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Why collaborate? - The Open College of the Arts

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Why collaborate?

For artists, photographers, musicians, writers and other arts practitioners at all levels, it is all too easy to become isolated. We can work alone, often from home, and it can sometimes be difficult to engage with a wider community of other artists. For some, this is an ideal scenario, affording control over the work produced, the working hours and also, to an extent, over who gets to experience the work created. Working in this way can be comfortable, protected and gives the artist the freedom to develop at their own pace and in their own directions.

Source: Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection
Richard Rodgers seated at piano with Lorenz Hart on right. Source: Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.

However, there are times when collaboration might be a useful venture, either within the same artform or with practitioners from different areas. There are numerous famous collaborative partnerships which can serve as potentially interesting case studies, such as Gilbert and George, Cage and Cunningham, Stravinsky and Diaghilev, Rodgers and Hart (or Hammerstein), to name but a few. For those interested in studying collaborative processes further, Vera John-Steiner’s writings are worth exploring.
Collaboration can take on many guises, and does not mean an individual losing his or her identity as part of the process. My own collaborative work focuses on working, as a performer, with composers on new pieces of music. I work with a wide range of composers, and each retains their individual voice, while my input helps them to write successfully for the instrument and communicates their work to an audience, in a way which hopefully enhances the music as a result of gaining a deeper understanding of the work. I’ll help the composers to revise drafts for greater practicality, and to renotate anything that needs clarity to be communicated to other performers.
My involvement can begin at any stage in the compositional process between the initial compositional ideas and the first performance, and for the artists involved, it is a win-win situation; the composer has access to a performer who can help to refine their work, and as the performer, I have a range of new works created which can challenge me technically and musically, and in which I can understand exactly what the composer intended. Together we are able to develop new ideas and techniques which can be passed on to other players and contribute to the development of a new musical language.
I learn more about what might be possible on the flute from the imagination and suggestions of composers than I could ever do from most flute players, since as instrumentalists we are taught to approach the tools of the trade in a particular way and challenging some of those ideas requires a fresh perspective.
A good collaboration allows the participants to spark ideas off each other, and to explore new directions which they may not have even thought of individually.  Approaching a problem from a different angle can be enlightening, and realizing the potential of two or more people’s combined ideas and knowledge can be extremely exciting and rewarding.
Collaborations can be short-lived or long-term and can be an essential part of artist development.  I urge you to dream up some projects and have a go!


Posted by author: Carla

6 thoughts on “Why collaborate?

  • I’ll be honest – I don’t reas a lot of the OCA Weekender bulletins but this issue of collaboration invaded my thoughts and so I read on. I can completely see why collaboration works in music. As soon as you have more than one insrument or voice, collaboration is necessary in the performance. The design (or composition) might be another matter and there are many examples of both single and dual composers, but you don’t often see more than 2 names attributed as writers of a piece of music. Perhaps because one person concentrates on words while the other on the music?
    But when I read these articles, and I think of OCA projects, Is there really room for collaboration? I can think of one or two ways in which I and an associate could create some collaborative works of photography, but how would they be assessed? Who would get the credit for delivery of the final assignment? If those collaborating had different tutors – how would they collaborate in their assessments and to whoms whould they direct their critique – and what if they can’t agree!
    I can imagine that while interesting in concept it may not be a very practical way to manage an OCA project.

  • Collaborations, especially between the writers of texts and composers, are the most successful, especially when the two of like mind. But that isn’t always the case, and falling out between these highly-strung creative professions can be serious – Gilbert and Sullivan being a good example. Of particular interest are rare collaborations between the equally talented, like Boito, himself a composer of two operas, and Verdi, for whom he provided the two final libretti; or Stephen Sondheim who was Bernstein’s librettist for West Side Story! Carla mentions Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, and that perhaps is the best kind of ‘collaboration’ – as she herself knows – of composer and performer; the best a composer can ever have is a devoted and persistent performer.

  • I agree wholeheartedly. Unrelated to my study at the OCA, I am currently collaborating with my sister (a writer) on a photography book exploring the viewpoints of people working within the Yorkshire Dales National Park (www.workingtheview.co.uk). I have been a photographer for many years now, but this has given me a new perspective on my work as I am now trying to capture other peoples viewpoints, rather than views that I like and usually photograph. It has forced me to plan my photography in a lot more detail than I have ever done before, to try to work out when a scene will look at it’s best and how to get the most out of a location. This work has also had the benefit of having lots of people who know the area, give me fantastic locations to photograph, and given me the motivation to get out more to take photographs.
    As a side benefit, I, like many artists I know, find self publicity very difficult. The advantage of a project like this, especially a joint one, is that this process becomes much easier as you are publicising the project, not yourself.

  • Alongside my individual art practice I work in collaboration with another artist (Michele Whiting, who also teaches with the OCA). Collaborative practice means we do not reserve our activities to a single medium or activity (painting,photography, writing etc.)but adopt a multi-disciplinary and very open approach, using whatever means necessary to create and show the work. For example we recently spent time as artists-in-residence in the USA where we were able to work individually, together and with others to produce a group of site-sensitive works incorporating found and made objects, drawing, text, performance, photography, film and sound. Had I worked alone the work might not have developed so quickly or so powerfully – and this is the value of collaboration; constant dialogue and the sharing of skills and ideas leading to more ambitious work. This can be done at any level; the more usual example of artists working in collaboration is when they plan a group show, each member offering ideas and skills to pull the whole project together successfully, and this is something that OCA students at all levels and from all disciplines might want to consider in the forums.

  • Interesting thoughts – thank you, Carla.
    My favourite singer/songwriter Tom Waits has been collaborating with his wife Kathleen Brennan since the mid 1980s with great success and to huge ‘critical acclaim’. I love his simple expression, “She washes, I dry.”
    There’s a nice explanation in this recent Guardian article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/oct/23/tom-waits-interview-bad-as-me):
    Brennan encouraged Waits to express the more dislocated sound he had wanted and which has given his career its adventurous longevity. “I think everyone has irreconcilable musical differences,” he says. “You know when you throw a party, you think people will show up and no one will like each other. It’s like that with music – parts of your musical psyche have never met other parts. You wonder if you should get them together. I used to think it was good to keep them apart. Now I kind of throw them in and see what happens.”
    The first collaboration with his wife, the critically acclaimed, triumphantly discordant, Swordfishtrombones, was Waits’s turning point and he has never stopped reinventing. To begin with, on a very basic level, Brennan opened him up to new influences, he suggests.
    “Her record collection and her library were both impressive compared to mine. When I met her most of my records were kind of stuck together with cheese and hair and oil and stuff. She had hers not only still in the cases but still in the little paper sleeve too. That in itself was something of a revelation.”
    Since then, they have shared pretty much everything, (“She washes, I dry,” is how Waits describes their songwriting technique).

  • Collaborations, especially between the writers of texts and composers, are the most successful, especially when the two of like mind. But that isn’t always the case, and falling out between these highly-strung creative professions can be serious .

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