If I Deign to Say Something

: using intentionality and catholicity to explore a composer’s practice

Abstract

Composition is arguably the musical practice most obscured from external observation for interpretation. The distance between a composer and listeners of their music, between a composer’s intentions and the outcomes of their music, is an inevitable gap for third parties to cross when analysing a score. Scholarly inquiry into a composer and his or her individual works is primarily carried out by those who aren’t the composer, leading to minimal first-hand contributions of new musical insights from the composer’s account and the very creative thoughts which produced the score. Is it possible to learn more from the conscious creative forces at work in a composition practice? Can a first-person, emic perspective on composition take into account its context within modern society and offer new methods for regarding music on a path towards a more peaceful and harmonious coexistence? This portfolio and commentary explore these questions by establishing phenomenological and theological methods scaffolded by semiotic and hermeneutic theoretical frameworks. These methods observe and document the interior insights gleaned from the level of the composer’s mind in this practice-as-research.

Date of Award	30 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Stuart MacRae (Supervisor) & Michael Ferguson (Supervisor)