The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag

Introduction

Introduction Works of art have been compared to icebergs: what is visible is but a small part of the whole. An artwork might seem to exist in splendid isolation, but that impression is misleading.Cultural products inevitably arise from a context,a submerged landscape that is often not easily accessible.It is an undertaking of research to bring such things to light, and studies of the creative process find their cutting edge by probing beyond the surface,opening new perspectives on the apparently familiar. In the case of Beethoven, whose music has served as a locus classicus for studies of musical genesis, part of this missing context is preserved in voluminous sketchbooks. Johannes Brahms, another composer who labored long and hard on his compositions, himself collected sources bearing on the creative process, including some of Beethoven’s manuscripts. Just weeks before his death, Brahms examined one of his predecessor’s later sketchbooks.1 Yet he curbed the access of later investigators to his own creative method by destroying not only sketches but also many of his early unpublished works. Artists do not always welcome others into their workshop. In the present study I open the door to that workshop, investigating not just the final outcome but the process of creative endeavor in music.The most rigorous basis for the study of artistic creativity comes not from anecdotal or autobiographical reports (although they have their role) but from original handwritten sketches and drafts and preliminary studies,as well as from revised manuscripts and similar primary sources. Especially since the eighteenth century, the issue of originality 2 Introduction of style has encouraged intense preliminary efforts preceding and leading toward the production of finished artistic works. Study of the creative process has an interdisciplinary context. The term “genetic criticism,” or critique génétique, relates not to the field of genetics but to the genesis of cultural works, as regarded in a broad and inclusive manner.2 This approach stands in contrast to a formalist focus on the text itself and the related disinclination to probe issues of creative process lest these involve entanglement with the so-called intentional fallacy. Although the turn away from such formalist thinking in literary studies occurred several decades ago, its lingering influence was felt much longer in music scholarship. More recently, growing recognition of the value of contextual studies and of the problematic nature of the notion of a single definitive text has exerted a welcome impact. Particularly promising are approaches that integrate source studies with interpretative analysis, probing the aesthetic meaning of artworks in a rich contextual field. The approach of genetic criticism offers a valuable antidote to the fragmentation of music scholarship into subdisciplines cultivating discrete methodologies. The integrated field as understood by Guido Adler and others in earlier times has split into a colorful array of discrete subdisciplines, with weakened connections between what have become largely autonomous areas of activity.3 Since the tendency toward fragmentation has gained ground in recent decades, it is useful to describe the background in order to clarify the enhanced relevance of creative process studies,which have the potential to help counteract this trend.In a muchdiscussed article from 1978, for instance, Douglas Johnson sought to confine the relevanceofBeethoven’ssketchesstrictlytothebiographicalsphere;insodoing,he overestimated the capacity of musical analysis,guided by a belief that the structure of a given work can be read as though it were transparent in the published score.4 Johnson’s model of musical analysis was the system of Heinrich Schenker,who was concerned to construct “a theory of musical coherence that will not open pieces to the infinite intertextuality of the déjà entendu,” as Kevin Korsyn puts it.5 If the musical text is understood as a closed system of relations—exuding an aura of infallibility —then avantes-textes such as sketches and other preliminary compositional documents seem excluded from the aesthetic field of the work itself.Yet underlying this position is an attitude of dogmatic ideology. As soon as we embrace an open view of the work—acknowledging its continuity with historical sources and the intertextuality of the déjà entendu—the potential enrichment of such contextual studies becomes apparent. By the 1980s Joseph Kerman had advocated a model for musicology involving a shift“fromthevariousbranchesandmethodologiesofmusichistorytowardsactual music,”but this model was not embraced by the “new musicology,”whose proponents were concerned to distance themselves from a work-based canonic repertory of “pure music.”6 Despite its use of a rhetoric of liberation, the new...