Collaborations in Music Conference: Podcast
Recordings from the Collaborations in Music conference can be downloaded here. More papers will be listed as recordings become available. Alternatively, you can subscribe to the ECPS Podcast to receive these and other recordings automatically.
Subscribe to this feed- Janine Burke
- Jane Hammond and Helen Noonan
- Catherine Ingram
- Margaret Kartomi
- John Scannell
- Peter Murphy
- Peter Doyle
- Geoff King
- Becky Shepherd
- Stuart Grant
- Rebecca Do Rozario
- Helen O'Shea
- Graeme Smith
- Anthea Skinner
Being Geniuses Together: What Yoko Ono Taught John Lennon
Janine Burke
The dynamics of Ono and Lennon’s creative partnership have been obscured by the couple’s celebrity status, by public prejudice against Ono as well as by Lennon’s dominant and enduring reputation. This paper explores the music and performance works, enacted by the couple during their 14 year collaboration, that were often conceptually and politically generated by Ono. The confluence of Ono’s avant-guardism with Lennon’s popularism/popularity created an innovative aesthetics of political action that emphasised pacifism and feminism.
Creating the Chamber Opera Voicing Emily: Successful Collaborations in Music Theatre
Jane Hammond and Helen Noonan
Voicing Emily: The Life and Art of Emily Dickinson is a new Australian music theatre work unfolding the life and art of Emily Dickinson. It is scored for three sopranos, guitar, cello and piano, with text drawn from poems and letters by the American poet and mystic. Voicing Emily was premiered at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in November 2007. John Slavin, opera critic for Melbourne’s newspaper, The Age, described Voicing Emily as “a work of ravishing beauty and rare artistic distinction.” After attending a performance, Dickinson scholar Dr Joan Kirkby wrote her appreciation: “I can’t say enough wonderful things about Voicing Emily”. Dr. Kirkby includes detailed reference to the production in the forthcoming book The International Reception of Emily Dickinson. Voicing Emily was devised by performer and producer Helen Noonan (co-creator of the seminal Australian music theatre work Recital) and was brought into existence in collaboration with composer Jane Hammond, who was also the musical director for the project. Other composer/collaborators were involved in the musical setting of several individual poems (Greg Mason and Eddie Perfect) with Jane Hammond the musical overseer. The collaborative creative process for this work was multi-layered and not restricted to music and words – the video artist/set designer James Verdon, and director David Myles had crucial creative input as the project progressed. Throughout the process communication was amicable, business-like, respectful, warm and clear. Using examples from Voicing Emily, Helen Noonan and Jane Hammond examine aspects of an artistically successful collaboration.
Catherine Ingram
In contemporary China, creativity and collaboration involving Kam minority villagers, professional musicians (both Kam and non-Kam) and state officials has enabled Kam songs to be performed by Kam singers in increasingly varied staged performance contexts. These performances feature Kam songs derived from or based upon various traditional genres. They include small staged song performances in Kam tourist villages, local performances for visiting reporters and officials, performances in high-profile singing competitions and massed choral performances of 10,000 singers that are broadcast on national television. Such performances confer economic, cultural and symbolic capital upon the Kam villagers who participate, and also have financial and political benefits for the various state actors who are involved. They arise through the negotiation of traditional music, “traditional” and “contemporary” forms of artistic creativity, and a structure of collaboration that is directly framed by the political situation. This paper draws upon some twenty months’ musical ethnographic research in rural Kam areas (during 2004-2008) to examine the kinds of creative and collaborative possibilities accessible to Kam village singers in their staged song performances, and how these are negotiated. It concludes by illustrating how the creativity and collaboration that has become permissible in staged performances is indirectly providing important enrichment of village singing traditions.
The Collaborative War-time Composition of ‘Gending Sriwijaya’
Margaret Kartomi
Created by a team of pro-revolutionary artists in war-time South Sumatra in 1945, the song-dance ‘Gending Sriwijaya’ was first performed as an ironic joke at the expense of the Japanese invaders, who were led to believe that its text about the glorious Sriwijaya-Palembang kingdom (7th to 11th centuries CE) was in line with the Japanese ideology of ‘Asians for Asians’. Japanese-employed Palembang journalist and underground nationalist activist - Nungtjik - led the team, asking Dahlan Mahibat to compose the music, Ibu Delima to choreograph the dance, and film/theatre singer/actor Hadji Gung to present its first performance at a function on 4 August 1945, following some pro-Japanese speeches by leaders of the Japanese puppet organisation, the All-Sumatra Advisory Council. Politically, the creative partnership worked because it could surreptitiously promote the Indonesian revolutionary struggle while appearing to work for the enemy. Artistically, the team members built on each others’ cues. The lyricist chose to extol the glories of Sriwijaya to inspire confidence in the revolutionary struggle; the composer matched it with a melody that was playable on the gamelan of the former Palembang sultanate (1690-1873) and the rural gongchime ensembles; the choreographer’s version of the rural female tanggai (long finger-nail) dance with mudra-style movements suggested the Sriwijaya period; and the item’s first singer chose to croon the song with a popular Malay-style band,which in turn led to tanjidor, pop, rock, dangdut and other bands all over Indonesia developing their arrangements of the song.
When Presupposition Impedes on Praxis: Lessons Learned from James Brown
John Scannell
James Brown’s artistic legacy commands a level of respect reserved for few other popular music artists. Yet his compositional approach was often just as peculiar as it was prescient, and as this paper argues, the inherent radicality of Brown’s funk style is testament to the creative unorthodoxy fostered by the “untrained” musician. Such musical “naivety”, whilst a boon to creative experimentation, would stand in stark contrast to the more orthodox schooling of Brown’s band-leaders, such as Nat Jones, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis and Fred Wesley, all of whom were required to translate the boss’ esoteric grunts and groans into musical notation, and all of whom were not only under-appreciated by Brown, but often uncredited for their work. This paper will explore some of the tensions that arose between Brown and his musical collaborators over these relative approaches to compositional praxis. In particular I will focus on how Brown’s relative lack of technical ability was anathema to his “trained” collaborators, all of whom despised their boss’ apparent musical “illiteracy”, yet applauded his capacity for promoting the necessary synthesis of the disparate and often incongruous musical ideas that were so vital to the development of one of the most groundbreaking bodies of work in popular music history.
‘I and I’: Collaboration and the Double Act of Musical Creation
Peter Murphy
Collaboration is essential to all music creation. This is true, paradoxically, even of acts of solo creation. This is so because creation of all kinds is propelled by the phenomenon of doubling. Creation is not singular, nor is it is multiple, but rather it is binary. It is a function of twinning, pairing, and doubling. This is evident in creative personalities. The composer, orchestrator and producer—each one is an “I”, an ego. The Romantic theory of creation rested on the ego alone. Romantic creation was the effect of lonely geniuses, but in truth, creation is an effect of lonely geniuses together. The interaction of “I” and “I” adds a soulful dimension to the work of the ego. It guards against the egomania and ego anxiety that otherwise destroys creative work. The strange looping that occurs between two egos, “I” and “I”, is a precondition of effective creativity. Sometimes the strange looping between “I” and “I” occurs within a single self. The music of Bob Dylan is a case in point. But equally important are the duos that create together. Twentieth-century music is inconceivable without the partnerships of Jagger and Richards, Plant and Page, Stravinsky and Balanchine, Cage and Cunningham, Warwick and David, Sinatra and Riddle, Reed and Cale, and Davis and Evans. The strange looping that occurs between two egos, “I” and “I”, is a precondition of the possibility of creativity because all creation is double. The creative mind mirrors the structure of creation…
Peter Doyle
It is a commonplace of popular music studies that records are manufactured things, that the sonic ‘production’ itself is worthy of attention, that producers matter, and that in the larger history of popular music recording, producers not infrequently matter more than artists. But despite that, the stories of producers, managers, entrepreneurs, engineers (often overlapping categories in the pre-rock age) remain largely untold. Over the past couple of decades many quality biographies of musicians — most typically ‘unsung heroes’ from outside the pop mainstream — have appeared, and so too various scholarly and popular histories of fringe scenes and subcultures. Yet such hugely important figures as Jack Kapp, Ralph Peer, Milt Gabler, John Hammond – each of whom had decisive influence on the emergence of twentieth century popular music ‘genres’, and each of whom worked in both the mainstream and on its hipper fringes – remain little known and written about. In this paper I wish to identify some of the narrative default settings which have been used to characterise the relationship between the creative artist and his/her first point of contact with ‘the business’ – be it producer, engineer, manager, agent etc. Descriptions of the artist-producer relationship, I will argue, typically invoke a set of deep and enduring narrative tropes — mythic, archetypal, folkloric, literary and pulp – and these almost unfailingly operate to the detriment of the producer. One near constant has been the valorisation of the artist as romantic, often tragic, indeed, as sacrificial figure, and with it a concomitant tendency to typify the producer/mentor/facilitator/’suit’ figure as venal, mendacious exploiter, and as unrepentant corrupter of artistic purity. The pop biopic, itself closely aligned to such forms as the boxing film, has further served to lock in those settings. Other representational strands co-exist with these: with the coming in the 1950s of what Keir Keightley has called ‘record consciousness’, for example, the producer was cast, again largely by default, in the role of the scientist or technician (buttoned-up and colourless, in horn-rimmed glasses, white dust coat), which as corollary, cast the studio as a kind of laboratory (maybe like the ones in the newsreels, where they handle microbes, or radioactive isotopes, or make atom bombs, or experiment on human brains). Which in turn simultaneously opened the door to ‘producer as auteur’ as it did to the trope of producer as mad-scientist, deranged megalomaniac.
When the music’s over: Collaboration gone wrong
Geoff King
In those genres of popular music where the ‘group’ has a central role, collaboration is, of course, at the heart of the group process. This is something difficult to maintain in a constructive manner when many forces are interacting: the personal, the creative and the industrial. So, what happens when the relationships within such collaborative units go wrong? What is the outcome for the individual musicians and the remaining members? Using the three fields (the personal, the creative, the industrial) this paper will examine the factors that led to the end of some successful collaborations drawing on interviews with a number of Melbourne musicians.
Geoff King is a lecturer in the school of applied communication at RMIT university. He is currently researching a radio/oral history project on Melbourne ‘roots’ music and its crossovers. Amongst other activities, he is chair of the board of community radio station 3RRR FM.
Collaboratively Crafting the Recorded Soundscape
Becky Shepherd
The collaboration between the artist of popular music and the studio recordist is a relationship that is integral to the development of recorded sound as artistry, however there are different degrees within which this collaboration operates. The original role of the studio producer as A&R man for example, involved the collaboration between a recording artist and a producer that was predominately based on administration, finances and logistics. Alternately, the producer as autonomous orchestrator involves the governance of the producer over the entire recording process, from the early stages of pre-production and arrangement, to the tracking and mixing process. Finally there is the role of the producer as collaborator, or techno-musical advisor. In this context the producer works closely alongside the recording artist throughout the production process as a means of realising an appropriate recorded sonic aesthetic. In this paper I will examine the last of these examples and highlight how the creative collaboration between the recording artist and the studio producer is the most common mode of operation for the production of contemporary rock music, despite such collaborations often remaining unacknowledged in album linear notes and album promotions . I will focus on two contemporary examples of this collaborative relationship, and examine the extent to which the production process is conceptualised as recorded sound by the artists/performer, but is realised via the techno-musical crafting of the song, the arrangement and the track, by the producer in the recording studio. I argue therefore that the collaborative role between the studio producer and the artist/performer, works like a conduit of ideas, whereby the producer facilitates the sonic vision of the recording artist, via his/her techno-musicality within the recording studio environment. I will examine the successfully collaborative relationship between producer Steve Albini, and American indie artists Low. I will demonstrate how Albini’s preference for live tracking and distant microphone techniques directly complements, captures and crafts the sonic aesthetic of close harmonies, cyclical melodic lines, and the raw intimacy of the sound of the ‘room’ in Low’s first LP, Things We Lost In The Fire (2001). Secondly, I will briefly demonstrate how Canadian producer Peter Moore , realised a similar, intimate, lo-fi live ambience to the recording of American country/folk rock artists The Cowboy Junkies second LP The Trinity Session (1988). I will argue that both these albums and the collaborative role of the studio producer and the recording artist, continues to influence the live, intimate lo-fi recording techniques that characterise the recorded sound of successful contemporary alternative country artists such as Gillian Welch, and My Morning Jacket. These types of collaborations demonstrate two examples of the valorisation of the studio producer as a facilitator of the recording process, and more importantly as an orchestator of an artists’ recorded sonic aesthetic.
Becky Shepherd is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. She has just completed her PhD, which focused on retrospective rock and analog sound production. Her main areas of research interest include studio production, retrospectivity in contemporary popular music, and issues of authenticity and nostalgia and the canon of popular music.
Stuart Grant
In funk, it’s called being in the groove, in jazz it’s in the pocket. When musicians play together, listen together in attentive grace, particularly in improvisation, they are moved by an invisible flow of mutually experienced shaped silence; an intercorporeal contoured time-flow to which they belong, and to which they must submit in order to make a meaningful contribution to the music. The individual audible musical events struck by the musicians emerge as markers or symptoms pointing to and communicating the existence of the flow, making it available to the listener to experience in their own body, but those specific events are by no means necessary to the flow for its existence. The singular musical events: the notes, the phrases, the beats, the tones, the keys, the melodies, are all arbitrary attestations bearing witness to and shaping the flow, but an infinite number of other events might be played to reinforce, vary, state and shape the flow in an infinite number of ways without disturbing the musicians’ and the listeners’ attentive bodily submission to the flow. The flow is the essence of music: the relational structure which gives the individual notes of a melody its coherence as a melody, the propulsion which moves bodies, the elaborate contour of the deep dramatic and expressive structure of the symphony. And the flow is silent. The silent essence at the core of music. Music is shaped silence. In its sharedness, through the flow, it bears witness to the birth of shared time. The mutual embodied experience of pure diachrony. The flow.
Wrocking Collaboration: Wizard Rock and the Work of J.K. Rowling
Rebecca Do Rozario
Harry Potter is the series that launched a thousand wizard rock bands. This may be a slight exaggeration, but no other series of books has ever resulted in a genre of music. Wizard rock bands produce music, including rock, punk and folk, based on storylines and characters from the Harry Potter novels. Most of the bands have names drawn from the novels, including Harry & the Potters, The Remus Lupin and The Moaning Myrtles. Harry & the Potters on their website explain how wizard rock not only celebrates fandom and engages metafictionally with the narratives, but challenges the music industry.
Drawing particularly on Henry Jenkins’ fan cultures work and the latest thinking on new media, the paper will examine collaborations between wizard rock bands and the Harry Potter fan community, the evolution of wizard rock from folk into an ‘outer-industry’ phenomenon embracing new media, and the unusual relationship between the bands and J.K. Rowling’s original series, with its implications for creative ownership.
Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario teaches fairy tale, children’s and fantasy literature at Monash University. She has published on topics including fairy tale, Harry Potter, musical theatre and children's literature.
Sean O Riada and Ceoltoiri Chualann: The collaboration that changed the sound of Irish music
Helen O'Shea
In 1960, modernist Irish composer Sean O Riada gathered together a group of largely traditional musicians and singers, initially to provide music for a play. It was a turning point for the composer, for the musicians and for Irish traditional music. Contrary to the convention of unison playing, O Riada’s arrangements of Irish tunes had the musicians performing solo or in varying combinations, sometimes using harmonies. Soon the ensemble, Ceoltoiri Chualann, developed a repertoire for concerts, radio performances and recordings that were immensely popular among Irish art-music audiences. Within three years, members of the group had formed The Chieftains, which became the most popular and enduring of Irish music performance groups and which are still recording and touring the world. O Riada, on the other hand, retreated from Dublin and from the art-music world to immerse himself in rural life and traditional music. This paper explores the collaboration between these musicians from the art-music and traditional-music worlds and their mutual influence, arguing that the sound of Irish traditional music changed from this point, with a new performance practice and a new aesthetic, and illustrating the ways in which the musicians’ collaboration changed from musical director and guest performers to an intensely innovative creativity.
Helen O’Shea is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. She is the author of a critical study of Irish music, The Making of Irish Traditional Music (Cork University Press, 2008).
Singers and Songwriters in Australian Country Music
Graeme Smith
According to sociologist Howard Becker music is best seen as the result of “what of a lot of people have done jointly”. Yet at the same time, the figure of the autonomous singer-songwriter is seen as an ideal creative agent in popular music. It has been noted that Country music and its antecedent genres, through such figures as Jimmie Rodgers, established many of the features of the performance role of the singer-songwriter as the authentic, autobiographically informed projection of self-in-music. At the same time, in country music in particular, collaborative authorship, (“co-writes”) and non-performing songwriters are still prominent in the genre, in comparison with other popular music genres. In Australian country music performers frequently negotiate relationships between singer songwriter, while creating the performance persona projected in the song. These collaborations may sometimes be disguised or accommodated against an ideal of ideal authorship, but are always treated as potentially relevant to the authenticity of utterance of the song. This paper will examine a number of relationships between country performers, producer and songwriters, including Lee Kernaghan, Garth Porter, Shane Nicholson, Kasey Chambers and Troy Cassar Daley to establish a typology of collaboration in the genre. It will be argued that collaboration and its accommodation to creative ideals of creativity is a central feature of the construction of the performing subject within this genre.
Ian Dury and the Kilburns – Disgracefully Disabled
Anthea Skinner
When British Punk Rocker Ian Dury set out to look for members for his first band, Kilburn and the High Roads, his main criteria was not musical, it was physical. He wanted musicians that looked right. He wanted freaks. Ian Dury contracted polio at age seven, the illness left him with a serious limp and a withered arm. He soon learnt that his unusual appearance afforded him an automatic outsider status, he became used to people looking at him with a mixture of fascination, pity and fear. Drawing on the culture of 19th century freak shows, Dury saw that he had the perfect image for the Punk Rock scene. Not all of the members of the Kilburns were disabled, but most looked as if they might be. Although it began as a gimmick, Dury’s collaboration with people with disabilities had a profound effect on his musical style and more broadly on the disability community of Britain. This fascination and collaboration continued after Drury left the High Roads. It culminated in the release of Spasticus Autisticus, his homage to the International Year of Disabled Persons in 1981. The controversial hit was rejected by the IYDP and banned by most radio stations but became an underground hit in the disability community. The album sums up his message to the able bodied: “Hallo to you out there in normal land. We too are determined to be free.”
Anthea Skinner is currently working at The Australian Children’s Choir while she takes a break from studying musicology at Monash University. Her main fields of interest include percussion organology, military music and disability culture. In 2005 Anthea co-created and appeared in a documentaryabout gay and lesbian Mormons called A Lost Tribe. This film was aired on ABC TV’s Compass and screened nationally in the USA and Israel. Anthea also plays orchestral percussion and is an active member of Melbourne’s disability community.