This article continues our ongoing series exploring ways of working with sound across creative and cultural contexts.

________________________________

________________________________

NOTES

Trying to describe the inner process of composing music—and then somehow making it visible in words and in a video visualising the music—feels a little like being asked to explain a dream while still half inside it, but I will do my best, and so…

This intermediate-level piano composition grew from a traditional melody whose original Mongolian title, “Дэжийн ногоо” (Dejiin nogoo), evokes fresh green growth and the earth returning to life with the season. Although the piece began with this imagery, as I worked with the melody at the piano it gradually opened into something different in character: a more immersive landscape. The process was less one of imposing a fixed design than of entering into a living musical conversation with the melody itself.

“Practice-led Composition”

Rather than treating the melody as a closed object, I worked with it as a sounding presence, listening to its contour, the weight of individual notes, and its cadence, and allowing those qualities to shape texture, harmony, pacing, and my own physical gestures. I find this way of working with sound deeply rewarding, and it is one to which I return again and again.

In this sense, the piece emerged through attention as much as invention. The final arrangement was guided not only by conscious decision-making, but also by an accumulated inner store of pianistic habits, accompaniment instincts, and compositional leanings evoked by this particular melody at the time.

In the academic literature, this kind of real-time, music-making is referred to as “practice-led composition“: a form of artistic creation in which knowledge arises through the act of shaping sound at the instrument. In this approach, the unfolding of a piece depends on a dialogue between deliberate craft and tacit musical understanding, between what can be consciously shaped and what becomes audible only through patient attention.

The above composition therefore preserves something of this inner process: not simply an arrangement of a melody, but a record of listening, response, and gradual discovery. For that reason, the finished piece stands somewhere between arrangement and original composition.

Its source remains recognisable (cf. the melody), yet the surrounding musical world grows from an exploratory surrender to resonance, spacing, and pianistic colour. What began as work on a familiar melodic line slowly opened into a broader sound-world, one shaped by memory, instinct, and the inner dialogue through which music sometimes reveals its own direction at the time.

Perhaps this area remains lightly researched because so much of the compositional process depends on tacit, embodied, and inwardly reflective forms of knowing that are not easily captured within conventional academic research frameworks. So far, I’ve only been able to find one  recent UK source that is especially relevant here, since Bartosz Szafranski reflects on his own practice-led Doctor of Music in composition as a fully non-linear creative and research process shaped by the interaction of theory, practice, and poiesis, thereby making a useful conceptual parallel for understanding composition as an inward, reflective dialogue drawing on accumulated musical habits and intuitions (Szafranski 2024).

More broadly, Australian scholarship on practice-led and artistic research in music has been especially helpful in clarifying the roles of tacit knowledge, reflection, and the difficulty of rendering time-based creative work legible within academic discourse (Draper and Harrison 2011; Harrison 2013; Draper 2014). Recent Australian work on composition pedagogy and reflective practice also helps situate such inward creative processes within wider educational and artistic research conversations (Crawford 2024; Carey, Harrison, and Dwyer 2017). 

This piece was composed quietly and entirely by hand, through listening, reflection, and time at the piano, with no involvement from AI in the creative process. I then used a range of ICT tools and software to notate the piano score, record, render and present the composition in visualised form for educational and teaching purposes, so that aspects of structure, gesture, texture, and musical development can be more clearly seen as well as heard.

________________________________

GLOSSARY

Practice-led composition. A way of composing in which creative understanding emerges through the making of the music itself, rather than through theory or planning alone. 

Reflective practice. A process of making and then thinking carefully about what has emerged, so that reflection becomes part of the creative work rather than something added afterwards. 

Tacit knowledge. Knowledge carried in practice — touch, instinct, stylistic habit, musical judgment, and embodied understanding — even when it is difficult to explain fully in words. 

Dialogic process. A back-and-forth process of response. In composition, this suggests that the composer is not simply dictating ideas, but listening and replying to what the emerging music seems to be asking for.

Pianistic instinct. The accumulated feel for what lies naturally under the hands, what resonates well on the instrument, and what kinds of gesture or texture the piano invites. This is a practical form of tacit musical knowledge rather than a merely abstract concept. 

Neo-classical character. A modern musical character that draws, loosely or clearly, on classical clarity, balance, restraint, or form, without belonging to an earlier historical style in any strict sense.

________________________________

FURTHER READING

Carey, Gemma, Scott Harrison, and Rachael Dwyer. “Encouraging Reflective Practice in Conservatoire Students: A Pathway to Autonomous Learning?” Music Education Research 19, no. 1 (2017): 99–110. 

Crawford, Renée. “Composition Pedagogy in Australia: Rethinking Teaching and Learning in Music Education through Composition and Creativity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Composition Pedagogy, edited by Michele Kaschub, 733–56. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.  [Useful for readers seeking a recent Australian account of composition as a non-linear pedagogical and creative practice.]

Draper, Paul. “The ‘Little r’ in Artistic Research Training.” In Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice, edited by Mine Doğantan-Dack, 265–87. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. 

Draper, Paul, and Scott Harrison. “Through the Eye of a Needle: The Emergence of a Practice-Led Research Doctorate in Music.” British Journal of Music Education 28, no. 1 (2011): 87–102. 

Harrison, Scott. “Examining the Music Doctorate: Challenges, Contradictions and Confluence in Assessing Time-Based Work.” TEXT Special Issue 22 (October 2013): 1–13. 

Szafranski, Bartosz. “The ‘Self’ Particle: A Time Traveler’s Account of How One Doctorate in Music Composition Would Have Benefited from a Better Awareness of Autoethnography.” In The Routledge Companion to Music, Autoethnography, and Reflexivity, 161–84. London: Routledge, 2024.

Crawford, Renée. “Composition Pedagogy in Australia: Rethinking Teaching and Learning in Music Education through Composition and Creativity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Composition Pedagogy, edited by Michele Kaschub, 733–56. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.  [Useful for readers seeking a recent Australian account of composition as a non-linear pedagogical and creative practice.]

Refer to the INDEX for other music and articles that may be of interest.

© 2013-2026. CP in Mongolia. “Soundscape 16: Dejiin Nogoo: an immersive landscape” is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. ScholarGPT provided an additional channel for research. Documents and music linked from this page may be subject to other restrictions. Posted: 8 April 2026 Last updated: 8 April 2026.