A Practice in Empathy: an account of a devised contemporary music practice
Composer Stephen Goss asked in a paper given at York University in 2007, “Is it possible to analysis collaboration with any rigour?” (Roe, 2007).
Collaboration is person specific, project specific, and practice specific. This specificity renders the analysis of collaboration challenging and, at times, inadequate. With all of this in mind, I will offer an account of my collaborative practice of devising contemporary music compositions with disparate composers.
During my research at the Norwegian Academy of Music and through the Norwegian Artistic Research Program I have made six pieces with six different people. Each of them is different and in each of them I am different. Each collaboration is built on an interacting relationship between at least two people, and I am no fixed entity.
Each project within the research challenges the notion of the traditional separation of labor between composer and performer. These collaborations were initiated because I felt claustrophobic in the role of pure, executing instrumentalist. I have become increasingly suspicious of strict labor divisions and identity categories in music making. As a performer I increasingly yearn for meaningful contact with the people and composers I am making work with. It no longer suffices to simply receive a finished score in my e-mail inbox. I want to be part of the process and to have my specific person and practice impact the outcome of a piece.
Every piece within the research project was made in the room, on the floor, in close contact, over a long period of time. In short, we attempted to devise contemporary music compositions.
The inherited hierarchical labels of composer and interpreter were voided and the work was made together. We each carried into the collaboration our backgrounds as performer and/or composer, but we let the piece be made by everyone.
While apart from each other, both the composer and I prepare, reflect, and research the concepts driving the project. These activities can span a range of forms, including reading texts, writing texts, seeing artistic work, and performing field work. This on-going process of research and reflection is critical for a rich in-the room, on-the-floor collaborative process.
Despite an attempt to allow creative equality in the devising process, what I, as “Performer”, am doing in these devising processes can vary resulting in both “equality” and “inequality” that reflects older and more traditional models composer-performer collaboration: on occasions I feel like a voyeur peering into the mind and practice of the “Composer”, seemingly watching over their shoulder as they in real time; on other occasions I feel like an assistant to the composer, complementing and expanding their idea and fascilitating the real time composition; on other occasions I feel like my body and artistic tendencies are the literal material being thrown around like oil on canvas, where my specific artistic practice is the material of the work and thereby underlines the person specificity of the project; on other occasions I feel truly as a co-creator, building a piece from the ground up as an equal contributor. All of these dynamics can occur, even simultaneously, and all within in the frame of a single piece.
To varying degrees I have taken ownership and/or authorship of each piece. This language is always a negotiation between specific collaborators. The language used for ascribing credit establishes in writing how each person contributes, and therefore what each person owns or authors. My collaborators and I have occasionally opted out of using the labels “composer” or “performer”, instead settling for “creators” of the project. This choice opens up the possibility that every person can influence any and every aspect of the piece, regardless of their background or education. It has personally been important to take credit for the work made in collaboration with another person. I am no longer satisfied with being the “commissioner” or even the “dedicatee”. If I was part of making the piece I feel it’s important to state that, whether or not that statement is understood specifically as authorship. The negotiation of ownership and authorship has, in my experience, been a welcome and important discussion, however in most cases it has remained a delicate one.
Though the creative process may generally be equal, and even in the case of collaborators agreeing to share authorship, this does not mean that financial renumeration is equal. Some institutions and funding bodies have the flexibility to award authorship to both the composer and performer, where other bodies are less flexible in this way, and less flexible to retroactively reflect how a creative process develops across the course of creating new work. When the collaborative process becomes co-creative the challenge is largely up to the artists involved to share credit and financial rewards in an appropriate and mutually agreed manner.
When a shared commission fee did not seem right for a particular project or did not emerge out of a shared dialogue, it was important for me as the "Performer" to ensure my credits be explicitly noted in scores and documents.
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In every project we begin with a concept. The concept leads us where it wants to, which may or may not be instrumental playing in the traditional sense. The task is to fulfill a process of shared creation, the finished product is not pre-determined. This choice was reinforced by my current artistic research project, which explores the boundaries of what a classical trained musician can do or be on stage, which may or may not result in instrumental performance.
In each piece I credit my collaborator with the concept; it is up to debate whether to credit them for musical composition. Very often what we can understand as composition manifests as the process of ordering events, not in the sense of creating distinct structures but in the sense of deciding what goes where and when. Very often the pieces became as performative as they are musical. The devising process complemented this artistic ambiguity.
In every piece it became valuable and even inevitable to remove the separation not only between who composes but also who performs. In many of the pieces created in a devised method, the composer ultimately performs on stage and/or creates another entity with which I perform, such as a video or playback. This was always natural result of creating together in the same room.
Very few of the pieces made in a devised method have or require scores. In these projects the musical score moves towards the nature of a dance score, where the purpose of its existence is not for fetish or monastic purity but for another artist to use in in the future, or for me to use once my memory has inevitably slipped.
The scores we have made are inadequate and they leave absolutely no question of “Where does the work lie, in the score or in the performance?”Without the score my practice moves away from the traditional relationship between interpreter and object and towards the interacting relationship with another person and a shared concept.
My beloved hours alone in my practice room drilling repetitions are very few in comparison to the past. In these devised projects the process of production and rehearsing are collapsed and occur at once. This is the distinct difference between a devised practice and a traditional practice of collaboration: the making and the rehearsing occur at once. The writing of texts and scores usually happens long after the piece has been brought to life in performance.
Revisions happen continually and constantly. Very rarely do these revised details make it into any pre-existing score. The body of the performer is the preserving archival mechanism, thus the pieces remain in fluid motion and become performer specific.
Most, if not all, of the material is created through improvisation. Working on the floor leads to spontaneity.
The video camera becomes a critical partner in the creative process.
A devised music practice never takes for granted who is in the room. If it weren’t me and it were someone else, the piece would be drastically different and possibly unrecognisably so. This person specificity is precious, but it does not mean the piece can only be performed by specific artists, it simply means that the piece wouldn’t exist if that specific person hadn’t been present.
The creative process moves away from a “production” line model where composer and interpreter work on the piece at different stages at different times and in different spaces, and it moves towards a devised collaborative process out of which emerges a sense of “we-ness” through being-with. (Roe, 2007)
A sense of we-ness comes out of shared creativity and shared responsibility. There is the experience of ‘joint tenancy’, that we as collaborators rise and fall together, that we are bound through this project in a nature similar to marriage. We share the responsibility for our project. (Meill/Littleton, 2004). This dynamic arises naturally out of the devised process and is strengthened through collective problem solving in creative and practical matters alike. It is sharing the feeling of ambiguity that comes with a project whose outcome is uncertain. This feeling of collective uncertainty is new to my practice as a performer.
A sense of we-ness also grows out of a shared experience of expanded subjectivity through the inclusion of another’s. Devising is not merely co-creation, it is also co-existence. This co-existence causes an expanded perspective and a sense of empathy that arises between collaborators.
I consider devising contemporary music itself as a practice in empathy where I, as “Performer” am offered by the “Composer” an extended subjectivity through which I can view, filter, and experience the world. Composers often offer this to performers, where devised creation differs is that I now have the ability to I offer a similar expansion to my composer-collaborators.
Some people think collaboration automatically equals compromise, where one must give up something in order to reach an ever tenuous agreement. I haven’t had this experience in these collaborations. Devising takes time, a time long enough to reach a shared perspective. I understand this shared perspective as the experience of devising as a practice in empathy, where empathy is understood as unbounded generosity through which a sense of “we-ness” emerges. This sense of “in-it-together-ness emerges” through the slow cultivation of a shared perspective, a shared space. It is built on trust and mutual respect. It is the bed from which creativity blooms. It takes time and it is worth it.
Devising is to give up on the idea of heroes and to give into the idea of communion through collective creative action. It’s to let go of “I” and to give into a third entity: the relationship that spawns the unexpected perspective.
Collaboration is not a means to an artistic ends, but is itself a worthy ends. It is not a motion towards utopic democracy; it’s a motion towards an artistic practice built on empathy and self-making through creation.
Bibliography:
Miell, Dorothy and Littleton, Karen. Collaborative Creativity: Contemporary Perspectives. Free Association Books, 2004.
Roe, Paul. A Phenomenology of Collaboration in Contemporary Composition and Performance. PhD Diss, The University of York, Department of Music, 2007. Retrieved from http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/9941/3/485137.pdf
