Educated in both engineering and music, I am equally comfortable with objective appraisal and with intuited insights. I also have a continuing interest in the procedural and perceptual aspects of musical experimentation — the motivations and strategies that underlie musical innovation. How does one set out to explore in a productive way, unfamiliar paths for musical invention? Too often, "experimental" music has signified license, not a systematic effort to uncover the possible bases of new musical materials or forms. It has shown too little concern for whether such new paths are perceptually plausible. My perspectives have been informed by almost four decades of composing, by reading in perceptual psychology and by the experience of mentoring dozens of younger composers.
In 1998, a colleague, G. J. Balzano, and I offered a graduate seminar entitled "Musical Variation and Psychological Invariance" at the University of California, San Diego Music Department. Participants were asked to place on the table a cherished belief regarding how music is heard. Their beliefs were modeled as informal experiments. The results of these experiments challenged each participant's beliefs, bringing about a reconsideration of their positions. It seemed only reasonable that my own practice be similarly tested. I had described it in a series of lectures (originally given at The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore) that became the basis for the book Form and Method. I also embarked on the project reported upon here: composing a musical work in consultation with perceptual psychologists so that it could serve as a multi-faceted experimental object.
Perhaps because of my particular background, I have habitually planned my compositions diagrammatically before embarking on the explicit choice of pitches, rhythms, and so on. In the so-called "common practice" periods, shared learning, assumptions, and experience on the part of both composer and listener allowed for what has been thought of as a "natural" process within which "intuition" could be relied upon. In our time, however, it would appear that what is shared — between professional composers, between educated listeners, and most problematically between members of these two groups — is uneven, unpredictable, and, hence, unreliable. If this is true, it means that, to a greater degree than in more homogeneous earlier times and societies, an artist now has the responsibility to create his/her own internal consistency — to shape a "tradition of the moment". It is this belief rather than a thirst for diagrams, charts, schemes, and the like which initially shaped my outlook. If the results of my efforts to foresee and ensure logical consistency and emotional integrity had not, to my ears, succeeded, I would have altered my ways. Rather, my experience as a composer and as a teacher has convinced me that the effort to forge an individual consistency of some appropriate sort is indeed (even if regrettably) part of the contemporary composer's task.
In recent decades, the term "pre-compositional" has been used in relation to those activities that a composer may undertake before beginning to actually write down the pitches, rhythms, and other musical details that determine a musical passage. It seems absurd to suggest that the shaping decisions one makes before commencing more traditional forms of musical notation are somehow not to be thought of as a part of the compositional process. To the contrary, however one's ways develop as one forges a craft, it is clear that all that occurs between the first moment at which the intention to create a work is recognized, and the moment the autograph is completed, is a part of the compositional process. This conviction, I underline, does not suggest that only one way, one creative methodology, is acceptable. Rather, I believe the creative process is a holistic web of decision making in which the individual's aesthetic sensibility acts as an arbiter, accepting and rejecting. If this accepting and rejecting occurs within a framework that the composer has carefully considered, it is more likely to be economical, consistent, and substantive.
When I begin a new work, I pass through several stages. The order and the particular content of these may vary from project to project, but it would normally be possible to map whatever I find myself doing during a compositional process onto the following sequence of stages:
There is still the overall shape of a composition, the way ideas flow, attract ones attention immediately or only become significant in later phases of the work. This, the manner in which the listener is addressed, might be thought of as comprising the composer's rhetorical style. I sometimes speak to students about "the orchestration of intention", that is, whether one leaves one's musical ideas relatively undifferentiated, or clearly marks them either by exaggerated emphasis or by punctuation with pauses or tempo fluctuations. In making such choices, the composer can project the musical argument or allow it to remain understated, sometimes almost "out-of-reach".