The Meaning of Making : Mapping Strategies in Music Composition

Abstract—One way to think of creative processes is as recontextualizations of perceptions and conceptions of reality. Impressions and ideas are seen from new perspectives and connected in new ways before entered into a new context in a different form, which may or may not include shifts in modality or form of representation. This study is about how composition students give musical expression to extra-musical phenomena and how they relate their musical thinking to other forms of representation. It involves studying what mapping strategies the student composers develop in order to establish relationships between different forms of representation, but also to study the meaning making processes in both the analysis and synthesis phase of the restructuring of concepts. The how-questions imply a qualitative approach and method. Data comprise a wide variety of sketch material, as well as scores, performances and recordings of the finalized compositions, and in-depth interviews with the student composers in relation to these materials. In all the studied cases, composition process began with extramusical considerations in the form of narratives, imagery or some kind of physical phenomena (e.g. geometrical concepts, acoustical phenomena and tactile qualities). Typically there would appear several creative processes in different modalities converging into musical form along the composition process. Results suggest that these students intend their music to represent extramusical phenomena and concepts in as far as they take that as points of departure for developing compositional concepts, but also for shaping musical expression. To a varying degree, these extramusical considerations are meant to be conveyed in the music.