The heart of this question is the extent to which research and composition are — or can be — the same thing. All the official wordings obfuscate the yawning question of where the mysterious distinction lies: if composition can flourish without research, what then is the latter's relation to the artistic whole? Why is it necessary? It is crucial that the link is identified and scrutinised, rather than being merely admitted on the nod. For what it's worth, my composer definition of research denotes material useful to the composer, that is, of itself, not actually composed but which can inform the work by driving a subsequent compositional process. Clearly such outside sources may loom large — but they may be entirely and respectably absent.

Let us stay briefly with definitions: research is "a course of critical or scientific inquiry", according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. None of us could dispute that critical inquiry as such is a part of our artistic judgment and processes — but scientific inquiry is another matter. A work of art may be put together without any scientific inquiry being involved, and still be of outstanding merit; yet the discrete elision of the artistic process with scientific assumptions brings upon the composer an agenda of "finding things out" in quite another sense from that of discovering musical materials. While every new work is, and must be, a struggle, composers who are not notably deficient in methodology now face a requirement to view the process in a way that might be entirely foreign to their previously validated practice.

An essential part of this new view of the process comes down to language: I notice that the student's favourite cornucopia of knowledge, Wikipedia says, of the doctrine of cultural hegemony: "how the messages are presented thereby determines the value of the information as ‘reliable' or ‘unreliable', as ‘true' or ‘false'." In other words, a trend of cultural dominance is imposed by means of establishing "good" and "bad" terminology — an insidious mechanism to which it is impossible not to submit, albeit unconsciously.

I note this because the discrete and un-debated advance of the scientific imperative into the artistic pursuit of composing is implicit in terms like "research questions", familiar to every supervisor of PhD composers in the UK. The proposition that "in this composition process I am finding things out" — in a specific, not a cuddly personal-development, sense — is a contentious one that dismays many good PhD composers — though not others — and it has gone largely unexamined itself. Yes, the PhD is after all a research degree, but there is more than a whiff of modernist one-upmanship in the implication that art looking for new mechanism is more deserving of support than art that achieves in other ways. Once that implication stalks among us, then the art in question is being rated for its discovery content above its artistic success. In what other field is research valued just as evidence of its own existence? Presumably, in science, research is valued for the worth of its discoveries; the presence of research per se need not excite us. Arguably we should even be suspicious when we find it vaunted in art.

I cannot resist wondering about the pedigree of this cult. A telling story from the young Dave Brubeck notes how, in the 1940s, he sought tuition from Schoenberg in Los Angeles and was asked, on bringing his piece for scrutiny, "Why is that note there?" When he murmured that it was his intuitive choice to sound it there, as composer, the gruff response was: "No. That's not a good enough reason." Schoenberg's life's work had led him to a belief in rationale that was to be immensely, and unconsciously, influential on following generations and their assumptions about validity in composition — though for Brubeck it was a turn-off. He would have appreciated the counter-view put by Leonard Meyer, writing of Schoenberg's 12-tone row composition method in his landmark study Music, the Arts, and Ideas (University of Chicago Press) in the 1960s: "It is clear that at many times one does perceive the row and is aware of its transformations," he writes. "But in such cases our perception is of a pattern or set of relationships which happens also to be the row. Understanding is not dependent upon the fact that we are hearing the row."