Artistry, particularly musical, is subjective and success in artistry can be achieved by more than one route. I consider myself an autodidactic musician by the musical and compositional achievements I have made without formal music training. I chose to research the compositional traits of other autodidacts to see their successes and challenges with their knowledge. George Gershwin, Danny Elfman, and John Bucchino come from a different background, a different time period in music, and each comes from a different stylistic genre. This research describes each of these composers’ influences, approach to composing, and any advantages or disadvantages they have faced because of their lack of formal music and music theory training. I wanted to know what skills and instincts composers possess. As part of my study, I composed a song cycle of 10 original musical theatre-style pieces. Notating the sheet music for the songs was a large portion of the project. During the process, I recognized my level of music theory, patterns and habits in my writing, and engaged in the process of making my music accessible.

La prose et la poésie de Wolfgang Hilbig mobilisent un grand nombre de topoï, clichés et scénarios de l’existence poétique et de lavocation artistique, qui revêtent à la fois une fonction légitimante et critique. Ils répondent à l’improbable vocation de cet autodidacte est-allemand d’origine prolétaire. Les figures de poètes ou d’écrivains sont les supports d’une poétologie auctoriale héritière du romantisme et de la modernité, incarnée en particulier par la figure paradoxale de Kaspar Hauser. Interprétée comme une construction littéraire, fantasmatique et mythique située en aval de l’oeuvre, l’auctorialité est ici une théorie de la littérature incarnée dans des personnages et des modèles figuratifs de vies vouées à l’art. Les figures de la rupture d’équilibre, le motif de la lettre et le dispositif narratologique de la métalepse d’auteur se lisent comme des mises en scène de la condition poétique, de la relationtexte/auteur et de la transformation de l’auteur en fiction, sur lesquelles repose le projet existentiel de littérarisation de soi qui fonde l’écriture de Hilbig. Enfin, les textes esquissent des scénarios de vie faisant pièce au modèle de la prédestination. Ils explorent des possibilités de figurer la vocation improbable à travers les formes du cercle, de l’explosion, du saut et de l’événement, opposées au schéma linéaire de la prédestination, qui a partie liée avec la temporalité. Face à cette biographie extérieure, à cette vie exotérique, l’oeuvre de Hilbig piste les mouvements de la vie ésotérique, secrète, illisible et sans nom dans laquelle se joue la vocation désormais comprise comme promesse d’éternité. / Wolfgang Hilbig’s prose and poetry bring into play a large number of topoï, clichés and scenarios of the poetical life and of theartistic calling, both in a critical and in a legitimating way. They function as a response to the unlikely vocation as a writer of a selftaught,East German proletarian. In Hilbig’s work, poet or writer characters convey an authorial poetology that appear as a legacy of Romanticism and Modernity, which the paradoxical figure of Kaspar Hauser particularly stands for. Interpreted as a literary, phantasmatic and mythical construct resulting from the work itself, authorship consists here in a theory of literature embodied by models of art-dedicated lives. The figures of the loss of balance, the motif of the letter and the narratological device of the authorial metalepsis are read as means of staging the situation of the poet, the text/author relationship and the fictionalization of the author.Those are the bases of Hilbig’s existential project of self-literarization. Finally, Hilbig’s texts sketch life scenarios that thwart the predestination model, exploring the unlikely vocation through figures such as the circle, the explosion, the jump and the event, all of which go against the linear model of redestination that rely on temporality. As an alternative to this outward biography, this exoteric life, Hilbig’s work tracks the movements of a secret, unreadable and nameless esoteric life where vocation develops as a promise of eternity. The question of authorship in Hilbig’s work cannot be separated from a meditation on time and an idealistic perception of the world.