What is collaboration, actually? Not the polite version — two names on a programme, a shared credit, a residency with a joint outcome — but the real thing. The kind where you can't easily separate who contributed what, where the work exists precisely because these two people, or more, were in the same room at the same time with the same problem. There is also the other version — where the collaboration was real but the credit was not, where the work exists because of you and the programme notes do not mention it.
I've been thinking about this for a long time. Long enough to write a PhD about it, long enough to be the subject of someone else's academic study of it, long enough to have made it the centre of my teaching as well as my practice.
A few things I think I know:
Collaboration is not natural, not easy. It has to be learned, and the learning is uncomfortable. It requires revealing what you don't know. It requires trusting someone with your uncertainty before you've resolved it into something presentable. Most of us are trained in exactly the opposite direction — to present finished thoughts, finished work, finished selves.
The best collaborations are constitutive. The work couldn't exist without them. Not "A helped B make B's piece" but "this piece is the product of A and B together, and neither could have made it alone." The electroacoustic music I've worked on for thirty years is almost entirely this kind. The composer/creator brings a vision and their musical world; I bring the technology and, inevitably, something of my own sensibility and whatever is on my mind at that moment in time. Where exactly those contributions begin and end, and how they ebb and flow, is often impossible to predict. I've come to think that's a feature, not a problem.
You can teach people to collaborate, which I discovered very early in in my own creative practice which changed how I think about pedagogy entirely. At Brunel I had an idea of how this could work coming from the experience of running a project with composer André Serre-Milan at Art Zoyd Studios in Valenciennes where students made electroacoustic music together from scratch. The premise was simple: you learn by doing first, not by studying first. Each year it culminated in Sonoscopie — a full multimedia spectacle created entirely by the students. It worked, consistently. What we were really teaching, I think, was the capacity to trust someone else with your unfinished ideas.
A short text I co-wrote with Manuel Poletti and Tom Mays in 2002 — Musical Assistant or Producer? Sketch of a New Profession — tried to name some of this from the inside, when we were all still figuring out what we were doing. I've put an English translation of it here on granular.forms. It's interesting to read now, twenty-something years later. Most of the questions it raises are still open.
More to come on all of this. For now, the question I keep returning to: what does collaboration ask of us that working alone does not?