John Croft's ‘Composition is not Research’Footnote ¹ draws attention to the ways that musical composition is ill suited to current research orthodoxy. Indeed, the distorting impact that this is having on the discourse surrounding the discipline, its regard within Academia, its ability to secure grant income and, most worryingly of all, upon the discipline itself, goes still further than Croft outlines. But this is not the result of a category mistake, as he maintains. Rather, these are casualties of uncritically adopting a scientific (or, as I will argue, pseudo-scientific) paradigm of research method in a misguided, essentialist, drive to determine what is and is not research. A scientisticFootnote ² paradigm of method lies behind Croft's analysis of composition; but whilst composition is not science (which is the most that can be concluded from Croft's arguments) it does not follow from this that composition is not research. Research ≠ science, and many things that are not science are quite rightly regarded as research (philosophy, history, theology, musicology and so on).

Viewing composition as research is not a category mistake, or anything approaching one. Identifying a category mistake more typically entails uncovering a process of reification: where something that does not have clear substance or definition is being treated as if it has such properties.Footnote ³ It was in this sense that Gilbert RyleFootnote ⁴ introduced the tool to resolve the confusion that arises in trying to understand something diffuse and boundless like the mind as if it were something fixed and delimited like the body. No such reification occurs in maintaining that composition is research, as this does not entail taking something open and trying to understand it as if it were something closed. Perhaps Croft is arguing for a category mistake in the more simplistic sense of misclassification, but to assert that research is a class with clear boundaries is, as I will discuss below, to reify the concept of research itself.

Croft asserts: ‘There is a fundamental distinction at work here: research describes the world, composition adds something to the world’.Footnote ⁵ Leaving to one side the false dichotomy here,Footnote ⁶ such attempts at demarcation are borne of an essentialistFootnote ⁷ endeavour to define for good what research is and what it is not, i.e. in trying to answer the ideological question, ‘What is “research” … really?’ ‘Research’ is not out there in the ether, waiting to be found.Footnote ⁸ Its meaning is up to us (human beings); and that meaning can, does and will change – across time and in different contexts, both within and outside of Academia. If there is a category mistake at work here, it is Croft's own. The concept of research emerges from a complex network of intersubjective relationships. The whole point about research is that it is open – an exploratory quest into the unknown – and so too is composition. The reification here, the category mistake, lies in Croft's maintaining that research has clearly identifiable boundaries when it does not.

In 1945, Karl Popper decried this sort of essentialist definition hunting as the ‘poisonous intellectual disease of our time’.Footnote ⁹ But essentialism gets us nowhere.Footnote ¹⁰ We certainly have need of the types of knowledge that things like mathematics, history, physics, philosophy and music provide; but we do not need to know what ‘research’ is … really. It is a profound misconception that the lack of essentialist definitions is in any way a barrier to clarity or creates problems of precision, understanding or utility.Footnote ¹¹ If we need to clarify what we mean by ‘research’, we can be more precise – we can say ‘historical research’, ‘compositional research’ or ‘anthropological research into the native peoples of the Americas between 1800 and 1850’. We can be as precise as we need to be. Rather than providing clarity, the search for essentialist definitions muddles things considerably.Footnote ¹²

There is no real problem with the overarching research structure generally adopted within the Humanities, namely: research context – research aims – research questions – research method – research outputs – dissemination. This process is sufficiently open and malleable to suit most intellectual pursuits, including composition. True, composition is less concerned with research questions than it is with context, aims, method, output and dissemination. At least composers do not generally formulate their aims in terms of questions. Croft is right about this;Footnote ¹³ but this is a minor issue. The real problem concerns research method. Whilst composition most certainly does entail a method, or methods, the difficulties occur with essentialist attempts to reduce its method/s to a paradigm that must hold for all research disciplines (and, with composition, for all composers).

It is precisely this attempt to align compositional research method (indeed all research methods) with a single, reductionist paradigm that is causing the confusion to which Croft objects; but this paradigm is not one of Croft's own making. He is responding to, and accepting (rather uncritically, if I may say, although he is certainly not alone) a model of research orthodoxy that is becoming ingrained within the Academy. In its own misguided and more general attempt to answer the question, ‘What is “research” … really?’, the Academy has looked to science.Footnote ¹⁴ Croft merely follows suit, using the term ‘research’ in the narrow sense of, ‘scientific research’. The conflation is relatively explicit in Croft's analysis: ‘If Einstein had not existed, someone else would have come up with Relativity. If Beethoven had not existed, nobody would have written the Ninth Symphony’.Footnote ¹⁵

It is easy to see why the scientific model should command such respect in the search for a universal paradigm of research method, however misguided that search might be in the first place. Science has given us the modern world: better health and longer life expectancy, enhanced communication and travel, a sophisticated understanding of the natural world and so on. But research is not limited to the paradigm of scientific research, and the result of such reductionism for those subjects outside of science, especially those within the Humanities, is a poor fit generally.Footnote ¹⁶ There is no reason to single out musical composition in particular.

Research in the Humanities (including composition) is generally more concerned with narratives than the methodological paradigm (of observation – hypothesis – experiment/testing – accept/reject/new hypothesis) particular to science. But, like a bunch of ugly stepsisters wrestling with Cinderella's slipper, we have dutifully tried to make it fit nonetheless; and the result has been the superficial and perverse acquiescence to pseudo-science, or scientism.

Even if we do accept the scientific model as the reductionist paradigm for research generally, only science could fit this. So when aspects of it appear elsewhere, the scientific method proper is not what is actually being applied. Rather, the isolated tenets of scientific method become fetishized, and superficially imitated, in piecemeal fashion, in practices that are divorced from the scientific method as a whole and from scientific objectives. But it is all or nothing as far as the scientific method is concerned. The piecemeal appearance of any of its constituent parts in isolation does not suffice. If any one of the interconnecting stages in the process is absent, any resemblance to scientific method is entirely superficial. Any appeal to scientific objectivity on such grounds is a sham.

I suspect it is the distorting affects of such half-baked scientism upon the discipline of composition that is the real cause of Croft's abhorrence, and I share in that wholeheartedly. Piecemeal scientistic reductionism is becoming all too pervasive. A good example can be found in Nicholas Till's, ‘Opus versus Output’.Footnote ¹⁹ A precursor to Croft's article, Till's central thesis is likewise that composition is not research (well, not all composition, anyway), claiming, ‘I don't believe the intellectual rationale for practice as research in universities was ever thought through systematically’.Footnote ²⁰ It is difficult to see why Till feels the need to single out composition in particular for persecution, as his own musicological work, brilliant though it is, would stand up no better to the rigours of scientific method proper.Footnote ²¹ Yet, as with Croft, it is clear that it is the scientific paradigm of method that Till has in mind when holding composition up for research scrutiny. Where he does concede that ‘artistic practice can be research’Footnote ²² he points exclusively to those features that might be superficially aligned with scientific method: the importance of collaborative work, experimentation, and ‘whether the practice is employed to test a theoretical hypothesis’Footnote ²³ – with a particular emphasis on technical features.Footnote ²⁴

Aesthetics do not come into the paradigm for Till. Indeed, for him, they are entirely incidental to research content. As he says, ‘practice as research can lead to some dull artistic outcomes. But perhaps that doesn't matter’.Footnote ²⁵ Why doesn't it matter? Aesthetic power is rather important for artists, including composers, and if compositional research has any aims or objectives, these are decidedly aesthetic ones. Even if aesthetic issues may be incidental to scientific method (although I do not believe this is entirely the caseFootnote ²⁶), why must those working outside of science be obliged to follow suit and undergo some process of aesthetic sterilization? If aesthetics are central to the aims of compositional research, why can these not be intrinsic to our research methodology? I will return to this problem of excluding aesthetics below.

This rise of scientism is, I believe, a symptom of our inadequacy in reconciling ostensibly objective demands of grant applications and research-review processes (such as the UK's REF2014) with the narrative nature of work in the Humanities. Thomas Nagel points out that, when matters are muddled by subjective versus objective perspectives, ‘This makes them receptive not only to scientism but to deflationary metaphilosophical theories like positivism and pragmatism’.Footnote ²⁷ When engaging with such processes, scientism offers a means of framing things in a language that has the appearance of greater objectivity. But that is all it is: an appearance of objectivity. As I have outlined above, any claim to objectivity on the grounds of piecemeal resemblance to scientific method is fallacious; and keeping up appearances comes at a very high price indeed.

Discussing the impact of computing technology in 1979, Lyotard prophesied that

The pressure to present all research as zeros and ones is thankfully not with us just yet,Footnote ²⁹ but a drive towards translation – scientistic translation – is certainly already at work today, and Croft is rightly concerned that some compositional research lends itself better to this process of translation than others. He highlights the ‘emphasis on collaborative work, technology and superficial novelty of format’.Footnote ³⁰ Such things lend themselves well to this pseudo-scientific discourse, but others do not; for those left behind the price may be sidelining or even losing them.

In the context of a sterilizing and scientistic research paradigm that requires such translation, any sciency-looking compositional work has a clear advantage. Electroacoustic work can appear more scientific due to its use of technology. So-called ‘experimental music’ and music that explores new ‘extended techniques’ on instruments can resemble scientific experimentation. But experiment is not the same thing as simply doing something new. A hypothesis is rarely being tested in such music and, where one is being tested, the system of hypothesis and experimentation would not be sufficiently robust to constitute science.Footnote ³¹ Such ‘experimentation’ is, by scientific standards, just ‘messing about’. Any relationship with science in such instances is entirely superficial. So whilst such ‘messing about’ might be productive artistically, there is no logical reason why it should be assigned privileged research status over other forms of artistic creation. This is a poor means of determining what is research and what is not.

It may be claimed that some things are more research-worthy on the grounds that they are advancing the discipline. Progress and innovation are part of the course for science, to be sure, but such concepts are not as straightforward in Art. Paradoxically with Art, moving forwards is not always moving forwards, at least from a technical point of view. Progress in art can be aesthetic, rather than technical, and sometimes a deliberate technical regression can stimulate aesthetic change. Doing something new is not the same as doing something worthwhile, and endless innovations in technique (timbre, technology, harmony, rhythm, pitch, instrumental technique, etc.) may seem positively regressive at certain times. Why? Because Art innovates aesthetically as well as, and sometimes instead of, technically.

If Art has aims or objectives, these are principally aesthetic ones.Footnote ³² We need only think of such things as the simplification of polyphony at the start of the sixteenth century, Satie's reaction against Wagner, or Stravinsky's Neoclassicism. More recently, we might consider a composer like John Tavener. Whilst Tavener's music is not technically as forward-looking as that of his contemporaries (e.g. Helmut Lachenmann, Per Nørgård or Harrison Birtwistle), aesthetically something new is being said. (In such cases it is often difficult to capture what precisely is ‘new ‘in words; and that is the point of aesthetics: discussion alone cannot get you there.)

Even if we accept innovation as a necessary tenet of research, the central importance of aesthetics means that innovation in Art has a very different hue than it does in science and technology.Footnote ³³ Attaching privileged research status solely to ad novum technical pursuits has a profoundly distorting impact within the domain of Art. Art may be technically progressive whilst aesthetically regressive, technically regressive whilst aesthetically progressive, both technically and aesthetically progressive, or technically and aesthetically regressive. (Granted, the latter is probably not desirable; but one needs to be open-minded.) As the aims of Art are aesthetic rather than technical, cherry-picking things like ‘experimentation’ or the use of new technology does not attest to research validity over and above aesthetic concerns. To use such things as the sole criterion for demarcation between research and non-research outside of science is fallacious. Any attempt to do so should be recognized and cast out for the pseudo-science that it is. For composition to innovate, we need a permissive research culture in which composers may seek to explore aesthetically as well as technically.

Croft insightfully draws attention to, ‘the bizarre idea that the purpose of a musical composition is to report findings’.Footnote ³⁴ I believe that it is precisely this equating of compositional research method solely with the technical features of a composition, and not aesthetic ones, that gives rise to the perverse perception of practice-based research ontology that Croft identifies: namely, that there is a de facto distinction between composition as research on the one hand and composition as professional practice on the other. Till holds this to be self evident,Footnote ³⁵ as did the UK's sub-panel D for REF2014.Footnote ³⁶ This, in my view, is a major problem as it attends unwarranted bias to music of a particular aesthetic (Modernist or ‘Experimental’, for example). I have already shown that, to attach privileged research status on such grounds – on technique over aesthetics – is a sham. Not only is the distinction between professional practice and practice as research less than self evident; it is analytically false. To return to where we began – with category mistakes – maintaining that the research is to be found in the music, rather than that it is the music, is a reifying category mistake in the true Rylean sense. (It is the very same category mistake that Croft makes in the process of trying to nail down ‘research’.) One of the three examples Ryle provides of a category mistake is ‘a child witnessing the marching past of a division, who, having had pointed out to him such and such battalions, batteries, squadrons, etc. asked when the division was going to appear’.Footnote ³⁷ We can now add to Ryle's list of examples the impossible sort of question composers were required to answer for UK's REF2014: ‘I have heard the rhythms, timbres, harmonies and gestures … but which of these is the research? Tell me in 300 words’.Footnote ³⁸

The aims and content of a work of Art are aesthetic and creative; they are explored and emerge holistically. This no doubt includes the techniques involved in its realisation, but a work of Art is not reducible to such things, and neither is its research content. As Lyotard would say: it is narrative rather than commodity. The research content is emergent: becoming rather than being. One cannot grasp the significance of compositional research through someone just explaining isolated details in a 300-word statement, or a 300,000-word statement for that matter. One needs to hear it.Footnote ³⁹

We in the Humanities need to accept that the research paradigm of science and scientific method is a poor fit for us, and that the distorting impact that pseudo-scientific models have on our disciplines makes for an even poorer substitute. We would do better to devise our own models. The true meaning of ‘research’ is not out there waiting to be found. It is impossible to reconcile all the various interests of all the various disciplines to one set of criteria. So we must resist drives to reduce all research method to a single, reductive, paradigm (whether that be of science or anything else). The Academy itself must make a judgement about what it does and does not consider worthy of serious intellectual pursuit at a given time and place. For the sake of convenience we currently and collectively call this activity of serious intellectual pursuit ‘research’. It is a wide umbrella, and we must ensure that this umbrella remains open if research is to continue to be an exploration into the unknown. If anyone has a problem with this openness because they cannot equate what happens in composition with what happens in biology, or in musicology with medicine, or in sociology with astronomy, then we just specify by distinguishing ‘compositional research’ from ‘biological research’, ‘musicological research’ from ‘medical research’, or ‘sociological research’ from ‘astronomical research’.

Does this mean that anything could be classed as research? Ideologically speaking, yes: anything could be classed as research. But there is no reason to suppose that anything and everything will be. It simply means this is a matter of judgement rather than objective fact. What does and does not constitute research is a matter of judgement for the Academy.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is up to us to choose what we deem to be worth serious intellectual pursuit and why, and what models we apply in assessing this ‘research’ for grants, or for research-review processes like the UK's REF2014. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, any models of assessment should be formulated in ways that are intrinsically suited to individual disciplines, if we deem those disciplines to be worthy of pursuit.

To make such decisions we must look to the world: we in the Academy must decide what sort of world we wish to live in and play our part in making that world a reality. Choosing what we value and how we value it (or evaluate it) is not an objective matter of right or wrong.Footnote ⁴¹ Today I, and I believe others with me, value a world in which the serious pursuit of composition has a place in the Academy more than one in which it does not. But it is for us to make that choice, and I would much rather it were a matter for reasoned judgement than a matter of essentialist definition-hunting and the dogmatic application of any such definitions we think we have found. Whatever we call such things – ‘research’ or whatever – for those disciplines we have chosen to value as research, we must encourage a permissive cultureFootnote ⁴² that fosters the very best that these disciplines can achieve, leaving each to its own and allowing each to flourish according to its own in such ways that each might flourish best.