For over 30 years I have been speaking with contemporary American composers about their experiences during the development of their musical ideas.
In organizing the data, I have been interested in the particular sensory style and physical experience that is characteristic of the individual composer, whether visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or something else. While I have learned that composers will employ different styles in various pieces that they work on, for many there is a consistency in sensory approach.
It is difficult for a composer to articulate how the musical idea is experienced and where he or she feels it originates. This taps at the heart of the creative process and demands a verbal discursive description of a non-verbal process. It has an unfair quality to it because it requires a shift in focus from process to observation. The ability to present non-verbal ideas in verbal form is extremely difficult. In many instances, the composers had never been asked the kinds of questions about their work that I was investigating and found our talk interesting and challenging. Thinking in non-verbal terms involves a completely different “set” and often the direction of the interviews took surprising turns for the interviewees.
Since many composers who have written about their experiences in the development of musical ideas have described them most often in auditory terms, one would think, therefore, that their primary means of experiencing and processing the musical impulse would be auditory. In my own interviews with many contemporary composers, I found this not to be the case. While there are many composers who ascribe a major role to their auditory experiences, many report other sensory modalities as their main vehicle in experiencing the musical impulse. Following are some anecdotal reports by composers regarding their experiences during the inspirational phase of their work:
There are several particular forms of auditory experience that some composers described to me that merit consideration.
For example, one said, “My ideas come aurally. I know the instruments of the piece I'm writing and I just sit down and some ideas come. I'll hear a melody and figure out a way to circulate it around among the other instruments.”
While there are many composers who ascribe a major role to their auditory experiences, many report other sensory modalities as their main vehicle in experiencing the musical impulse.
I asked another composer, Chen Yi, “How do you experience the musical idea?”
She answered, “I hear every precise pitch and rhythm.”
“You actually hear it?”
“Yes,” she said. “I don't use the keyboard to compose. I do it all in my head and actually hear it precisely. I have absolute pitch, so whenever I hear people talking or bells ringing, the music sounds in my head and I know the pitches.”
Chen Yi was born and grew up in China where spoken language uses particular pitches as means of expressing meaning. She uses this in her music, especially in setting texts.
During a discussion with George Crumb regarding some of the developmental aspects of music in a composer's life and the origins of some early musical impulses, he said, “Composers first draw from infancy or childhood on the sound of nature, even the particular acoustic. Appalachia happens to be a river town that sits in a valley. That's a particular acoustic that I accepted as the acoustic of the world, and I don't think there's any question but it found its way into my own music. An echoing acoustic.”
A number of composers, contrary to earlier expectations and reports in the literature, are more visually oriented and at times experience their ideas for compositions in visual terms. One composer whose inspiration was visual described his process of composition, in this manner: “I can see scores in my mind, full scores in my mind. I actually see the notes and everything in my mind.”
To me, this represents a unique phenomenon, in that a composer, working in an auditory medium and using sounds to express his creative ideas uses visual means as the primary mode of expression. Apparently, sensory preferences operate independently of the particular sensory modality that the composer uses in his or her creative mode. One might speculate that on a neurophysiological level, this conforms to the descriptions cited by Allan Schore, who stated that the convergence of sensory afferents in the frontal lobe are operating and may be available for both visual and auditory functions. I have since found other documentation in the work of neuroscientists which support this proposition including the ability to change visual cortical cells to auditory functions.
Martin L. Nass, Ph.D., is clinical professor of psychology in the NYU post-doctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and faculty, training and supervisory analyst, at the New York Freudian Society. He is professor emeritus, Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
I was most interested to learn that many composers experience the musical impulse in bodily terms, some as a form of bodily tension or kinesthetic pull which is released through the expression of the piece, others as a more general feeling of physical motion. In his interview with me, the late Ross Lee Finney described his experiences in writing several pieces of music:
The image in my mind is related to a sense of gesture. They're not usually picture memory experiences, but gesture memory experiences. I'm writing a work for a band now. It's called “Crack the Whip.” It's based on a game played on the frozen rivers in North Dakota where a group of children on skates form a line and then pull the far end around. The body pull of the experience is what is involved in the source of inspiration for the piece.
This articulate individual was able to put his most complex experiences into words. I had the impression at times that these were issues that he had never before articulated and that formulating them made a good deal of sense to his experience.
A young composer, who was awarded a Pulitzer for her music, was also an articulate reporter who thought through many of her responses to some complex questions:
I see the composer as a sculptor. I feel that I need to do something physically. I use the idea as a piece of clay…shaping and reshaping…. I'm always trying to determine how it fits into the larger picture…there's always a physical sense to how I work.
On reflection, one could see how the sense of physicality is close to the experience of sound. Early sound experiences are related to body movement experiences and composing music is reported by some (e.g., Paul Hindemith) to be connected with the baby's earliest gestures. Thus, the composers interviewed who are close to these early experiences report their compositional inspirations in terms of early sensorimotor experiences. These experiences are also related to basic issues in the creative individual, who has the capacity to hold onto and continue early non-verbal experiences and to reshape them.
The problem in being able to articulate the issues and the processes involved was aptly described by another fairly recent Pulitzer Prize winner:
I feel music. I hear it and I feel it. I think the thing that's difficult about music is that it exists in time and we don't have any way to talk about it. We talk about musical form as though it were something that was in space, but the whole issue of musical form is when something happens, when you have a contrast…. It's not translatable to a flat surface. So I think it's very difficult for us in some ways to think about it. It's difficult to articulate even what the issues are in time. The concept of gesture for something, for instance, is something that is a time sense and the feeling we have in our body—rhythm, what-not—a time kind of thing. I think a very important part of thinking about music is to experience the time of it and to have a sense of how the piece lays itself out over a period of time…. These are the big issues.
Another highly successful young composer, in response to a question about how she experienced the musical idea, said that an idea “is like a person. I think you have to live with it, you have to be patient with it to get inside of it. You have to understand the rhythm of it, the shape of it, the space you're in, the dynamic you're in. You have to really, really get inside of it and see this little kernel of things… you need a relationship with it.”
I asked, “How do you actually experience the idea? Do you hear it? Do you see it? Do you experience it in a body sense?”
“I call myself a choreographer of sound,” she said. “I have a physical relationship to music and I feel it physically… how high does it go up, how long does it stay up there and what's the fallout…. It's tension and the release of tension. The whole thing has got to have some kind of architectural motivation to it.”
I continue to be awed by the work style of these creative people. More and more, I regard their creative work as being accessible to their inner workings, as being able to take risks, to try out new ideas, and to face unknown and frightening consequences. Also a form in which they work parallels the form of good psychoanalytic work in that imagination, new ideas, and an ability to move into unknown, unexplored areas are critical factors in the endeavor.