Capitalising on intuition and reflection: Making sense of a composer’s creative process

Abstract

This case study investigated the transformation of intuitive and reflective thinking during a composer’s compositional process. The qualitative data comprised stimulated recall interviews conducted in the composer’s studio during the compositional process and the entire manuscript corpus that the composer created during that process. The results showed the qualitative change in the composer’s intuitive and reflective thinking in the course of the process; within intuitive compositional acts, imagination changed into experimentation and incubation into restructuring, whereas within reflective compositional acts, rule-based reasoning changed into contemplating alternatives. Further, intuitive metacognition decreased while reflective metacognition increased. These changes were explained by concurrent procedures of grounding and rationalisation. In the grounding procedure, the composer substantiated the fuzzy construction of his original ideas (called the Identity Idea by the composer) into aesthetically coherent musical structures that gradually limited the compositional problem space. The rationalisation procedure involved the composer becoming increasingly proficient in the way in which he operated on his musical ideas and materials. After a critical moment, the composer adopted a situation-specific cognitive device called ‘rational intuition’. This ‘rational intuition’ was the composer’s way of creating aesthetic coherence when working fluently, albeit retaining rationality, in an insecure and complex working situation of a creative process. The prerequisites of ‘rational intuition’ were (1) the guidance of a goal-driven cue (i.e. the Identity Idea) as a key determinant and motivational energy for the process; (2) the selection of intuitive and reflective compositional acts to match compositional situations; (3) an expert ability to learn implicitly; and (4) resilience to abeyance.

Keywords

Creative process decision-making implicit learning intuition metacognition musical composition reflection

Introduction

Manufacturing an artistic object, such as a piece of music, can be viewed as a paradigmatic example of an utterly ill-defined working situation characterised by unique, uncertain and complex circumstances (Schön, 1983). Working with ill-defined problems typically entails lateral thinking and intuition (Öllinger & Goel, 2010; Pretz, Naples, & Sternberg, 2003, pp. 4–10; Schön, 1983, p. 130;). However, the artistic condition of a composer, the concern of this article, is even more complicated than the conditions of typical high-stakes professions such as intensive care workers, surgeons and fire-fighters. Artists not only solve practical professional (e.g. compositional) problems but also create the problems; something novel is to be created out of nothing, and moreover the results have to satisfy the criteria of aesthetic coherence and the composer’s expressive needs.

How does a composer address the quandary between exploring the countless possibilities of his or her original ideas on the one hand and the need to create a complete work that conveys aesthetic unity on the other? Generating novel solutions seems to require divergent, associative thinking. Furthermore, convergent, analytical reflection is needed to create and sustain aesthetic coherence. While imaginative and associative endeavour would lead to endless invention without congruence, analytical thought and rational choice in complex and uncertain working environments are severely bounded by the limited capacity of the working memory. Moreover, rationality in artistic ideation is sometimes associated with mundane and unoriginal solutions. The relevant questions would then be the following: How can one combine rationality and intuition in the artistic enterprise of creating a cogent piece of music? When and how do different types of thinking contribute to the creative endeavour of completing an original musical work?

Although the powers of reflective thinking have been predominant in the research on decision-making and problem-solving for decades (Dane & Pratt, 2007), an increasing number of researchers now claim that intuition may outperform reflection (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010; Dijksterhuis, Maarten, Nordgren, & van Baaren 2006; Khatri & Ng, 2000; Lieberman, Jarcho, & Satpute, 2004; van Riel & Horváth, 2014; Sadler-Smith, 2008). Further, research suggests that the prolific and adjustable ability to alternate between intuitive and reflective thinking may largely explain expert performance (Acker, 2008; Betsch, 2008; Epstein, 2010; Klein, 2003; Simon, 1987). However, the roles and dynamics of reflection and intuition are seldom studied together (Evans & Stanovich, 2013) and are hardly ever considered within artistic contexts or in composition research (see the review in Pohjannoro, 2014). Moreover, the association of intuition with expert performance and learning processes is theorized in numerous studies of (expert) intuition but is seldom scrutinised empirically with reflective thinking or examined in naturalistic settings (see Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986; Hogarth, 2001; Klein, 2003; Reber, Beeman, & Paller, 2013; Sadler-Smith, 2008).

The aim of this study is to give an empirical account of the roles and dynamics of intuitive and reflective thinking within the full artistic endeavour of creating a novel piece of music. In doing so, this study exemplifies and explicates the coordination between intuition and reflection, the association between intuition and processes of learning, and the role of reflection in this association. A quantitative analysis of a case study of one compositional thinking process will be presented to integrate the previous results of the qualitative analysis of the same data¹ collected at a professional composer’s studio (Pohjannoro, 2014). Although these unusual qualitative data enabled the production of a thick description of the entire thinking process of a composer, the qualitative analysis overlooked the question of the composer’s persistent habit of deferring compositional decisions. Moreover, the discrepancy between the rationality of the composer’s decisions, the ease of his activities, and the apparent use of intuition with which he proceeded during the last stage of the compositional process will be scrutinised. An explanation of these phenomena will be suggested by combining the dual-process theory of information processing with an implicit learning perspective.

Intuitive and reflective compositional thinking

The dual model of information processing postulates that there are two modes of thinking: intuitive (type 1) and reflective (type 2; Evans & Stanovich, 2013).² According to the dual model, intuitive thinking is fast, autonomous and capable of dealing with large amounts of information simultaneously, thus relying on long-term memory and situation-specific perceptions. Reflective thinking, by contrast, is slow, serial and dependent on the capacity of working memory.

The dual-model paradigm is almost always employed in highly controlled experimental laboratory research and rarely involves scrutinising lengthy thinking processes that incorporate both intuitive and reflective thinking (Betsch & Held, 2012; Reber et al., 2013), let alone creative processes. However, Alty (2002) utilised Paivio’s (1991, p. 201) dual coding theory of the human memory system in his analysis of a composer’s organisation of constraints, which the composer used to be able to operate between the micro and macro structures of a large piece of music. Likewise, Allen and Thomas (2011) proposed a dual-process account of artistic processes. Wiggins (2012) suggested that two cognitive mechanisms may account for the range of implicit (unintentional) and explicit (deliberate) compositional processes. Most recently, Bangert, Schubert, and Fabian (2014) theorised a dual-process-induced spiral model of musical decision-making during the performance of notated music.

Pohjannoro (2014) proposed a conceptual framework for analysing compositional thinking within the dual model paradigm and presented a case study in which one thinking process of creating a piece of music was scrutinised. The composer’s intuitive compositional acts were identified as imagination, experimentation, incubation and restructuring (see Figure 1; see the definitions and interview quotes in the Appendix). The reflective acts incorporated rule-based reasoning, contemplation of alternatives, and the analytic viewing of music. The metacognitive acts comprised evaluating (intuitive or reflective), setting musical goals (intuitive or reflective) and making operative plans (reflective). The results demonstrated the substantial cognitive challenges for the composer in managing his creative thinking process. In contrast to Sloboda’s (1985, p. 116) suggestion that even an accomplished composer rarely uses abstract guidelines to steer his or her creative actions, this study manifested a composer who used a construct of germinal ideas (called the Identity Idea by the composer) as a key determinant of his compositional process in terms of procedure, cognition and aesthetics (Pohjannoro, 2014; see also Alty, 2002; Donin & Theureau, 2007).

Figure 1.

Compositional acts categorised into intuitive (type 1), reflective (type 2) and metacognitive (type1/type2) modes of processing.

Research design and procedures

Method, data, informant and composition

This study builds on the qualitative data mentioned in the last section. The data were collected over four months in 2004–2005 in the studio of a professional Finnish composer with an academic education, modernistic aesthetics, and a national and international career spanning more than 20 years (Pohjannoro, 2014). The data cover the creation of one extensive piece of music by the composer-informant and include the complete sequence of his sketches, material matrices, score versions (i.e. manuscripts; 32 items) and stimulated recall interviews (12 items, a total of 406 minutes and 29,000 words of verbatim transcripts; the inventory of all the data listed in Pohjannoro, 2014), in which the composer reported his compositional thinking. All the data, including copies of the manuscripts, are in the possession of the author.

In stimulated recall interviews, triggers are used to help the informant’s memory retrieval when reporting his or her thoughts during action.³ In this study, the composer’s manuscripts (written not more than a couple of days before the interviews) served as memory triggers when he reported the thinking behind them. During the interviews, the composer’s attention and the focus of his speaking were guided towards the concrete writings and rewritings in the manuscripts and towards the thoughts that lay behind them to prevent him from talking about what he thought he should have done or what he usually does or from justifying his decisions (see Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). When reporting past events, the composer quite naturally continued in his thinking process, thus verbalising a significant amount of concurrent thinking, which often resulted in instant additions to or refinements of the manuscripts. These valuable parts of the interview data represent fragments of the composer’s immediate thinking in action as opposed to thinking on action (Schön, 1983) and his post-event explanations or justification of his actions (cf. Donin & Féron, 2012; Donin & Theureau, 2007).

The completed composition runs 15 minutes and is for a quartet of percussion instruments. The piece has no melodic qualities other than the use of otherwise identical percussion instruments of different sizes (e.g. tom toms, cow bells, cymbals), with which up to five approximate pitches can be produced. The composition is in three movements, played attacca. The first movement forms a periodic structure T₁–S₁–T₂–S₂ (see Examples 1 and 4).⁴ The second movement comprises quick transitions between fragments of the T- and S-materials,⁵ and the third movement is an epilogue in which the T- and S-materials are merged into each other.

Example 1.

This is the very first manuscript of the piece (apart from a diary memo dating from approximately two months before the sketch; the composer showed the memo and read it aloud during an interview session), dated 5.12.2004 (1st compositional stage, phase I). The composer has outlined the formal structure of the whole piece, which is perceived (at the moment) as a one-movement structure. T’s (‘linear music’) are being depicted as square blocks; the width of the squares indicates the length of the respective section of the piece. S’s (‘space music’) are being depicted as wedges, symbolising the idea of ‘growth’, not yet specified or defined. In the lower part of the sketch, the composer has drafted basic rhythm patterns, which will be explored several days later (see material matrix, Example 2). ‘Alku’ (written twice over the formal scheme) means ‘beginning’. The composer did not add those two words until the interview session on December 28 (phase VII; see Example 4), indicating his sudden insight in which he re-perceived the structure as a three-movement piece instead of a one-movement piece. All the manuscript examples are published with the kind permission of the composer.

Example 2.

Material matrix, dated 7.12.2004 (1st compositional stage, phase II). The composer has systematically formed different patterns from rhythm cells (dactyls, trochees and spondees, including their inversions). The composer has chosen patterns nos. 1, 15, 25 and 35 (all of which are marked with darkened squares by the composer). The composer reported the rule for choosing the rhythm patterns: ‘These patterns have a beat on every quarter note, or on every dotted quarter note and there are no syncopations over the beats.’

Data handling and analysis

The data analysis approach can be characterised as involving an abductive reasoning process – in other words, a combination of data-driven and theory-oriented approaches. The identification of the compositional phases and stages and the classification of the manuscripts (sketches, material matrices, and score versions⁶) as well as the description of the musical materials and rendering of the germinal ideas were conducted in a data-driven manner. The analysis of the interview data (after an elementary musical analysis of the complete score and a preliminary analysis of the manuscripts) included three cycles beginning with data-oriented analysis and ending with adjusting and renaming the codes to fit the dual-process frame, which again included resegmentation of the data into smaller units (utterances).⁷

An assistant coded approximately one-fifth of the interview data with the support of the code definitions. The validation procedure was conducted in three stages until satisfactory inter-coder consensus was reached. Further, utterances that were interpreted as the composer’s justifications of his acts or explanations about what he usually does were eliminated from the data (see endnote 7). Eventually, a total of 553 of the composer’s utterances concerning compositional thinking were identified and classified as different compositional acts (see the definitions and interview quotes in the Appendix), and 617 utterances were classified based on emotional states (e.g. confidence, doubt, or anxiety; see endnote no. 7).

For the benefit of the quantitative analysis, the compositional process was arranged into 18 compositional phases. Each phase consists of one or two assigned manuscripts and the respective interview data reporting the production of those manuscripts. Each compositional phase concerns working on a specified section or sections of the evolving composition. Subsequently, three compositional stages were identified from the 18 phases according to the distributions of intuitive and reflective compositional acts and were supported by the development of emotional experiences in the process (e.g. rising doubt after the first stage and increasing anxiety, frustration or boredom after the second stage; see Table 1). During the first compositional stage (‘ideas’), the composer invented and explored the germinal ideas of the piece and started to write them down into a score. After the first phase, which involved the origination of ideas dominated by intuition, reflective thinking prevailed in the first stage (see Table 1, Figure 3). The second compositional stage (‘crisis’) was the platform for rising doubt and accumulating problems, which eventually led to a turmoil of chaotic experiences and cognitive confusion. The composer resolved the crisis with consecutive strategic operations that are typical of this composer (see Pohjannoro, 2008). Despite the ample number of problem-solving activities, the intuitive processing mode outweighed reflection in the crisis stage. In the last stage of ‘adjustment’, the composer fluently – although with growing frustration – adjusted and completed the piece. The adjustment stage contained more metacognitive acts than the previous stages, and it was slightly more reflective than intuitive.

Table 1.

Frequency distributions of the processing modes, compositional acts and experiential-emotional aspects within 18 compositional phases grouped into three stages.

	1st compositional stage					2nd compositional stage						3rd compositional stage							Total	Total %
	I	II	III	IV	V	VI	VII	VIII	IX	X	XI	XII	XIII	XIV	XV	XVI	XVII	XVIII
Intuition
Imagination	13	0	4	2	1	2	1	8	7	2	10	2	1	1	1	1	4	0	60	10.8 %
Experimentation	2	1	4	16	3	3	2	2	5	2	4	2	0	3	2	1	2	11	65	11.8 %
Incubation	2	0	0	1	1	0	1	0	2	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	8	1.4 %
Restructuring	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	2	0	2	1	0	0	0	2	0	1	10	1.8 %
Reflection
Music analytical viewing	4	2	1	12	6	2	3	3	5	0	3	3	3	2	2	4	1	0	56	10.1 %
Contemplating alternatives	0	0	1	3	0	0	2	3	4	2	3	1	1	1	1	0	1	0	23	4.2 %
Rule-based reasoning	0	12	7	4	3	3	0	2	4	0	5	3	1	1	1	1	3	1	51	9.2 %
Metacognition
Evaluation (intuitive)	4	6	5	17	4	2	0	1	3	1	2	1	0	0	3	1	2	5	57	10.3 %
Evaluation (reflective)	1	2	1	7	2	1	2	0	5	3	9	2	3	2	2	2	0	3	47	8.5 %
Setting goal (intuitive)	12	1	1	16	3	1	1	6	7	2	8	6	0	0	0	5	1	4	74	13.4 %
Setting goal (reflective)	1	3	1	3	1	1	1	3	2	2	0	6	5	0	1	1	5	1	37	6.7 %
Making operative plan (reflective)	7	3	5	5	1	1	3	2	11	0	4	4	1	0	7	3	4	4	65	11.8 %
Experimental-emotional modes
Confidence	39	26	21	45	22	6	11	14	18	11	30	21	8	8	9	14	17	23	343	55.6 %
Doubt	4	2	8	33	2	7	5	16	30	3	17	8	6	2	7	4	6	6	166	26.9 %
Anxiety	1	1	5	8	2	1	6	2	3	2	3	7	6	6	23	10	17	5	108	17.5 %

Because of the qualitative research design, no statistically significant measurements were envisaged. Descriptive statistics are given with the different compositional acts as variables according to the identified compositional phases and stages.

Results and discussion

Musical grounding and decisional rationalisation

More than a quarter (25.8%; see Table 1) of all the composer’s utterances (of compositional acts) were identified as intuitive acts, comprising mainly experimentation and imagination (45.5% and 42.0% of all intuitive acts, respectively). Utterances of reflective compositional acts (23.5%) were slightly rarer than utterances of intuitive acts. The most common reflective acts were the analytic viewing of music and rule-based reasoning (43.1% and 39.2% of all reflective acts, respectively).

Inventing an extensive piece of music is a lengthy process. Therefore, managing the process should not be taken for granted in terms of either time or cognitive load, including challenges of recollection (e.g. when amending or rewriting passages that had been untouched for several weeks). Consequently, half of the composer’s total utterances involved metacognitive compositional acts. Setting musical goals and evaluation constituted three-quarters of all metacognitive utterances (39.6% and 37.1%, respectively), with the remaining quarter (23.2%) being utterances that involved making operative plans. More than half of all utterances (55.6%) were coded as being confident; more than one-quarter (26.9%) were coded as being doubtful; and the remaining utterances were coded as sighs indicating anxiety, boredom, or frustration.

Detailed analysis of each of the three processing modes within the three compositional stages discloses rich dynamics and varieties within each of the processing modes, as shown in Figures 2 –4 (within the compositional phases) and in Figure 5 (within the compositional stages). Two trends could be detected from the changes in the distinctive distributions of intuitive and reflective compositional acts: the procedures of musical-aesthetic grounding and decisional rationalisation. In the grounding procedure, the composer established musical structures and passages on the basis of his ideas and musical materials, analogous to how theory and concepts may be grounded in the perceptions of data or theoretical underpinnings in the context of empirical research. The foundation of the grounding procedure was the Identity Idea, which was the composer’s pivotal means to promote aesthetic coherence when organising his musical configurations. The Identity Idea appeared as an eidetic-synesthetic, crystal-clear experience for the composer. In addition to being the inspiration, starting point and motivational force for the whole process, the Identity Idea served as a hypothesis or an evaluative reference for a fundamental part of the composer’s compositional acts, whether those were reflecting, planning, setting goals, assessing or intuiting. However, in terms of tangible implementation, the Identity Idea proved to be nothing but a fuzzy meta-representation of the germinal ideas, and much time and effort had to be invested in the work before the Identity Idea in its totality could manifest as a musical score (Pohjannoro, 2014; see also Alty, 2002; Donin & Theureau, 2007). Thus, the Identity Idea gradually became more clearly articulated (i.e. grounded) as the composer used it to promote the concretising of its substantial ingredients into musical structures.

Figure 2.

Proportional distributions of the composer’s intuitive compositional acts in 18 compositional phases grouped into three compositional stages.

Figure 3.

Proportional distributions of the reflective compositional acts in 18 compositional phases grouped into three compositional stages.

Figure 4.

Proportional distributions of the metacognitive compositional acts in 18 compositional phases.

Figure 5.

Distributions of the utterances of the composer’s intuitive (a), reflective (b) and metacognitive (c) compositional acts and distribution of the utterances of the different processing modes altogether (d) over three compositional stages.

The following three examples from the verbal data show how the composer described the emergence of the perception of his Identity Idea from a group of loose and separate germinal ideas:

One cannot predict them [ideas]. It is difficult to make them happen. When one is beginning with a new work, one just needs to ruminate on different options that could … So that something could come out of them.

So it [the Identity Idea] just came out of a closet, a store?

Well, it surely came out of somewhere.

To be laid somewhere, like here?

In a way, yes … or more like it belongs here. When a work has just begun, there are lots of ideas that could be laid there, in principle. But there is no proper place for that idea in that particular piece. So I can’t use it.

Do you remember the place where you got it [the core idea, named the ‘identity of the piece’ by the composer]?

It is connected to the moment when I got it, to the moment where the image of the identity of the piece is being crystallised. When I got the sense of what [ideas, musical impressions] belongs to this piece and what does not. There are lots of, like, loose ideas … that do not necessarily fit that special piece; they float around now and then. But then there is a clear perception of what this piece is all about.

The next quotes demonstrate how the Identity Idea guided the thinking process. The composer intuited whether his idea would fit the Identity Idea when the cue was vague: ‘Does this [musical passage] belong to this piece?’ He reflected on when his aspiration was clear enough, for instance, when he had already established the overall principle of fragmentation of the materials T and S: ‘Because something must happen between those two things [between and within the sections T₁–T₂ and S₁– S₂ (see Examples 4 and 5)]. There must be some kinds of transitions between linear music [T-material; written with time signature] and space music [S-material; notated without time signature].’ In the beginning of the process, the decisions had to be grounded in just fuzzy pieces of information because the guidance from the Identity Idea was nothing but a vague clue. However, as the Identity Idea became less obscure and more grounded, more established decisions could be made, which brings us to the rationalisation trend.

The rationalisation trend is the logical implication and the behavioural counterpart (in terms of compositional acts) of the musical grounding procedure. While the evolving composition was becoming increasingly grounded in the Identity Idea – and the Identity Idea itself was concurrently becoming increasingly comprehensible and explicit – the proportions of intuitive and reflective compositional acts of the composer changed. This qualitative change at the macro level of the compositional process (see Figures 2 –4, Table 1) reflects the micro-level qualitative analysis of the brief compositional episodes where fuzzy and subliminal (musical) substance becomes increasingly apprehended, when deeper and wider areas of comprehension of (musical) ideas and their implications are emerging (Pohjannoro, 2014). In other words, the composer moved up and down the threshold of consciousness (through intuitive and reflective acts) and thus deepened and extended the awareness and potential implications of the (musical) substance at hand. The macro-level quantitative analysis of the entire compositional process revealed an analogous process called the rationalisation process. This rationalisation process manifested itself in changes in the distributions of the intuitive, reflective and metacognitive compositional acts: in the beginning of the compositional process, intuition primarily manifested as imagination and incubation. However, after the crisis phase (no. VII; see Table 1), experimentation and restructuring prevailed over the other intuitive compositional acts (see Figures 2 and 5(a)). Analogously, within the reflective compositional acts, rule-based reasoning prevailed in the beginning of the process. Near the end of the process, although reflection became subordinated altogether, contemplating alternative options became increasingly common (see Figures 3 and 5(b)). Further, metacognitive processing increasingly manifested in the reflective mode while intuitive metacognition diminished (see Figures 4 and 5(c)). Thus, the composer’s thinking gradually converted from less rationalised compositional acts of imagination, incubation, intuitive metacognitive acts and rule-based reasoning into more rationalised acts of experimentation, restructuring, contemplation of different alternatives and reflective metacognitive acts.

Diverse actions for different kinds of invention

Various modes of processing and different compositional acts must be considered with respect to different compositional purposes and contexts. Compositional aspirations may involve elaborating ideas, creating novelties, solving problems and adjusting, among other actions. At the same time, the compositional context (working conditions) comprises interdependent aspects of complexity, different kinds of internal or external constraints, and the availability of ready-made material (task-driven cues) – all of which largely depend on the respective phase of the compositional process. Thus, inventing new ideas and solutions to problems depends on the locus of the novelty, that is, the situation in the compositional process that entails the amount and qualities of task-related cues at hand. These informative cues can vary between fuzzy conceptions (e.g. the Identity Idea, other, ‘loose’ ideas) and sophisticated logical constructions (e.g. systematic material matrices) or between music analytic foreground and background issues for any musical parameter.

Imagination, incubation and rule-based reasoning may be dependent on nothing or on one single aspiration (e.g. a starting point, a rule). When information (task-driven cues, e.g. unsatisfactory ready-made musical passages) was lacking or the situation was too complex (in terms of the capacity of working memory), the composer had to use intuition, guided by the Identity Idea, to tap his mind’s pool of experiences (deeply consolidated knowledge) in order to proceed. Consequently, imagination, incubation and rule-based processing prevailed. The next quotation from the second compositional stage, uttered during the accumulation of problems before the critical phase XI, exemplifies how the composer shifted between imaginative and rule-based compositional acts. The only reflective act (apart from analytic viewing) that the composer could undertake was to reason about the implications of the idea that he had just imagined and to compare the existing material with some hesitant ideas that were based on a passage of written music a couple of minutes long:

Then, having this number four [referring to the S₂ section of the 1st movement; see Example 5], one just wonders how to proceed. [Imagination.] If this [S₂] would be the end of the first movement – what kind of preconditions would it set to what comes next [in the piece; the 2nd movement, none of which was written down on the score at the moment]. [Rule-based reasoning.] Now and then one has to compare the smallest passage – here [in section S₂], I only have just a couple of minutes of music – to what has already been done [in the section S₁]. But above all – and this is the hardest thing – one has to compare it [S₁] [Rule-based reasoning.] to something that doesn’t exist at all [S₂], to something one just tries to imagine. [Imagination.]

However, whenever there was some orientation or starting point (i.e. deeper musical grounding), the composer quickly turned to ‘higher’ (i.e. more rationalised) intuitive or ‘higher’ reflective compositional acts. In line with dual-process theory, the composer used his working memory to reflect on information that was available and accessible to him. Experimenting, restructuring and contemplating alternatives depend on pre-existing musical material: these acts require something to experiment with or to choose from. The composer analysed his actions and options and formed different alternatives for proceeding; the Identity Idea served as either a reflective or intuitive reference point (intuitive or reflective metacognition). Restructuring, like experimenting, also requires something to restructure. Restructuring occurred, for example, when the composer reorganised what was then a one-movement piece into an outline of three movements during the VII phase (see Examples 1 and 4) and when he apprehended (intuitively, after musical analysis and incubation) the middle section of the second movement as its most substantial passage in the XII phase:

It may be so that the second movement is the substantial core of this piece, after all. The first movement is some kind of arrival to it [to the 2nd movement], and the third movement is a sort of epilogue or departure.

The way in which an inventive compositional act is selected may vary between processing modes and according to situational circumstances; therefore, reflection may occur even in somewhat obscure conditions. By contrast, as illustrated in the next section, intuition may appear in situations that would seem to induce rationality. The next selection of the composer’s utterances indicates a continuum of increasing grounding in increasingly established task-driven cues:⁸

There is this condition that I call incubating. It is frustrating, indeed, as I can find no sensible way out of the issue there. [Incubating, IX phase. Cue: unknown.]

I had looked for something like this, and then at some point one just knows that this [musical passage] belongs here. [Imagination, I phase. Cue: the Identity Idea’s certain quality so far unknown.]

There, I have just started to put them on top of each other [referring to the basic rhythm patterns; see Example 3, rehearsal nos. 1.1–1.3]. And, then, the idea that these commencing elements will give way, there is a diminuendo, and these others will grow from underneath. I haven’t thought about this thoroughly; it’s like a suggestion. [Experimentation, IX phase. Cue: idea about the 1st movement’s ‘growing procedure’ in the sections T₁–T₂, and S₁–S₂, in an unknown way, until phase X; see the last quote of this section and Examples 1 and 4.]

Here is a thing. This passage [in the 2nd movement] could be some kind of turning point or a point where these things [before it] aim at. [Restructuring, V phase. Cue: the passage about one and a half minutes before the ‘turning point’.]

Wait a moment. I have chosen two of these four rhythm patterns divisible in many ways. [sigh] They are retroversions, aren’t they? Yes. [Rule-based reasoning, I phase. Cue: rhythm patterns written down in a material matrix and formed according to their metres so that there is no syncopation over the bar lines; see Example 2.]

These boxes [points to the sketch of the formal structure of the piece; see Example 4] indicate … I’m pondering a sensible ordering of them [transitions between T- and S-materials in the 2nd movement]. When there is space music and when it turns over into linear music. [Contemplating alternatives, X phase. Cue: a sketch of the formal structure of the piece, where four alternatives of the several T- and S-boxes are organised consecutively in different orders.]

Example 3.

Pages 1 and 4 of the score version no. 1, dated 10.12.2004 (1st compositional stage, phase IV). Two middle pages are excluded (rehearsal nos. 1.4–1.10, comprising 24 staves). The score version comprises T₁ (rehearsal nos. 1–1.11) and the first drafting of S₁ (rehearsal no. 2). The composer has begun the compositional process by introducing four basic rhythm patterns (marked on the score version with identical numbers to the material matrix; see Example 2) played in unison (rehearsal no. 1.1). This exposition is followed by polyphonic variations of the basic rhythm patterns. Rehearsal no. 1.2 is being drafted on paper, while rehearsal no. 1.3 has already been transcribed into the computer file (Finale). The title text ‘nimetön toistaiseksi’ means ‘untitled, for the time being’.

Example 4.

Sketch no. 4, dated 28.12.2004 (2nd compositional stage, phase VII). The composer has formed four alternatives to the formal structures of the 2nd and 3rd movements. The Roman numbers I–III denote the three movements of the piece. The Arabic numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 denote T₁, S₁, T₂ and S₂, respectively. The composer’s aspiration is to decide the arrangement and order of the transformations between T’s and S’s in the 2nd movement and to design the (preliminary) structure of the 3rd movement for the first time. The upper text in the lower part of the sketch (‘linja–kenttä’) translates as ‘line–field’ and refers to the attributes of T and S (linear and space music). The lower text (‘liukuma–profiili’) means ‘transformation–profile’ and indicates the idea of the 2nd movement’s merging of the materials T and S.

It is worth noticing that the composer’s cognitive control – in other words, the selection of the processing mode, viewed as metacognition in this study – proved to be both deliberate and unintentional. Further, metacognition became more deliberate during the course of the process (see Figure 5(c)), in concert with the Identity Idea’s grounding process. The results thus support the latest evidence that human cognitive control is not only explicit but also implicit (see Deroost, Vandenbossche, Zeischka, Coomans, & Soetens, 2012; Sun & Mathews, 2012, pp. 110–111).

General discussion

Because of the artistic condition of generating an original and coherent artefact in ill-defined circumstances, neither intuitive nor reflective thinking seem to fit the respective requirements: the capacity of reflective thinking is limited when working in uncertain and complex circumstances (De Neys & Goel 2011; Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010). Divergent thinking, by contrast, may indeed generate a combinatorial explosion of accumulating alternatives, which makes the use of intuition hazardous, especially in the beginning of an art project (Policastro, 1999). Moreover, intuition is commonly considered to be lax and thus destined to produce different kinds of biases (e.g. stereotypical thinking) in decision-making situations (Evans & Stanovich, 2013). The composer of this study confronted the creator’s dilemma using the resourceful strategies of (1) the Identity Idea as a vibrant and loosely directive conductor for aesthetic judgements and for the entire process; (2) purposeful decision deferral to avoid early stage, ill-founded commitments; and (3) the appropriate flexibility of intuitive and reflective compositional acts, which again can be viewed as implicit learning, especially when considered in the context of the creative process.

The mental construct of the Identity Idea not only provided the composer with a tolerably limited problem space that established his exercise to be within reason but also was highly inspiring despite being eidetic in nature, thus energising the whole process. Using the Identity Idea as the compass (goal-driven cue), the manuscripts as a mapping reference (task-driven cue), and the ability to single out the best configuration of intuitive and reflective acts for each compositional episode, the composer proceeded step by step, narrowing the problem space while nevertheless remaining open to unexpected ramifications of his efforts. While exploring, transforming and implementing ideas and musical materials within new contexts and situations, he resourcefully and artistically crossed the gap between order and chaos.

The reason for the composer’s indecisiveness in the beginning of the process (when he decided not to decide) originates from the composer’s fundamental perplexities. First, the logical fuzziness of the Identity Idea rendered it inadequate in dictating subsequent decisions straightforwardly. Second, the composer was unable to create congruence within his newly created materials because of the lack of satisfactory reference points (task- or goal-driven cues) against which the materials and their use could be evaluated (see Pohjannoro, 2014); early stage ill-founded choices could have led to incoherent solutions or to overly restrictive constraints from the point of view of later impending compositional dispositions. The composer simply did not know enough about the potential of his Identity Idea, his musical materials, or the future, unforeseen musical structures and development of his work; the piece at this point was nothing but vague ideas and unfinished passages on the score. The next quotation exemplifies the composer’s decision not to decide:

Because the whole perspective has not been founded yet, one easily starts messing around with details and tries to accomplish all sorts of things with them. It usually ends up at a point where one cannot go further. Then, one has to go to another section [of the piece] and go on from there.

Decision deferral is recurrently reported in cognitive studies of composition (see Collins, 2005, p. 209; Reitman, 1965, p. 178), but the functions of compositional decision deferral have not been explicated. What made the composer of this study so confident in deciding not to decide? Were there reasonable grounds for postponing such an ample amount of important choices, which then accumulated into a crisis that the composer plausibly must have anticipated from previous experience? In the following, the function of decision deferral will be elucidated from the point of view of the artistic dilemma that necessitated that the composer, in creating new musical structures, learn these structures to make them work for him.

According to the learning perspective, intuition is based on mental representations that reflect the entire stream of prior experiences (Betsch, Plessner, & Shallies 2004; see also Epstein, 2010; Klein, 2003) that were learned mainly implicitly (i.e. without conscious effort and guidance; see Atkinson & Claxton, 2000; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Epstein, 2010; Glöckner & Witteman, 2010; Hogarth, 2001; Klein, 2003; Sadler-Smith, 2008, pp. 136–143) and stored in long-term memory (Betsch, 2008; Smith & DeCoster, 2000). In the composer’s case, however, there was no previous knowledge for the intuition to rely on, especially in the beginning of the process; the material that he was working with was new, and moreover, only a little of the material had been written down into the score that was then almost empty. How could the composer, operating with his novel ideas and materials, live up to the aesthetic ethos of making a coherent musical construction out of them?

The composer’s response was to carry on with his creative endeavour without making far-reaching decisions. This meant leaving an increasing number of empty bars in the score along with unanswered problems, eventually leading to a crisis of accumulated problems. However, in moving ahead without making pivotal decisions, the composer persistently invented and experimented with his musical materials; he tested, associated, theorised, juxtaposed, applied and developed his ideas into new situations, all the while relating his actions to past events and future events (when possible). Being carried out in the midst of a creative process where the conscious focus is on making a novel artefact, these activities constituted an implicit learning process that also approximated the ‘enhanced learning activities’ described by Biggs (1999). The composer learned as he composed and composed more as he learned more. As a result of this implicit learning process, the composer was able to attain a thorough comprehension of his musical material, its full potential and its dispositions.

In the beginning of the third compositional stage, after repeated decision deferral, accumulated problems, crisis and resolution, the composer’s enhanced but predominantly implicit learning reached a critical point, making his earlier indecisiveness understandable. After this point, the composer began to work fluently, made quick and effortless decisions, and reported that these decisions were ‘surprisingly intuitive’. From the music analyst’s perspective, the composer’s choices appeared to be logical deductions based on nearly all the composer’s actions from the very beginning of the process.

The implicit learning perspective offers a plausible explanation for the discrepancy between the composer’s intuition, his effortless decisions and their seemingly rational and logical grounds. The creative process and the enhanced implicit learning process intermingled and, after the critical point, generated a cognitive device that can be called ‘rational intuition’. ‘Rational intuition’ is specified as a distinct type of intuition that is quick and effortless but nevertheless rational, therefore combining qualities of intuition and reflection. The composer’s ability to ‘intuit rationally’ was acquired through creative, implicit learning activities and was based on deeply consolidated (automatised) knowledge of novelties that were created not more than a couple of days prior.

‘Rational intuition’ in the compositional thinking process has been described as a situation-specific disposition to proceed congruently, albeit without effort. The way in which the composer acquired his ‘rational intuition’ is supported by Schön’s explanation of expert practice in uncertain and complex circumstances. Schön showed how an expert quite naturally determines the method of inquiry to address the issue concurrent to the process of defining the problem. Despite not knowing the answer, he or she knows how to proceed with the problem. As Schön (1983, pp. 132, 134) concluded: ‘The unique and uncertain situation comes to be understood through the attempt to change it, and changed through the attempt to understand it.’ Likewise, Ap Dijksterhuis reported on the liberation-without-attention effect (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006) that occurs whenever implicit learning and evaluative conditioning arise in the context of a goal-directed endeavour (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010). Further, Sinclair (2010) (see also Reber et al., 2013) reported that intuition can be learned and that artists may use it quite intentionally.

The artist’s working environment both necessitates and excludes the use of intuition (being associated with novel solutions while leading to abundant options) as well as reflection (ensuring coherence while being limited in cognitive capacity). The composer’s strategic solution to this contradiction was to generate the kind of conditions for his endeavour that would allow him to thoroughly and rigorously investigate and experiment with his artistic ideas and musical materials. When a satisfying solution could not be assured, the composer delayed making a decision. He knew that making imprudent decisions at early stages of the process could be fatal in terms of attaining coherence in the finished piece. He knew that despite heading directly into a crisis of accumulated problems, he would at some future point be able to resolve the unanswered questions and the unsettled problems. The composer’s determination in decision deferral (see Example 5) can be explained by his experiential knowledge of his own compositional process that would eventually result in a condition of ‘rational intuition’ allowing him to solve the problems. The prospect of beneficial outcomes in the future made him confident in postponing decisions, which again prevented him from committing to far-reaching, disadvantageous choices that could have led to aesthetic incoherency. Just after having solved the crisis, the composer described his own conception of ‘rational intuition’ (bolding by the author):

What happened when the work went on so well?

I really can’t tell. It somehow – it comes to the point that one just has to go on somehow. I sort of know enough about these options at hand.

But, what did you do, concretely?

Basically, I sort of continued pondering. And I somehow came to a sort of crystal clear understanding of what this [piece] is all about.

Example 5.

Score version no. 5 of the section S₂, dated 30.12.2004 (2nd compositional stage, phase VIII, less than a week before the critical phase XI). The musical material has been derived and developed from the section S₁. The composer ponders the relationship between the sections S₁–S₂, as well as the ramifications of this progression S₁–S₂ into the progression of T₁–T₂ (remaining as it was in phase IV). The composer reports his aspiration for these relations as ‘growth’. At this moment, the composing of the 2nd movement has not yet been begun. However, although unable to complete this section, the composer already ponders the ramification of the progressions of the 1st movement into the 2nd movement. He goes further, deciding not to decide, leaving unanswered questions behind.

Questions of validity

The limits of this study lie primarily in its methodological aspects. Using special phenomenological interview techniques instead of stimulated recall interviews would better attend to the problem of ineffability and to problems in verbalising the experiential aspects of the composing process (see Petitmengin-Peugeot, 1999; Vermersch, 2009). However, targeting the experiential side of compositional thinking fails to reach many of the procession aspects that were imperative to the findings of this study (e.g. the role of the Identity Idea, the discrimination of intuitive and reflective metacognition). Further, the think-aloud method, in which the informant speaks while he or she is working, is impossible within extended processes because it can seriously bias the process (as the informant may report whatever he or she wishes without any control by the researcher) and can even distort it (see Perkins, 1981, pp. 13–18). Moreover, there are practical reasons that such a method is not feasible; for example, the composing process examined in this study lasted for several months. Finally, the composer simply refused to use this method.

Overall, when exploring a lengthy process, one cannot truly study all aspects of the process; focusing on one aspect of a phenomenon implies concealing the other dimensions. When detecting compositional thinking in action in the context of the totality of one piece of music, one must focus either on facilitating pre-conscious experiences or on considering a wide range of thinking dispositions, thus revealing pre-conscious thinking only indirectly and secondarily, as in this study. The critical questions are whether the masked thinking differed qualitatively from the covered compositional acts and whether this or the interview-acquired samples of all the composer’s thinking implied significant differences in the distributions of the compositional acts.

Intuitive and reflective compositional acts were differentiated by interpreting the composer’s utterances according to the source of information (long-term memory without deliberation or working memory with deliberate and conscious recall) that the composer was using. Thus, the analysis of qualitative data implies hazards in identifying the fine lines between manifestations of conscious and pre-conscious thought. If these hazards are not pitfalls of the actual data, then they suggest that the phenomenon of consciousness could be continuous rather than discrete, as proposed by scholars such as Fisk and Haase (2011), Sergent and Dehaene (2014) and Vandekerckhove and Panksepp (2009).

The composer of this study has scrutinised this article, including the translations of the interviews and the manuscript examples (cleared of elements that might compromise their anonymity), and has approved the publishing of these materials without any additional notes.

Conclusion

Research on human information processing has predominantly focused on experiments in which intuition and reflection are scrutinised separately in decontextualised research designs, which often (in an unintended way) cue a response that supports the researchers’ hypothesis – whether it is in favour of reflection or intuition (Betsch & Held, 2012; De Neys, 2012; Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010; Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011; cf. Thompson, Turner, & Pennycook, 2011). In this study, qualitative data collected in natural settings have been presented to scrutinise the dynamic use of intuitive and reflective processing modes in a creative process. This case study did not aspire to generalise the results to other composing processes of the same composer, let alone to the compositional processes of other composers. However, the dynamics of compositional acts for brief compositional episodes may be comparable among different composers and even among other creative practitioners. Thus, some theoretical conclusions have been suggested.⁹

Although this study identified limits to the appropriate use of intuition, the findings support research that promotes intuition as a valid mode of decision-making (e.g. Betsch, 2008; Perkins, 1977; Pretz, 2011; Sinclair, 2010, p. 4). The case study of this composer exemplifies and explicates the conception of expert intuition, which is neither lax nor biased in certain conditions, as often denounced in research on thinking and decision-making. Utilised by professionals with adequate cognitive capabilities (i.e. long-term memory and chunking, see Chassy & Gobet, 2011), intuitive and at the same time rational decisions can be made rapidly and without systematic evaluation of the different options available (Klein, 2003). Intuitive expertise is postulated to be embodied, situated, experiential (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986), and domain specific (Gore & Sadler-Smith, 2011). This study supports the notion of intuitive expertise and further notes that artistic intuition shows its full potential when there is (1) a guiding principle, which centralises and guides searches in the problem space; (2) constant fluidity between different processing modes so that intuition is guided by as much evidence as possible and explicated to the point that ensures the achievement of generic aims (aesthetic coherence); (3) expert ability to learn implicitly; and (4) the ability to tolerate ambiguity.

The findings indicate the integral roles of implicit learning and reflection when utilising the positive power of intuition. The study postulates a special, context-specific cognitive device of ‘rational intuition’, which the composer accomplished only after enhanced but mainly implicit learning activities with his brand new musical material and ideas. The investigation thus provides qualitative and ecologically valid support for Dijksterhuis’s experimental evidence about ‘deliberation-without-attention’ (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006) and ‘effortless attention’ (based on Csikszentmihalyi’s work on the flow experience; see Bruya, 2010). The study also explicates a phenomenon reminiscent of Dijksterhuis et al.’s (2014) latest theoretical notion of ‘prolonged thought’, which suggests some sort of combination of intuitive and reflective processing modes in the context of creative work.

The results support the theories of the source of cognitive control being both endogenous (goal-driven, deliberate) and exogenous (task-driven, unintentional; see Hommel, 2007; Koriat, Ma’ayan and Nussinson, 2006). The compositional tasks can actually be organised as a continuum according to their disposition to enhance different kinds of intuitive or reflective behaviour (fewer rationalisation-inducing or more rationalisation-inducing tasks, depending on the informative reference at hand), as with Kenneth Hammond’s (2007, pp. 124–126) notion of ‘cognitive continuum’. With this in mind, the study confirms doubts about the systems view of dual-process theories, which postulate distinct cognitive systems according to different processing types (Evans & Stanovich, 2013). The study thus provides evidence in support of theories that assume intuitive and reflective processing modes to be continuous rather than dichotomous (see note no. 2 about the debate between different dual-process theories and single-process accounts of information processing).

The rich qualitative data in this study still have analytic potential. Affect has been shown to play an important role in decision-making within both intuitive and reflective modes. The role of (metacognitive) emotion in intuitive behaviour is widely debated (Epstein, 2011; Thompson et al., 2011; Tiedens & Linton, 2001; cf. Perkins, 1977, p. 21). Various kinds of affect, including emotions or more transient moods, are believed to have different effects on the decision-making process (Habib, Cassotti, Moutie, Houdé, & Bors 2014; Lerner & Kertner, 2001; Shiv, Loewenstein, & Bechara, 2005). The analysis of the composer’s utterances from the point of view of affective aspects could prove to be valuable both in discriminating different kinds of intuitive processing and in scrutinising the selection of different processing modes.

Footnotes

Appendix: Definitions and interview quotes pertaining to the compositional acts

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the composer for his involvement in this research and for the permission to release his manuscripts.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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