Abstract
My aims in this paper are twofold. My central concern is to present an autoethnographic insight into my roughly decade-long transition from practitioner to practitioner-researcher within the context of my employment in a research intensive UK University. I also intend to provide a glimpse of one way in which composition may be harnessed for autoethnographic study.
My academic training (DPhil in Composition 1990-4) and career (2001 - date) span a period in which the status of composition as research (at least in the UK) has changed markedly from a position of equivalence to one in which composers are expected to engage in a more overt research process by establishing lines of inquiry designed to arrive at new insights (Nelson 2013). I will establish a career timeline on which to hinge my account, drawing out epiphanies (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2011) and other key moments in coming to terms with this research model. These will include some brief examples from my work on revision as a compositional tool, a project that has unfolded across the period under discussion. I will suggest that revision may function as a musical mode of autoethnography, particularly when it involves the radical re-working of material from much earlier in a composer’s career. In the process of presenting this account I will briefly mention methods I have used to track my compositional practice over a lengthy period of time and the changes that have been wrought on it as a result of the documentary imperative.
My main conclusion will be to show how the culture of academic research in the UK can both impede and impel artistic practice. I will also show how my embrace of revision has been part of a move away from a particular compositional production model still noticeable in mainstream classical music.