Looking within: A self-reflective interrogation of orchestration process through Bela Bartok’s 14 Bagatelles for Piano

This study explores orchestration as a reflective, embodied, and personal form of compositional inquiry as opposed to a purely technical craft. Using the orchestration of Béla Bartók’s 14 Bagatelles as generative material, it examines the tacit knowledge, aesthetic instincts, and decision-making processes underlying the author’s orchestrational choices. Situated within a practice-led research framework, the study combines methods from autoethnography, reflective practice, and constructivist grounded theory. Through simultaneous creative work and documentation, artefacts such as annotated scores, reflective journals, and iterative drafts were generated and analysed through qualitative coding methods in ATLAS.ti. 3,675 codes were organised into four orchestration “zones” and grouped under instrumental, sonic, structural, and analytical categories, revealing the interconnections between intuition, material, and context. The findings propose orchestration as both artistic practice and epistemic process, thus generating knowledge through doing. By articulating the tacit and experiential dimensions of creative work, this study contributes to emerging discourses in artistic research, composition-as-research, and the pedagogy of orchestration.

Grantor dc:publisher

Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Dalton, Owen

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Schonken, Philip Antoni

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/135710

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/135710