Creative Processes in composing for guitar: An auto-investigation in retrospect

Few composers write about their own creative processes. Many of those who venture into this activity simply give an account of the process, either through a compositional diary or an essay, without further analysis. When the creative process is investigated, either by the composer or a third person, the data is usually collected in real time, that is, during the composition of the piece.
In this lecture, I will briefly present a paper in which I give an account of, and analyse, the creative processes of my five pieces for/with guitar. This is part of an investigation that encompasses all my 16 creative processes up to the present. The data was collected in retrospect, as the processes occurred without my intention of analysing them in the future. The analytical approach is that of an activity analysis, but the analysis framework is not centred in activities. Instead, it endeavours to bridge a gap in understanding the factors that inspire composers, and how initial ideas are processed as the compositions develop. This lecture will focus in particular on the identification and specification of the frameworkʼs elements in each process, which includes the unconventional guitar techniques employed in the pieces. The codification of the data allows for a comparative analysis of the five processes, which reveals their main tendencies.