Practice? What Practice?

Would you acknowledge a Music Composer as an Artist?

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If so would you expect them to be creating practical artworks?

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If so what would you class as a practical piece of art?

It seems strange that I have only just now tackled with this ambiguity. It seems the nature of my practice does not concern creating but immediately documenting my creative ideas as accurately as possible so that they may be interpreted/ brought to life in the by the performance or production of others. The musical score works as a widely recognised and accurate means of portraying the detail and conveyance of a composer’s work.

However, if we consider documentation to be secondary to practice; as a byproduct or after thought reflecting over the use of creative abilities that are known to us tacitly, in this instance where is the practical work.

‘the relationship between documentation and work entwined, mutually compromised, mutually generative, mutually reflective. Increasingly it is no longer accurate to think about the difficulty of reading the documentation without witnessing the work, but equally, it is difficult to think of experiencing the work without knowledge of the documentation: each is only half the picture.’

Reason (2011) p. 169

In this quotation Reason describes the iterative nature of this binary relationship. Although I am always able to further document the process of my work in a reflective manner, what I take from that reflection then informs a practice that is based around a specific set and highly traditional syntax with certain rules and constraints.

Undoubtedly the musical ear has certain phenomenological insights into sonic beauty that even the most sophisticated scores cannot represent. However this is where the process begins and ends for me.

Although the notion of performance is implicit to the process of score writing there is no necessity for my involvement after the fact of completion.

Is it possible that technology has significantly stunted my artistic ambition?

By relying on score writing software as a means executing my creative process have I ultimately created an archive instead of a portfolio?

• Reason, M, Dorey Richmond, J, Gray, V & Walker, N (2001). 'Performance, documentation and the archive within the institution'. In McGillivray Ed Hidden Archives. Peter Lang: Amsterdam. pp 149-71.