ABSTRACT
It will be apparent from the complete title of this book that the authors are looking at composition in a range of guises. The adjusting of a phrase to fit new words, the appearance of a new phrase, a new individual contribution to a known song, a new song, a new symphony, all come within our meanings of composition. In some cases there is intensive preparation, in others the performative act of utterance simultaneously embodies the act of composition. In 1903 Albert Lavignac discussed the nature of composers and composition in his book Musical Education. For him:
No study ... can result in producing a composer worthy of the name out of any individual who is not natively endowed with that entirely special instinct that leads one to create and invent combinations of sounds, and which in various degrees is called having ideas, having the creative faculty, and lastly, having the sacred fire, or having genius. (1903: 241)
As to how this 'special instinct' is to be recognised, he comments:
... many young composers reveal their vocation from infancy, by the propensity for putting their ideas down on paper, when as yet they know none of the theoretic elements except what they have been able to divine. (Ibid.: 242)
So for Lavignac composition has theoretical constructs, and is to be perceived as existing when written down. A composer has a special instinct, which is innate. In considering the optimal environment for composition, 'to favour its growth and blossoming', Lavignac sets it against the worst conditions, which include:
... living in some forlorn region far from every intellectual centre, isolation, or association exclusively with common people who are totally destitute of instruction, the absence of all affection, employment in manual labour of a kind that demands no intellectual effort, ignorance of all manifestation of any art whatsoever, in a word, all that constitutes the most brutish existence. (Ibid.: 243)
It might be seen as unfair to Lavignac to expect his cultural conditioning to stand up to examination nearly one hundred years after his book was
published, for situations of which he could have little awareness or understanding. However, it does perhaps make clear a particular attitude to composition and composers that is questioned and generally found to be incomplete by the authors of this book.
