Composing with Musical Instruments: Physicality and Instrument Intervention in the Creative Process

Abstract

For many composers, the physical practice of making music with an instrument plays a prominent role in their creative process. While intellectual and abstract forms of musical understanding have received much attention in scholarship, the body’s knowledge and understanding of music—and its place in the creative process—is often overlooked. Composers with and without instrumental expertise incorporate the influence of instrumental understanding in their compositions. This can be through direct experience or abstract understanding and it affects music in both concrete and ephemeral ways. Instrumental knowledge can also hinder the creative process in a variety of ways for different artists. Through interviews and the analysis of composed works, the work and personal experiences of fifteen composers, including the author, form the central offering of this paper. Interspersed with first hand accounts are voices from scholars of musicology, music cognition, philosophy of perception, and music technology and instrumentality.