a friendly association or agreement OR to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort

I love collaboration. It's one of my favorite things about inhabiting a creative profession.

Some composers stay within their own little sandbox and become, essentially, greedy about their art. People commission the "next work by So-And-So" rather than, say, the composer writing something specifically for them.

This, I think, is backwards and inherently wrong. It is not couched in the humility of collaboration (which you know my thoughts on) and seems like brow-beating to me. I also subscribe heavily to the "build communities, not empires" notion of being an artist so, clearly, that other way doesn't appeal to me at all.

Collaboration is getting together with others who share your ideals, existing in that ferment for a while and then taking a bit of what this person likes/dislikes and moving that proverbial ball down the field a little further.

Case in point: the new work I'm writing for The Esoterics. The two amazing conspirators I'm working with for this piece are the conductor of the choir, Eric Banks, and an incredible visual artist named Gregory Euclide.

Eric tasked myself and a few other composers to write a choral piece with no words which must be based on a piece of visual art. He is that rare conductor who comes up with a big idea and then just runs with it fearlessly. One look at this ensemble's stable of recordings and it becomes starkly evident that this is something different and amazing which exists outside the tradition of choral music without seeming alien and irrelevant.

I absolutely love this. I love love love it.

The artist I immediately went for was Gregory Euclide. I've known his work for about 5 years now and have admired from afar his ability to paint these incredible "neo-landscapes" (I'm hesitant to use that clumsy, awful term but I have to cast his art in terms of the traditions that come before him) and I was lucky that he agreed to work with me on this project.

That being said, it's obviously tricky when you enter into some sort of collaborative effort with someone else. How are we going to work together? What are everybody's expectations at the outset of the project? Things like that. I imagine that, for a visual artist like Greg, this process might feel like giving some of your favorite toys for other kids to play with. You always hope they get the same amount of care they got from their owner but you never really knew for sure.

Side note: I had a couple of favorite He-Man toys that I was always a bit more greedy with than I probably should have been. But, c'mon, we're not just talking about any old action figures here...this is Thunder Punch He-Man, you guys. You could load his backpack up with little caps and make them explode and spew little plumes of smoke around the room (my mother--for the obvious reasons--only bought me and my brother one pack of those things).

But I digress.

With Greg's work it's become about how I can translate his medium into mine. How does the visual become the aural? Do you just take his gestures and put them down onto the staves and see what happens? Do you take the title of the work and try to make something programmatic about it? Or do you just write the piece of music and then say it's inspired by the art?

With any piece of music you often stare at that blank space where all that stuff is going to go and think, "Okay. Now what?" With choral music you have the added benefit of the text creating some sort of narrative thing that, like a faint road map, you can grasp onto from the very beginning.

But Banks, with his trademark innovation, took that completely out of the equation. So...really...now what?

This is where the collaborative part of the story comes into play. This is where I drive out to Greg's place and talk and talk and talk with him about his art and how it comes to him and, literally, what it's about. This is where the piece actually starts to focus itself.

Now I'm not going to try and articulate all of the things we talked about (they mostly exist in my mind as emotive gestures and concepts that are too deep into too many things for me to lend any sort of words to here anyway) but what I came away with from our three hours together was "the evocation of memory." These aren't specific memories per se but, rather, just the physical experience of remembering something. Déjà vu is way too specific for me to relate this to but it's probably as close as we're going to get. However, one look at his pieces and you know exactly what I'm talking about. Here:

You get the feeling that you're looking at something that you've seen before even though there is very little which is specific about that piece.

So how to translate this into my medium? I'll probably write more about that as the piece gets closer to done because working on it is going to be a bit arduous for me. I've hit on a very specific concept that's going to carry me through so I feel less out of the proverbial deep end and instead like I'm on some sort of adventure.

For now I think I'll have a listen to the amazing album Jónsi & Alex put out last year, Riceboy Sleeps. It turns out that Greg is a huge Sigur Rós fan so it seems an appropriate way to close out this blog entry.