowledge How’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive, Fall 2017 Edition https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/knowledge-how/.
15 Latour argues that how effective an actor is depends on whether it is an intermediary or a mediator. An intermediary transports meaning or force without transformation therefore ‘defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs’ (Latour, and Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation Bruno LaTour, Reassembling the Social, p. 39). Mediators, ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’ (ibid. 39).
16 cf. Jennifer Walshe, Thoughts upon a New Discipline, Darmstadt Summer Course Lecture, August 2016.
17 Benjamin Piekut, ‘Actor–Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques’, Twentieth-Century Music, 11 (2014), pp. 191–215; Georgina Born and Andrew Barry, ‘Music, Mediation Theories and Actor–Network Theory’, Contemporary Music Review, 37 (2018), pp. 443–87.
18 The network diagram of Figure 1 is my own interpretation built from Ross Feller's account of the composition of the String Trio in ‘E-Sketches: Brian Ferneyhough's Use of Computer-Assisted Compositional Tools’, in A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches, ed. Sallis Friedemann and Patricia Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 176–88.
19 The Figure 2 network is derived from Stockhausen's 1996 article, ‘Helikopter-Streichquartett’, Grand Street 14/4 (1996), pp. 213–25. An online variant version of 1999, titled ‘Introduction: HELICOPTER STRING QUARTET (1992/93)’, is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20141117125904/http://www.stockhausen.org/helicopter_intro.html.
20 Antoine Hennion, ‘Baroque and Rock: Music, Mediators and Musical Taste’, Poetics, 24 (1997), pp. 415–35.
21 Marlon Dumas, Wil M. van der Aalst, and Arthur H. ter Hofstede, Process-Aware Information Systems: Bridging People and Software Through Process Technology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), p. 21.
22 Nicolas Donin, ‘Empirical and Historical Musicologies of Compositional Processes: Towards a Cross-fertilisation’ in The Act of Musical Composition: Studies in the Creative Process, ed. Dave Collins (London: Routledge, 2016) pp. 11–12.
23 Feller ‘E-Sketches’, p. 185.
24 Latour, and Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation Bruno LaTour, Reassembling the Social, p. 72.
25 Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds, Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), p. 12.
26 Donin, ‘Empirical and Historical Musicologies’, p. 13.
27 Martin Supper, ‘A Few Remarks on Algorithmic Composition’, Computer Music Journal, 25/1 (2001), p. 48.
28 Of course, algorithmic composition itself isn't unique to computer-aided composition. Indeed, the idea of using formal instructions and processes to create music dates back to the ancient Greeks.
29 Charles Dodge and Thomas A. Jerse, Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance (New York: Schirmer, 1997).
30 It was in the 1990s that IRCAM researched and developed computer-aided composition software, with the development of the PatchWork environment by M. Laurson, J. Duthen and C. Rueda was the initial phase of CAC program development.
31 Gérard Assayag, et al., ‘Computer-Assisted Composition at IRCAM: From PatchWork to OpenMusic’, Computer Music Journal, 23/3 (1999), pp. 59–72.
32 Theresa Sauer, Notations 21 (New York: Mark Batty, 2009), p. 11.
33 Stuart Paul Duncan, ‘Re-Complexifying the Function(s) of Notation in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough and the “New Complexity”‘, Perspectives of New Music, 48/1 (2010), pp. 136–72; Juraj Kojs, ‘Notating Action-Based Music’, Leonardo Music Journal, 21 (2011), pp. 65–72; Ian Pace, ‘Notation, Time and the Performer's Relationship to the Score in Contemporary Music’, in Unfolding Time: Studies in Temporality in Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Darla Crispin (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), pp. 151–92; Andrea Valle, Contemporary Music Notation: Semiotic and Aesthetic Aspects (Berlin: Logos, 2018).
34 Miranda, Eduardo Reck, ‘On Computer-aided Composition, Musical Creativity and Brain Asymmetry’ in The Act of Musical Composition: Studies in the Creative Process, ed. Collins, Dave (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 215–32Google Scholar.
35 Miranda, ‘On Computer-aided Composition’, p. 216.
36 Cassidy, Aaron, ‘Determinate Action/Indeterminate Sound Tablature and Chance in Several recent Works’, in Facets of the Second Modernity, ed. Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen, Cox, Frank, and Schurig, Wolfram (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2008), p. 23Google Scholar.
37 Agón, Carlos, Assayag, Gérard and Bresson, Jean, The OM Composer's Book, vol. 2 ([Paris]: Editions Delatour, 2008), p. 55Google Scholar.
38 Sauer, Notations 21, p. 25.