collaboration and

the creative process

A). Creative Networks

LEVEL ONE: CLOSE CONTACTS

This level of your creative network includes close friends and family members who can potentially help you with your project. These individuals, being particularly close with you, will be the most likely to agree to creative collaboration. At the same time, when working with close friends you often have the advantage of sharing with them many artistic sensibilities and preferences. This is a big help since it will ensure that your project has a consistent tone, and that the aesthetics of your contributions don't end up clashing with those of your collaborator. Close contacts are also willing to sacrifice more for you and your project; after all they're your closest friends! Therefore, scheduling issues and other logistical concerns are usually much simpler to resolve with close contacts than other collaborators. Finally, it's simply a blast to spend time with folks on the first level of your creative network. These are people you spend your free time with, and working with them will ensure that the time spent developing their contributions to the performance is invigorating and fun.

That all being said, sometimes it can be a chore to get close contacts to take your project seriously. While having fun and maintaining a casual, non-project relationship with these contacts is important, it can be a real problem if level one collaborators don't understand what you expect of them as collaborators, not just as friends. In my experience, level one contacts are more likely to blow deadlines for completed work and to derail production meetings with sidebars or other interruptions. Luckily, this problem has a simple fix. When you ask a close contact to help you with your project, just take a moment to explain to them how important it is to you, and what you expect of them should they agree to contribute. You are, after all, asking for their help on something that is necessary in order for you to graduate! For these contacts, use your best judgement. You likely already know which of your close contacts are people you want to collaborate with on your recital, and how much you can trust them to be responsible.

In any case, level one of your creative network is surely the first place to look for collaborators. I ended up working with some of my best friends on my recital, from many of the composers, to the visual artist, to a number of the musicians. Asking them for help is as simple as having a conversation; for level one contacts there is no need to send a formal message about you and your project to get them on board. Just make sure that when you talk you are clear about what you want from them, and how they can best support your projects success.

LEVEL TWO: AUXILIARY CONTACTS

This level of your creative network includes acquaintances and friends of friends who can help you with your project. These individuals don't necessarily know you personally, and if they do they are usually people you've never hung out with outside of class or work. Reflecting this reality, level two contacts are significantly less likely to collaborate with you on your project than level one contacts. At the same time, scheduling issues and other logistical concerns are much more likely to hamper potential collaborations with level two contacts. When a scheduling conflict came up with a level one contact scheduled to play drums in my recital, he immediately acted to ensure he could fulfill his commitment by shifting around his work schedule. However when a similar conflict arose with a level two contact scheduled to play in the recital I was promptly notified that they couldn't fulfill their commitment after all, and I had to scramble to find a replacement.

Level two contacts often end up having a more formal relationship with you and your recital. They are significantly more likely to view the collaboration as something more like a job than a project shared between friends, and in keeping with this fact are significantly more likely to expect payment for their services. However, it is also true that this more formal relationship often ensures that they take their responsibilities as a collaborator more seriously than a close friend of yours might. Level two contacts are not, after all, agreeing to collaborate with you because they like you, or because they don't want to hurt your feelings. If they agree, it's because they want to.

Level two contacts are particularly useful as collaborators on aspects of your project that are totally outside of your wheelhouse. Since many of your closest friends are likely people who share your field of study or your primary interests, level two contacts can be used to broaden the scope of your search. Finding set designers and string players interested in collaborating on my recital, for example, required significant effort and patience. It involved asking level one contacts if they had recommendations and diligently reaching out to the individuals they suggested, cold emailing countless string players I had once played with in orchestra, and the utilization of university resources such as a web-service which matched instrumentalists with potential performance opportunities.

LEVEL THREE: INSTITUTIONAL CONTACTS

This level of your creative network includes collaborators that neither you nor your close contacts know personally. In fact, level three contacts are only accessible through institutional programs or resources, which often require a formal application, or through explicit contractual agreements and payment to businesses or individuals. Level three contacts are contractually the most reliable collaborators, although the lack of personal relationship between you and such contacts can make communication difficult, or even collaboration impossible. This is because their services are locked behind institutional or monetary barriers, which can typically only be overcome with a successful application or formal payment for services rendered. They will never help you just because you asked, but if you can make a case for their support, or if you have the money to pay them, they will do their job well and on time.

Level three contacts are especially helpful for complicated technical or logistical concerns. For example, after much planning, I knew that I wanted my recital to incorporate two streams of simultaneously projected visuals; one representing God and the other Man. And I also knew that I wanted these two streams to be projected onto two different surfaces; a giant projection screen for the God visuals and two roughly 4x7 box like constructions for the Man visuals. I also knew, however, that this plan would require experienced production staff to aid me in a process known as projection mapping, wherein projected visuals are mapped to the specific area of some chosen surface. And moreover, I knew that my plans for a theatrical recital depended on similarly trained individuals to help me with dynamic lighting and live sound, and that my desires to see the whole thing recorded would be impossible without a trained video team.

Luckily, the University of Michigan has a video studio in its Duderstadt Center which employees a team of professional staff to help students with such concerns, so long as they apply for use of the studio and are accepted. Securing the support of the staff at the Duderstadt Video Studio therefore required a formal application, including a written proposal and an in-person interview. My ability to collaborate with the staff employed at the studio was therefore characteristic of level three contacts, insofar as it required a formal application and did not rely upon personal contacts of any kind.

Other level three contacts can include collaborators that are put into contact with you through institutional programs. SMTD has a program called Colab run by the Composition Department, wherein student composers are matched with chamber groups and tasked with writing them a piece. Knowing that I was one musical commission short of what I wanted for my recital, I applied to this program with the explicit purpose of utilizing the commissioned piece for my recital. The composer who was ultimately assigned to work with me on my project was another example of a level three contact.

Using University programs and resources like this to further your project's success is perfectly fine, and will open up many possibilities that would be closed otherwise. However, it is crucial to be upfront and honest about your intentions when applying to them, including your full plans for the recital and how the institutional contact fits within them. This is both to ensure that the contact in question can actually help you, and that they know what is expected of them from the beginning.

I, for example, personally reached out to the head of the Colab program, Professor Chambers, to ensure that any composer paired with my group understood and was willing to participate in the greater context of my recital. Specifically, I wanted to ensure that the assigned composer would be willing to write something programmatic for the opening of my recital, and would be open to working within the confines of my already determined thematic outline. This sort of honesty when utilizing institutional contacts is vitally important, especially since you cannot rely on a personal relationship to resolve conflicts should they arise.

These three levels of contacts in your creative network will be the collaborative force that propels your recital out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary. Knowing when to utilize contacts on each level of your network will ensure that you utilize every resource available to you during the production process. With your creative network in mind, you can determine which of your collaborative ideas are just a conversation away from being realized, which may require more outreach and patience, and which may require an application or payment. (It is important to note that it is ALWAYS best to pay your collaborators if you can, whether they are level one, two, or three contacts. We will discuss this more in the next section, but know that if you can you should ALWAYS be paying artists for their expertise and support.)

B). Case Study: My Creative Process

Now, I think it would be helpful to discuss how interdisciplinary collaboration can work in practice. When collaborating with other artists, there are so many different bumps on the road to the completion of your project that it is difficult to summarize how best to be ready for everything that might happen. With this in mind, I think it would be most helpful for me to describe how the process went for me, what issues arose, how I dealt with them, and what I learned from it all. Hopefully, this exercise will help you avoid some the mistakes I made, but even more importantly, show how simple and fun interdisciplinary collaboration on a senior recital can really be. I will be separating this section into steps, not necessarily in full chronological order, but instead for clarity and to approximate the order in which I searched for and secured collaborators from my creative network.

STEP ONE: COMPOSERS

When I first started thinking about my senior recital, I knew that I wanted to feature original compositions commissioned specifically for the project. At the same time, I knew that I wanted the compositions to be programmatic, and therefore that I had to find composers who were on board with my narrative/thematic concepts. Luckily, I am close friends with a few composers, and was able to secure the first two composers for my project without much difficulty.

Being level one contacts, these two individuals were very excited to help, and both ended up contributing significantly more to the production process than just writing one piece. One of them, for example, ended up writing multiple interludes for solo bassoon and drone in-between each of the larger pieces. The idea, which they helped develop, was that each interlude would be modeled as a prayer, and that each of these prayers would be paired with a text to be read aloud during the performance.

The next two composers I found to help with my project were housemates with one of these level one contacts. I was friendly with both of them, and knew them from occasional visits to the house where they all lived. Getting them on board required a little more convincing than the first two composers, but since they were housemates of a close friend, it was mostly handled informally and in-person. Working with these contacts required significantly more trust and faith on my part, since I was generally working with them on the recommendation of a close friend. One of these contacts, for example, ended up missing numerous deadlines for the completion of their piece, and tried to back out of the collaboration all together around two months before the scheduled performance date. They were swamped with work, and my project wasn't their main priority, which is characteristic of one of the main downsides of collaborating with level two contacts. After numerous conversations through text and in-person, I convinced them to finish the piece (which ended up being amazing, and well worth the wait.)

My biggest takeaway from this experience is to really make sure your collaborators know what they are committing too before they agree to help. This is true for every contact in your creative network. Being clear and honest about the magnitude of the collaboration and any due dates as early as possible will ensure that things go as smoothly as possible. At the same time, continually checking in with your collaborators to see how they are progressing with their side of the project is a good way to keep tabs on whether or not they are going to meet any agreed upon deadlines. It is important to be understanding and flexible, especially when you're collaborating with students. After all, you're all still learning, and nobody is perfect. Just make sure to be firm when you need to be; if someone has blown six deadlines it might be time to have a conversation with them about how it is affecting your recital, and therefore, your graduation.

The last composer I recruited to help with my project was paired with me as a part of the Colab program at SMTD described in section A of this page. Although I did not know him personally, my application to the program did all the heavy lifting in order to connect us, and the collaboration went very well. The composer ended up being young, a freshman, and so the collaboration required a bit more attention than the others (all with older and more experienced musicians.) Small things, like barring issues and typos in the score, made it necessary to meet with him multiple times to ensure the piece was playable. This sort of thing doesn't only happen with young collaborators though; it is important to remember that even the most veteran artists make mistakes. When collaborating with students, especially for your senior recital, be prepared to take a bit more responsibility over the quality of their contribution that you might in a more professional environment. This isn't to say you should write their piece for them, or be needlessly critical (they are helping you out after all!) Instead, just know that you may need to be ready for multiple rounds of edits, and that they may make mistakes that will impede your planned production schedule.

This isn't a huge problem if you start the collaborative process as soon as possible! I reached out to and secured all of my composers in September of 2019, for a recital not scheduled until April of 2020. Since I had blocked out such a long time for my composers to write and for me to rehearse, minor setbacks like blown deadlines and irregular barrings didn't derail the projects progress. Since my recital was programmatic and I wanted my composers to understand how their pieces fit into the overall structure of the project, and also to streamline communication about deadlines and other logistical matters, I used a facebook messenger group chat to communicate with my composers simultaneously. I definitely recommend using something like this, if only to make sure that all of your composers are on the same page about their deadlines and the project as a whole.

Overall, when working with student composers; secure their help early and be understanding if they make mistakes or blow deadlines. But always make sure they know what you expect of them, and that they have a clear understanding of the production schedule for the project as a whole. Use a group chat of some sort to communicate with them simultaneously about due dates and whatever else you need them to know. At the end of the day, trust their process and ideas as much as you can. This is a collaboration, and it will end up being its best if you don't try to micro-manage them when it isn't necessary.

STEP TWO: MUSICIANS

Finding all of the required musicians to play the music commissioned for my recital ended up being a huge task. In all, I ended up needing around 15 musicians to have every part covered. I ended up relying heavily on level one contacts, if not to play themselves in the recital, then to recommend level two contacts for me to reach out to.

This process was particularly taxing, especially finding the string players (who needed to be willing to play on pretty much every piece in the recital.) In my experience, asking musicians to play on your recital is actually harder to coordinate than composers to write you pieces for it. Composers can usually complete their side of the collaboration without much logistical planning on your part; the best case scenario is that you simply get them on board, give them a deadline, and wait for them to finish. Finding and collaborating with musicians involves quite a bit more management on your part. I actually tried to find willing musicians first, and then give a list of possible instrumentation to my composers to choose from in an attempt to streamline this whole process. This didn't end up working for my project, but I would definitely recommend that you at least attempt this route. At worst it doesn't work, but at best you can lock down musicians early in the production process and cut down on a bunch of unnecessary stress.

The steps of finding and collaborating with musicians on your project are as follows. First, you need to get them to agree to perform in your recital, and make sure that they can commit to perform on your scheduled recital date. This step includes informing the potential musicians of any specific quirks or features of your project in particular. For my project, this meant making sure that all of my musicians knew that the performance would be narrative, that it would feature some improvisatory musical elements, and that we would be playing with projected visual elements. This step is all about outreach and patience; eventually if you ask enough people, you'll find the people you need.

Next, you need to distribute the necessary parts, and work with the musicians on each piece to coordinate a rehearsal schedule. I ended up using facebook messenger and the website When2Meet to coordinate my rehearsals. You will need to not only ensure all of your musicians are free, but also that you can reserve a rehearsal location in your music building or somewhere else. SMTD has an online reservation form that you can fill out to ensure you have a place to rehearse in advance of any scheduled meeting times, which was super helpful for my project. One of my pieces had 15 players, and it ended up being almost impossible to coordinate rehearsals for. Everyone involved was extraordinarily busy, so finding a time when they could all meet was a real headache. In cases like this, you need to be willing to do sectional rehearsals or work with your unavailable players to find another solution. I ended up filming my rehearsals and sharing them with the absent players, so that they could catch up to what they had missed if they couldn't make it.

Finally, you need to actually meet and begin the process of rehearsing the music. This part is where you actually get to start PLAYING, and can stop worrying about logistics for a minute. If you're reading this, you likely know how to rehearse for a performance like this (you're a music student after all!) One thing to remember; just because this is your recital does not mean you should be a dictator in your rehearsals. Remember that your musicians are helping you fulfill your goals, and that they want the same thing you do, namely, for the music to sound as beautiful as possible. Once you are in the rehearsal phase of the production process, sit back and have fun. Worry about learning your own part, and let your musicians do what they do best.

STEP THREE: INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATIONS

As described previously, I knew that I wanted projected visuals to be a major part of my recital. I also knew that, in keeping with my desire for the performance to be structured more like a theatre piece than a traditional recital, that I wanted it to include set design elements and subtle costuming. If you go to music school, you probably know composers, and you certainly know musicians. But it's likely you don't have a personal relationship with experienced visual artists, or with set designers or costume designers. If you want to incorporate these elements into your performance, it might be absolutely necessary to primarily rely on level two and three contacts. I was lucky enough to have a level one contact who was interested in producing the projections for my recital, and another level one contact who, in tandem with a level two contact, worked with me on set and costume design. If you don't have people like this in your life though, don't worry! I know students who have decided to use grant funding to pay professional visual artists or other level three contacts, and students who have gotten help from professors on finding collaborative dancers. Finding collaborators of any type is possible; just know your creative network and use it.

As soon as your project becomes interdisciplinary, and you decide to collaborate with artists who do something entirely different from what you do, it becomes significantly more important that you trust them and their process. I had no experience with how to design and construct a set for a theatre piece, but I was working with people who did. So when they told me how much they thought something would cost, or what they thought would work best for some specific fixture of the design, I had to trust them. So before you work with collaborators like this, make sure you are ready to defer to their expertise when necessary.

That being said, your vision is important, and the best way to communicate that vision with your visual artists is to meet frequently and talk it all over. I ended up communicating with my visual artists, my visual artist and my set/costume designers, more than any other of my collaborators. Remember that what the audience sees during your performance will almost certainly stay with them longer than what they hear. If you are making your recital interdisciplinary, you want to make sure that the non-musical elements don't feel secondary, or shoehorned in at the last second, but instead like integral parts of a cohesive whole. My visual artist was living in California, so I had to talk with him over the phone (with the time difference in mind); we ended up doing so about once a week for almost 6 months straight. My meetings with my set/costume designers were similarly frequent, although they started much later, in around February.

One of the best ways to collaborate with artists outside of your discipline is by simply having them send you drafts of their work as they complete it. This way, you can ensure that what they are working on is striking the tone that you want, and that it is complementary to the other aspects of the performance (like the musical elements.) I ended up having my interdisciplinary collaborators send me video clips, drawings, and other documentation so that we could work together as efficiently as possible. I did the same for them; I sent them notes from my brainstorming sessions, media that inspired my vision for the project, and videos of rehearsals and meetings. This sort of communication ensured that we always knew what the other was working on, and where they were coming from.

I was lucky enough to be able to work with a graphic designer friend to create advertisements for the performance. Although I was never able to use them, it would be shame for them to go un-presented; they truly are amazing works. More of his work is linked here: https://dribbble.com/michaelwilsondesigns.