I would like ask the operatives if they have formulated any ideas about the process of collaborative composing? Since the days of Beethoven, the composers have been seen as torch bearers of heroic individualism. It would be quite something if this could be made to work as a truly collaborative effort.
I dont't think it would be very good if we end up in a situation where everyone is parallelly composing his/hers own thing in the loneliness of his/hers study. That would probably leave the operatives two options:
1. Have Markus integrate the best bits of the indivual scores into a hopefully coherent whole. (This doesn't sound very promising -- think about the chances of combining the best part's of Le Sacre du Printemps and L'Apre-midi d'un Faune into something coherrent ;-)
2. Select the best individual score and have Markus polish it up, perhaps with the help of comments and suggestions from other members.
I think option number two would probably produce a better score, but at the cost of collaborativeness.
I don't have an all-encompassing solution to this question, but I'd like to throw in some ideas. Collaboration on composing may be very challenging, but I think it is much easier to collaborate on things that come before composing. For instance text analysis: What are the moods and emotions in the acts and scenes? What kind of persons the characters are? What are their relations? Aspirations? Hidden motives and agendum? These are all things that you can and you should weave into the music!
Let's take Gabriel opening speech for the angels' emergency meeting as an example. You could choose to portray him as a slightly pompous person. You could spell out "CEA" into "Chief Executive Angel", and have him sing it as a pompous fanfare.
Or you could adopt a very different approach: You could have him sing "As your CEA" in a matter-of-fact -like manner, with slight emphasis on "CEA". At this point you could have him pause and look sternly around to table -- and then go on: "I've called this etc..." This pause would convey to other angels that "I'm still the boss around here -- in case you have forgotten." There could perhaps exist a rivalry between Gabriel and the more senior other angles. This would create interpersonal tensions that you could weave into the music and also utilize later on.
Some toughts about the order of composing. Is the begining on the story really the best place to start the composing? How about finding the scenes that are really at the core of this work? Composing them first would give the rest of the composing a more or less fixed style, tone, sound and feel to aim at. It would help make this into a coherent and integrated whole, because everything else should musically compatible with these key scenes.
The music of a good opera has a personal, recognizable voice of its' own. (For instance, the opera "Tosca" has a voice that is distinctly different from that of "La Boheme", even though they are by same composer) In a collaborative work, the voice cannot be personal to the composer, but it could be personal to the work.
Maybe these key scenes should be developed into orchestrated scores before continuing to other scenes -- to really fix the personal voice of this work. It would be easier to have a rich collaboration and sketching of multitude of ideas in such a limited part of the score. After that, a more managed approach would probably be needed to ensure coherrent whole.
Maybe this could play out something like this:
1. Operatives select one or two key scenes.
2. Collaborative text analysis for the key scenes.
3. General sketching and commenting of ideas for motives and also for ways to support and enhance the text musically (the collaborative process should probabaly be very much centered around the text)
4. Call for shots for entire key scenes.
5. Based on the results of 1-4, Markus creates the final, orchestrated scores for the key scenes.
For other scenes, there could perhaps be some text analysis, then proceeding to steps four and five. Less sketching at this point, because we should already know where we the thing is heading to.
Jump to comment form
Comments
Great Antti! Sounds very promising!
Markus