Composing Heart Sutra - A Phenomenological Approach
Frederico Macedo, Motje Wolf, Andrew Knight-Hill · 2010
In this paper I intend to use ideas of phenomenology applied to the musical experience, as conceived by Schutz (1976), Smith (1979), Clifton (1983) and Ferrara (1984) to describe the process of composition of the piece Heart Sutra. Because phenomenology recognises the essential role of perception, experience and the subjectivity of the knower in the process of knowledge, it can offer an appropriate theoretical framework to describe the process of composition. The three levels proposed by Ferrara for the musical analysis ‐ syntactical, semantic and ontological ‐ offered the basic structure to organize the different levels of meaning and information I am working with. To describe the syntactic aspects of the piece I will use concepts proposed by Denis Smalley ‐ spectromorphology ‐ and Trevor Wishart for the description of the materials, structure and spatial design. For the description of the semantic aspects, I will introduce the text used in the composition and describe its general structure and meanings. For the ontological aspects I will introduce the discussion of the concept of space using references both from contemporary physics and Buddhism. This piece is the result of my research about space in music and here I intend to explain why the text was chosen and the way in which it relates to the conception of space which is emerging from my research work. In the conclusion, I intend to highlight which aspects of phenomenology are useful for the description of the compositional process and how they could also be used by other composers in the description of their compositional experience.