Yes, Composers ARE Researchers, and Here's Why

Yes, this is a picture of my desk. But what do you see?
I spy, from left to right:

-"Instrumentation and Orchestration" by Alfred Blatter, 2nd edition, open to page 82: Special woodwind effects 

-Pen cup, full of markers, pencils without lead, a piece of elk antler, and a pair of 3-D glasses. No actual pens in the pen cup.  

-Notebook with notes about the piece I've been working on recently 

-One large iMac, with Google Chrome open to jStor. Other tabs include: Twitter, email, Facebook, and Blogger, as well as 7 pinned tabs full of composition opportunities and articles I want to read.  

-An external hard drive, full of music, old papers, and plenty of files whose contents are a mystery to me.  

-Headphones and tons of cords whose origins are unknown. I can guarantee when I need these cords, they'll have vanished.  

-One moose bobblehead from Canada, minus one antler.  

-A library card: this wasn't staged, I left it on the desk after logging into the library research services a few days ago.  

-One USB microphone for recording music and podcasts 

-Stack of books: A Real Book, the Dummies Guide to Guitar, and a spiral bound edition of piano reductions of popular pieces from the classical era. 

I've been seeing think pieces and angry tweets over the past few weeks about how composers are creators, not researchers.

Is research a dirty word now?

Why is it seen as something less important than creating in the first place? The only reason we have the resources that we do is because of researchers who love nothing more than to delve into original documents to learn about composers long dead and tech heads who research programs and electronics to bring us bigger and better software and equipment.

Research isn't always combing through dissertations, books, and academic journal articles for relevant information. Sometimes research is score study, or listening to music, or analysis, or making notes as to which notes a bassoon can't trill on.

With that in mind, who of you has never researched before composing a new piece? Never studied a score to learn jazz orchestration, or typical rhythmic notation of traditional Irish music, or Brahmsian harmonic principles; never read a book on instrumental orchestration, or text setting, or voice leading techniques; never listened to certain genres to learn the tendencies to emulate, or to learn what catches the ear?

That's what I thought.

We're researchers, as well as creators.