Writings on Composition

The compositional and the precompositional acts.

I wrote this a while ago (2020, perhaps) in an attempt to consolidate for myself some of the working definitions I had been using over the years. The experiential roots of this for myself come from a class I took with Angus Balbernie — a choreographer and choreography teacher I love to bits and admire. In it, he suggested a distinction between choreography, composition and directing and gave us some ways of playing with these processes separately. I have tackled the first two in this text and intended to write up the third one, but I never got around to it.

On another note — part of why I decided to put this out is because of a little exchange I had with

Ruth Allen

in which I mentioned letting bits of writing be short and sweet without having to expand them:

“I resonate with the idea of letting a vignette be a vignettes rather than always worrying over into what larger piece it will fit. … I wonder too l, is there a dance equivalent to the written vignette? You know, a movement to the beat of 8 that doesn't get set into a choreography?”

This is, in part, an attempt to answer her question.

(If you haven’t looked at her work yet, I highly recommend checking out Ruth’s work and her Substack, Breccia)

Anyway — onwards to the meat and veg of this piece:

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What is Composition anyway?

Composition has something to do with placing two or more things together within one perceptual field and working on how they relate to each other.

The basic presupposition is that they relate to each other independently of the relationship’s quality. It may not be a clear relationship. One may not sense a quality of ‘connection’, but that is a phenomenon. Even “disconnection” is a form of relationship. As a composer, you can play with these two more things - move them around, get them to face towards or away from each other.

This all presupposes the idea of the boundness of an element: this object, action, movement, shape, etc - all are taken as bound in a compositional context; they are taken as discreet entities. Yet, this discreteness may break down in composing as an ‘element’ gets absorbed into a whole, like an atom into a molecule, potentially releasing energy.

Another compositional presupposition is that of a compositional field, context or frame. The frame has an inside and an outside. Like the relationships, the frame can be spatial, temporal, conceptual or something else. Still, it has to focus compositional attention on what is within it so that the relationships between the discrete elements within can be clarified and rarified and their discreteness dissolved. The compositional act has to happen somewhere, even if that location is non-physical.

Furthermore, another basic compositional presupposition is that of somebody doing the composer. This may be an explicit role or not; it may be a designated artist or an audience. The composer may be distinct from or unified with a performer. However, for elements to unite within a perceptual field, there has to be a perceiver, whoever that is.

So, composition depends on a composer, a frame, two or more discrete elements, and the relationships between these elements. Ultimately, when the act of composition is complete, the frame, the discreteness of the elements and the composer disappear, leaving only an ecology of relationship. These relationships can then be brought within a wider web of relationships, and then we must come to the audience…

Choreography, or the Pre-compositional act

If the act of composition is about arranging discrete elements within a perceptual field, then preceding it must be the act of isolating these elements in the first place. Fundamentally, this act is also a perceptual one. At any moment, your field of perception is a stream of colours, tones, sounds, scents, and information from the proprioceptive, vestibular, kinaesthetic and interoceptive senses. Yet, it is possible to perceive this object, that voice, neck pain, etc.

When it comes to movement, the choreographic act essentially differentiates between the stream of movement itself and a movement, a set of movements or an arrangement of movement qualities or concepts within it.

An equivalent in music is to isolate a pitch and ascribe it to a note value. Although infinite pitches are possible in Western Music, only twelve (and their octaves) are ascribed note values.

This process of isolation functions, regardless of art form, underlies vast differences in what we often call style or tradition. In the traditional performing arts, this process is essentially pre-existent. In many traditional dance forms, a limited number of steps exist, though their execution and arrangements are vast, if not infinite. In Western Music, as already demonstrated, the twelve tones are fixed, though their length, octave, timbre, sequence, instrumentation, etc., are endless. In traditional theatre, the script - words - provide a similar basis.

In a sense, a music composer is spared the pre-compositional act - unless they want to reexamine these fundamental conditions, as John Cage did.

In dance, isolating a motor Gestalt is a very complex process. To create “a movement” as separate from its stream frequently changes its quality entirely. There are many ways of isolating a part from a whole, however - for example, instead of “a movement”, an isolated element, for the purposes of the act of composition, can be a conceptual parameter in improvisation, it can be defining a space to work in, or a moment in time - similar to meditators defining a session as happening between a start gong and an end gong.

For the pre-compositional act to be complete, regardless of its process or medium, the perceiver must phenomenologically experience subjectively the discreteness of an element, whether the element is an object, a word, a shape, a sequence of muscular activation, a concept, a musical note, an environment or something else. Additionally to the condition of discreteness, there is also the condition of multipleness. If composition depends on combining at least two elements, then two or more elements must be defined.

The pre-compositional process may be experienced and approached as distinct from the act of composition, or it may be experienced and approached as one continuous whole - isolating an element or set of elements and then reunifying them immediately as a new whole.

Maybe this has something, in part, to do with the smoothness of a movement for it to be felt as “a movement”. If it is too jagged, it is experienced as many movements, each taking up working memory, but where the compositional sequence is fixed.

Merce Cunningham said, “Choreography is just the right movements in the right order.”

If it flows too well, it becomes impossible to compose. How does “a movement” emerge from its wider Gestalt?

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