Collaboration in musical creation

This essay reckons with the widespread criticism of Loveleen Tandan and Danny Boyle's Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire (2008) as " poverty porn. " Under this umbrella contention, both Indian and American critics have accused the film of propagating orientalist and negative stereotypes of India, thus fetishizing the country through a nostalgic superiority. In contrast, my reading begins with key ideas offered by global digital humanists which allow me to open up my key argument: digital music collaboration between A.R. Rahman and M.I.A. on the film's soundtrack compels viewers to critically read the film in more complex and enriching ways. The musicians created the soundtrack by emailing digital music samples to one another between London and Chennai, thus adding a uniquely diasporic dimension to the soundtrack (which subsequently won many Grammy Awards). I contend that the images of Mumbai's poverty and the Dharavi slum look very different when set to the sounds of resistance proffered by both South Asian musicians. To support this contention, I contextualise three of the digital music collaborations between M.I.A. and Rahman

Στόχος της παρούσας έρευνας είναι η μελέτη τρόπων ανάπτυξης των δημιουργικών μουσικών αλληλεπιδράσεων μεταξύ παιδιών προσχολικής ηλικίας κατά το αυθόρμητο παιχνίδι τους στη μουσική γωνιά, με τον παιδαγωγό ως συμπαίκτη και συμμετοχικό παρατηρητή. Η κατανόηση των προϋποθέσεων ανάπτυξης της δημιουργικότητας των μικρών παιδιών, ο ρόλος των περιορισμών κατά τον μουσικό αυτοσχεδιασμό και ο ρόλος του παιδαγωγού στην ενθάρρυνση της δημιουργικότητας των παιδιών τονίζονται σε σχετική βιβλιογραφία. Στην παρούσα έρευνα η οποία υλοποιήθηκε σε νηπιαγωγείο της Θεσσαλονίκης συμμετείχαν 13 νήπια ηλικίας 5 χρονών. Κατά τη διάρκεια 9 συναντήσεεων (α) πραγματοποιήθηκαν οργανωμένες δραστηριότητες για το σύνολο της τάξης, για να δοθούν ερεθίσματα δημιουργικής μουσικής έκφρασης και αλληλεπίδρασης και (β) δημιουργήθηκε μουσική γωνιά για την ενίσχυση του ελεύθερου μουσικού παιχνιδιού των παιδιών προκειμένου στη συνέχεια να μπορέσει να γίνει αντικείμενο παρατήρησης. Ως συμμετοχικός παρατηρητής, ως ακροατής και συμπαίκτης στο αυθόρμητο παιχνίδι των παιδιών ο ενήλικας πλησίασε στις αντιδράσεις των παιδιών κατά τη διάρκεια των αυτοσχεδιασμών τους. Από τη συνολική ενασχόληση των παιδιών στη μουσική γωνιά, η ανάλυση  επικεντρώθηκε  σε ομαδικές αλληλεπιδράσεις, οι οποίες εξελίχθηκαν σε διαφορετικό πλαίσιο, ανοιχτό, ευέλικτο ή κλειστό. Σε καθένα από αυτά, τα παιδιά αυθόρμητα ανέπτυξαν διάφορες στρατηγικές μουσικής αλληλεπίδρασης με ποικιλία στην ποιότητα συμμετοχής. Από όλα τα πλαίσια, στο ευέλικτο-οριοθετημένο πλαίσιο παρατηρήθηκε αυξημένη δημιουργική αλληλεπίδραση. H παρούσα έρευνα τονίζει τη θετική επίδραση στοιχειωδών περιορισμών για την ενίσχυση της αλληλεπίδρασης κατά τη διάρκεια του μουσικού αυτοσχεδιασμού και το θετικό ρόλο που μπορεί να παίξει ο παιδαγωγός ως ισότιμο μέλος και ιδιαίτερα ως συμπαίκτης.

During the twentieth century, electronic technology enabled the explosive development of new tools for the production, performance, dissemination and conservation of music. The era of the mechanical reproduction of music has, rather ironically, opened up new perspectives, which have contributed to the revitalisation of the performer's role and the concept of music as performance. This book examines questions related to music that cannot be set in conventional notation, reporting and reflecting on current research and creative practice primarily in live electronic music. It studies compositions for which the musical text is problematic, that is, nonexistent, incomplete, insufficiently precise or transmitted in a nontraditional format. Thus, at the core of this project is an absence. The objects of study lack a reliably precise graphical representation of the work as the composer or the composer/ performer conceived or imagined it. How do we compose, perform and study music that cannot be set in conventional notation?

The work of Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) has been influenced by computer technology since 1969 at Princeton University, and later during a short course on muSyS at the private emS (Electronic Music Studios) of Peter Zinovieff. However, it was at Ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris that he could finally fully explore his aesthetic vision, a passion for electronic music that lasted for twenty-eight years and resulted in eight pieces realised at the French Institute: among them the renowned tape piece Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980) and Ritual Melodies (1990), but also mixed pieces like Bhakti (1982), String Quartet No. 4 (2003), or Speakings (2008). This article focuses on Harvey’s collaborations with Ircam computer music designers Stanley Haynes, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Denis Lorrain, Jan Vandenheede, Cort Lippe, Carl Faia, Gilbert Nouno, and Arshia Cont. This research, grounded on published and unpublished materials, and oral communications, does not focus on technical aspects, but rather on what Harvey and his collaborators did to create and organize smoothly their work, their modes of collaboration, their everyday workflow. Although relatively weak at the beginning, the evidence of collaboration and above all its recognition through available sources grows over time, since it is highly dependent on the awareness computer music designers have built up of their profession along the years. Moreover, the British composer is one of the few who always recognize, in statements, texts, articles or interviews, the important role of the assistants.

The revolution of sound recording, analogue synthesis and the birth of computer music, caused the emergence of a new professional profile, the Musical Assistant – someone who collaborates with composers in the phase of researching, writing, creating new sounds, recording and/or performing live during concerts – whose presence remains hidden most of the time. How can we find traces of this collaboration in analysing electroacoutic music? I propose a unified methodology at the intersection of Music Analysis based on electronic and computer sources and instruments; the ethnographic research, being collaboration based on oral traditions and activities; the philology of music and source criticism. The article focuses on three Musical Assistants: Marino Zuccheri (1950s), Alvise Vidolin (1980s), Carl Faia (2000s). The choice is motivated by the significance of their work with composers such as Luciano Berio and John Cage (Zuccheri), Luigi Nono and Salvatore Sciarrino (Vidolin), Philippe Leroux and Jonathan Harvey (Faia). The collaboration I discuss here does have many facets and is rarely the same from author to author, from project to project. There are however several aspects that emerge such as diachronic versus synchronic collaboration, the mode of thoughts emerging from material and oral sources, intentions, actions, and constraints, psychology and authorship.

The work of Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) has been influenced by computer technology since 1969 at Princeton University, and later during a short course on MUSYS at the private EMS (Electronic Music Studios) of Peter Zinovieff. However, it was at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris that he could finally fully explore his aesthetic vision, a passion for electronic music that lasted for twenty-eight years and resulted in eight pieces realised at the French Institute: among them the renowned tape piece Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980) and Ritual Melodies (1990) but also mixed pieces like Nouno, and Arshia Cont. This research, grounded on published and unpublished materials, and oral communications, does not focus on technical aspects, but rather on what Harvey and his collaborators did to create and organize smoothly their work, their modes of collaboration, their everyday workflow. Although relatively weak at the beginning, the evidence of collaboration and above all its recognition through available sources grows over time, since it is highly dependent on the awareness computer music designers have built up of their profession along the years. Moreover, the British composer is one of the few who always recognize, in statements, texts, articles or interviews, the important role of the assistants.

The development of Web 2.0 combined with the emergence of innovative software platforms has helped remote music collaboration undergo a phase of significant growth in the last five years. My practice-led research responds to the question of how working with remote music collaboration software (RMCS) impacts on the production process. The discussion and the sound recording accompanied by this paper concern one example of my collaborative practice using Ohm Studio software. I created a popular music piece titled " The Giver " with creative contributors located on three continents. My analysis shows that RMCS offers music producers innovative ways to network and develop a project with the input of globally crowdsourced participants. The resulting sound recording exemplifies an RMCS-based process that led to changes in production workflow, facilitated learning, generated new creative relationships, and, ultimately, helped to achieve the desired musical outcomes.

This chapter illustrates a teaching/learning process for enhancing rhythmic understanding and skills through group improvisation, as it has been experienced by the teacher-researcher with a small group of 5-7-year-old pupils in the context of a doctoral research study on children’s interactions in creative music making.
The focus is, on the one hand, on what these children have learnt, specifically the kind of interactive skills that they developed – synchronising and entraining to each other, and being able to consistently produce and coordinate rhythmic figures on a pulse. On the other hand, it is relevant to see how they have learnt it: based on the model of cognitive apprenticeship, the subsequent phases of the teaching pathway are described, as a successful example of a social constructivist approach to musical creativity.

In this paper I will deconstruct the collaborative creative process with the computer in Prometeo. Tragedia dell'Ascolto by Luigi Nono (1984-85). Prometeo is particularly illustrative of the way in which the use of technology constructs both what is composed on paper (the score), as well as how the use of technology influences the listening (the public). I will report findings from a two-fold investigation: from one hand, an exhaustive study of source materials pertaining the generative process of sounds and software, including the score of the first performance (Venice, September 1984), and computer sketches from the first and second performance (as mentioned above, real-time synthesis was used only in these two occasions). I am pleased to present here, for the first time, figures taken from Alvise Vidolin diary of his meetings with Nono and his colleagues (from April 1984 to the second performance in Milan). Source analysis, however, is not sufficient to reveal the whole compositional/research project, and oral history is equally important (personal communications collected with interviews, discussions and/or e-mails). Researchers’ memories enable to explain certain technological developments, problems and solutions which have been adopted, and discover details and backgrounds in collaboration management (esp. section: Sound Design Thinking in Prometeo: achievements and bottlenecks).

There is a substantial amount of research on the creative process of the composer, and there has been an increasing interest in detailing the relationship between composer and performer. Yet, there is little research about the dynamics between the composer and listener, a subject which merits consideration. Thanks to the internet and online video-sharing platforms, composers can directly interact with their listeners and fans. This paper will focus specifically on Jacob Collier and Andrew Huang, two artists who make use of these online resources to collaborate with their audience by requesting compositional material from them. This crowd-sourced music is not a new phenomenon, but due to the popularity of these musicians it is now a recurrent dynamic online. Huang, a Toronto-based musician and YouTube personality, is known for his "Fan Mash” series, where he produces a song by processing fan-submitted short videos of random sounds. Collier, a Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist based in London, England, became widely popular by producing complex reharmonizations from fan-submitted melodies and livestreaming the arranging process for his listeners. These two young artists have in common a platform for interacting and submitting content; they both share their compositional process as a video and are able to receive audience feedback before, during, and after the creative process. The result gives the audience a sense of participation and identity, ultimately leading to a stronger community. This paper provides a detailed description of their corresponding approaches to audience collaboration and studies the reception of the final product by reviewing user commentary.

Approximately 1300 song items are preserved among the ethnographic recordings made on the Tiwi Islands (northern Australia) between 1912 and 1981. Housed in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, they were repatriated to the Tiwi community in 2010. Almost all of the song texts use the first person and present tense. For Tiwi listeners this brings the time, place and-importantly-the original performer of each song into the present at each hearing, creating a personal relationship between the (deceased) performer and the (living) listener and transmitting an experience of the original occasion. Extemporisation within cultural, linguistic and musical frameworks is fundamental to Tiwi song practice, with perhaps its most defining feature being the composition of text specific to a song's performance and audience context. This chapter discusses a project 1 that brought together Tiwi and non-Tiwi musicians to explore notions of improvisation and performance intuition, as we created a series of 'duets' with the recorded voices of deceased Tiwi singers, selected from the archive by elders. As well as engaging with the rich musical heritage of the recordings, this project invited the ancestors themselves into the recording studio as co-performers, re-establishing the important role of musical and poetic extemporisation and the 'now' of Tiwi song. This has been a way of keeping the ancestors' voices and knowledge active in an ongoing dialogue between the past and the present.

Throughout the history of electroacoustic music, creative collaboration has been a constant feature due to the complexity of the technology. All laboratories and electronic music studios involved the presence of different individuals with diverse, intertwined competencies. In particular, the embedding of technological tools into the process of musical creation prompted the rise of a new " agent " called the Computer Music Designer (CMD), who can work in writing, creating new instruments, recording and/or performance. Audiences as well as the academia have long been unaware of this emerging profession and its crucial role in the creative process of electroacoustic, electronic and computer music. This study sheds light on the socio-professional profile and expertise of the CMD in order to better understand how computer music design contributes to shaping electronic music as we know it. We present the methodology and outcomes of a questionnaire submitted to several CMDs. The purpose was to investigate this emerging community by means of an instrument permitting anonymity. Findings help to understand how the CMDs perceive their profession; trace common paths and habits among CMDs; and study this community from the point of view of their age, training, tasks, legal status, recognition, skills, professional identity and involvement in technological migration. The questionnaire instrument is appended.

The Lampung societies have many arts and cultures, one of which is a gambus tunggal. The characteristic of gambus that are played solely and has an original tuning system. A gambus tunggal style produces a melodic tone, accompanied by chanted poems that involve new romantic romance of Lampung, or parents' advice to their children. This ethnography study aims to comprehend how the gambus tunggal artists maintain the existence in Lampung. The study applies a descriptive method with a qualitative idea. We have interrogated and field studies to gather primary data. A purposive sampling technique was used to interview a gambus tunggal player who existed for decades. The result indicates that a gambus tunggal artist is doing a collaborative struggle to support gambus tunggal and living sources' survival. They need collaboration to keep the existence of traditional Lampung music. Gambus players have considered using social media as a promotional strategy. The local government's role has a tremendous impact, for example, providing an opportunity to perform gambus tunggal at various events, festivals, and many competitions. Therefore, the tourism sector is the foundation of Lampung's traditional music. It establishes policies to serve various performing arts.

This article focuses on the need for deeper studies about composer-performer collaboration, especially at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Its objective is to discuss the challenges and proposals introduced in the activity “Atelier for Contemporary Composition and Performance”, at the Graduate Studies in Music at the Federal University of Bahia. In dialog with authors such as Hayden & Windsor (2007), Domenici (2016), John-Steiner (2000), Lima (2012), Reynolds (2002), Pareyson (2005) and Salles (2004), we are in search of a methodology to support deeper studies of collaborative processes, uncovering a possible theory of collaborative creation.

Throughout the history of electroacoustic music, creative collaboration has been a constant feature due to the complexity of the technology. All laboratories and electronic music studios involved the presence of different individuals with diverse, intertwined competencies. In particular, the embedding of technological tools into the process of musical creation prompted the rise of a new “agent” called the Computer Music Designer (CMD), who can work in writing, creating new instruments, recording and/or performance. Audiences as well as the academia have long been unaware of this emerging profession and its crucial role in the creative process of electroacoustic, electronic and computer music. This study sheds light on the socio-professional profile and expertise of the CMD in order to better understand how computer music design contributes to shaping electronic music as we know it. We present the methodology and outcomes of a questionnaire submitted to several CMDs. The purpose was ...

The autograph sources of Leonardo Leo's operas have never been the subject of an analytical study. The manuscripts show different degrees of the composer's creative process: drafting, composing in several stages, working out. An example of a draft can be found in the manuscript of the "commedia per musica" L'ambizione delusa (1742, F-Pn 2253). In the draft of the aria Nel cupo seno di notte oscura, it is possible to reconstruct in what sequence Leo has conceived and put the structural elements in relation to each other and how they meet requirements of a dramatic nature. In the manuscript F-Pn 2254, a collection of arias from L'Andromaca, Demetrio and Decebalo, the instrumental aria ritornellos have been drafted in two different ways depending on their function. In the score F-Pn 2255, the third version of the opera Demetrio (pasticcio, 1738), Leo corrects the recitatives. When he corrects his own recitatives, the vocal lines are tonally altered, but the original melodic arc tends to remain unchanged; when he corrects the other composers’ recitatives, he modifies the vocal line, and in certain cases, the harmony; in addition, he tries to improve the declamation of the text. Finally, in both versions of the "dramma serio" Ciro riconosciuto (Turin 1739 and Naples 1742), one can observe the transformation of the musical material from the earlier to the later version of the opera. This paper aims to analyse the different forms of Leo’s creative process and to compare them with the autographs by other “Neapolitan” composers.

This chapter focuses on the analysis of “Taras su tre dimensioni” [Taras on three dimensions], a work realized by Teresa Rampazzi in 1971-72 in the course of a transitional phase (her transition from the analogue to the computer music technology).
The approximately eleven-minutes work represents an unicum among Teresa Rampazzi’s repertoire. It is made from the juxtaposition of three typologies of sounds: analogue, concrete and computer made sounds, and is also the only piece in her catalogue which incorporates concrete sounds.