Sound Composing: Composers’ Strategies and Influences When Making Music
In my dissertation, I argue that music composition practices should inspire change in both rhetorical studies and composition pedagogy, both of which are hampered by an overreliance on the fixed nature of visuals and text. To address this gap, my project develops a composer-centered rhetoric of music and sound—that is, a description of the strategies used to manipulate sound when communicating audibly through sound and music. The project is “composer-centered” in that I base my analysis on a qualitative study of music composers—including students, amateurs, and professionals—who spoke to me about areas where their practices intersect with rhetorical theory and written composition pedagogy: audience, influence, form, emotion, and composing in/for digital spaces. These insights into music composition suggest ways of teaching written composition, such as pedagogies inspired by musical improvisation, performance, orchestration, recursiveness, and collaboration. Underlying my entire study is the under-theorized issue of how sound operates rhetorically, as a unique vehicle for listener-directed associative content and emotional meaning—issues of concern for rhetors communicating in any mode.
Interest in sound and music studies grows each year in the rhetoric and composition community, as evidenced in special issues on sound in the journals Enculturation (1999), Computers and Composition (2006), and Currents in Electronic Literacy (2011), where my audio essay on issues of background music, context, and remixing was recently published. These scholarly discussions are growing in the field of computers and composition, but they more often take the angle of rhetorical analysis than my angle of qualitative research into the practices of composers themselves—a research method that follows the work of composition scholars who study real-world practices by observing composers at work (e.g. Emig, 1971). My work uses these methods to answer recent calls from leaders in the computers and composition field to attend to writing that is “made not only in words” (Yancey, 2004) and that uses the full range of resources available through multimodal composition (Selfe, 2009). Thus, my results speak to scholars in 21st-century rhetoric who can use my work as a foundation for understanding how sound works as mode of communication and to scholars in college composition pedagogy who teach undergraduate college students new ways of composing in multiple modalities.
In chapter one, I defend the use of rhetoric as an applicable framework for studying music composition and argue for a new way to study music and sound through a rhetorical lens. This chapter first describes the many applications of rhetoric to music that flourished in Enlightenment-era Europe, work that often relies on a narrow view of rhetoric, such as the atomistic application of classical rhetorical figures to parallel moves in instrumental music. In contrast, I argue that a better approach to musical rhetoric is found in Kenneth Burke’s theory of rhetoric as a means of identification between rhetor and audience, a view that focuses less on a message’s persuasiveness than its ability to draw individuals together to shared understandings through non-discursive texts (Murray, 2009).
Having established this rhetorical-musical framework in chapter one, chapter two moves further into questions of the epistemological questions of sound as a communicative medium. The connections between music and language have been discussed a great deal by scholars in cognitive science, aesthetics, and musicology, but much of this work goes uncited in the rhetoric and composition community; chapter two both introduces this work and suggests further steps from my perspective on music as rhetorical identification. Specifically, I focus on comprehensibility, the ability of an audience to understand the relationships and potential meanings conveyed by a sonic message in time—an issue that concerns student writers in college, music composers, and anyone else trying to “say something” in ways that can be effectively decoded by audiences. When composing sound, composers who want to be comprehensible must consider the nature of sound as moving through time, the brain’s ability to identify and remember patterns, and their desired relationship with audiences (who are sometimes eagerly catered to and sometimes happily ignored). I discuss how these issues are found at the heart of rhetoric—originally a solely oral art—and affect how we communicate today through both live and digital mediums.
Chapter three is the first of three chapters that tests my framework of musical identification and comprehensibility against the explanations offered by composers themselves. Today’s composers are obsessed with questions of how to express an individual musical voice in a way that still has meaning for today’s audiences. I approach these composers’ thoughts on tonality, form, audience, and musical influences through the lens of recent work in rhetoric and composition on intellectual property, remixing, plagiarism, and originality. I also argue that when discussing sound, these questions of influence are holistically tied to considerations of audience, since whom composers cite as their primary influences—the easy-to-understand Mozart or the atonal, boundary-breaking Schoenberg?—has much to say about who will be drawn to their music.
Following the dissertation’s trajectory toward the compositional and pedagogical, chapter four focuses specifically on the composing processes used by professional music composers. I relate their practices to written composition theory by organizing these stories around the five classical canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. As rhetors, these composers show a sophisticated understanding of finding inspiration, shaping works for specific audiences, and delivering works through collaboration with performers—all of which are instructive for writers struggling to compose meaningful work for real audiences.
Composition pedagogies—both musical and written—are the focus of chapter five, which recounts the voices of music composition students at a small, liberal arts college who told me about their composition instruction, their musical lives outside of class, their compositional aims, and their hopes and fears about performance. Throughout the chapter, I guide my readers to the challenges these stories pose to our perceptions of what English composition classes can be and what they teach us about encouraging our students’ extracurricular literacies. Specifically, I envision courses in written composition that both teach students to compose sound and are inspired by music composition practices even when composing words. My recommendations include pedagogies that reimagine invention and collaboration, require (and problematize) live and recorded performances, value (and challenge) the many forms of writing students do outside of class, teach source-based writing as sampling, and make room for both structured improvisation and careful orchestration or messages in any medium.
