Some artists
create spontenously some think ahead and even make roadmaps to reach the end of
a creative process: the work.
Spontenous
creativity may make recursive walk throughs of the incomplete work. Sometimes a breakthrough happens and you
enter a creative space which you just imagine at one step or it is
relatively easy to proceed. Intuition is
triggered by the minute steps of the creative process even by coincidence.
Sometimes the
creative process gets very slow and difficult and come to a halt. The waiting period for a new beginning may
take a few days or years in some cases.
Large scale
work creation, even sonatas, chamber music, are difficult to manage without
seeing forward. Musical structure helps
the composer to keep a sense of direction while
proceeding the creative
process.
Design helps
the creator to do size scaling. For
example, selecting a variations form
enables you to increase the size as you wish.
Design helps
the composer to divide the heavy load to small pieces and concentrate on every
and each section. Design also enables
the composer to correlate the small pieces and build up music that
is impossible for an individual to keep
in mind as a whole.
It helps to
define the entities that build up the work.
This gives the possibility to observe the relative affect that arises
when they come together.
The composer
interacts with instrument players and singers through the score. The design of instrumentation and characters
in an opera is simply the design of interface between them.
Design also
enables the composer to set explicit intention and task set for the work. The composer must know what he wants to get
at at the beginning. This increases the
coordination of many elements of a complex art work.
The timing,
duration, flow of events in an opera, flow of information in an abstract music
form, the characters, moods all can be designed.
The design
has to be guiding and opening the way when it gets narrow. It should determine the main contours of the
work. It should not specify all the
details. This may cause you to get lost
even at the design
phase before beginning to write.
The more
details defines the design, the less flexible it becomes. But this does not mean that the design even
at its birth moment should not define any details. Sometimes you work for 12
months for a simple
symbolic trick that you believe it has to live for as long as possible.
Designs help
the creator to come over deadends. The
design of the nature is the genetic material in the nucleus of each living
creature. The nature has overcome her
failure by being flexible enough to try new species with different genetics
namely different design materials.
Design has
to be dynamicly updateable. The tendency
to make change or not is left to the creator.
The dynamic
decisions may be given by cognition or by intuition. The balance between them depends on the
artist and th character of the work,
also on the genre.
The design
serves as a prototype which serves as a model for the intuition and imagination
of the composer. It gives clairvoyance
to the composer mind's eye.
Design has
an organising, guiding and regulating affect on the creative process. It also enables the creator to repeat the
same design and create other works with the same theme. The 'Rondeau' form is a
simple example.
Design is
more than what I have described upto this point. It can be described but it is not
definable. I believe, the flexibility of
the design element of the creative process is at its best when it leaves
intentional spaces for intuition and crafty spaces for imagination.
Ali R+ SARAL
Note: This article is written as a byproduct of my work 'The Music of Words' for Soprano and Pierrot Quintet. There will be another article named 'The Role of Design in Software Development'. These works were accompanied with my engineering project named 'Turkish Language Parser'. This is the first time my works in both engineering and music composition are correlated.
