In 1649, in the midst of the English Revolution, Gerrard Winstanley wrote a proposal for a new society, ‘The True Levellers Standard Advanced’, in which he considered how to set about ‘making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor’. It would be important, Winstanley told us, that in this ‘common treasury’ no attempt should be made at ‘Inclosing any part into any particular hand, but all as one man, working together’. Ideas about working together permeate this issue of TEMPO.
Winstanley was unable to realise his vision – the communitarian project he began on 1 April 1649 on St George's Hill in Surrey ended in 1650 when local landowners forcibly drove Winstanley and his supporters off the land – and the tendency to ‘inclose’ seems to be the dominant force in most socio-political organisations. Even something as ephemeral as music can be subject to ownership, fenced off and policed, as Matthew Shlomowitz suggests in his provocative reflections on the concept of the composer's ‘voice’. A composer who develops a recognisable musical language – a ‘voice’ – creates a commodity that can be traded on the music market. Those composers who choose not to do this are often marginalised, judged to be failing the requirements of their profession because their work is not so readily bought and sold.
The music business finds improvised music similarly problematic, both because of its resistance to commodification and its tendency towards a sharing of creative endeavour. Alistair Zaldua's study of the improvisational practice of the improvisers Sarah Brand, Moss Freed and the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) focuses on the role of notation in facilitating musical collaboration. Some improvisers reject any use of notation, seeing it in Winstanleyian terms as another attempt to ‘inclose’ their musical freedom. Zaldua argues, however, that in the work of Brand, Freed and the ICP, notation is a means of rendering musical processes ‘visible’, helping ‘to build and develop communities and cultures’.
Making visible the shared work of creative communities is also the subject of Lea Luka Sikau's article ‘Rehearsing Time’. She considers the hidden time of opera production: not the time that audiences experience in the theatre, but all the thousands of hours that have gone into the creation of that experience. ‘What’, she asks, ‘do we make invisible when we exclude the main act of collective labour in the production of a new staged work?’ Her answer to this complicated question explores its many challenges and it is telling that, in introducing the three works that provide the case studies around which she develops her argument, she immediately confronts the issue of creative ownership. The works are introduced as ‘Marina Abramović's 7 Deaths of Maria Callas’, ‘Michel van der Aa's Upload’ and ‘Sivan Eldar and Cordelia Lynn's Like Flesh’; collective credit is not acknowledged, even though these works would not exist without ‘collective labour’.
A similar exploration of the relationship between the embedding of time and collective labour in new music creation is at the heart of Diego Castro Magas's article on Helmut Lachenmann's Salut für Caudwell. The article takes Seth Josel's new edition of Lachenmann's two-guitarist masterpiece as the spur for a discussion that considers the history of Salut from the point at which the work's first performers began to prepare for its premiere. Conventional wisdom asserts that this is the point at which a composition is ‘finished’, all those hours of composerly labour now locked into a ‘complete’ score. Josel's new edition of Salut demonstrates that published scores may be finished but they are often full of contradictions, and Magas offers a fascinating analysis of the way in which these contradictions reflect and construct a work's evolving performance history.
Informing each of these articles is the idea that music-making is inevitably collaborative. Even in a universe as regimented as classical music, where composers deploy musical language to write music for musicians to play on instruments and in spaces that are designated as appropriate, collaboration is implicit in every relationship. The instruments and spaces constrain the sort of music that is possible; musical language evolves from these constraints; musicians are bound up in a collaborative discourse with history. In an article that documents the work of Cyborg Soloists, a project led by the pianist Zubin Kanga, the emphasis shifts from these relatively abstract ideas about collaboration to a forensic examination of five case studies from the project. Each case study details different ways in which the Cyborg Soloists project has brought composers, performers and new technology together to make ‘technology-focused contemporary music’. As the article suggests, the terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘technology’ can sometimes appear to be the best keys with which to unlock arts funding in the United Kingdom, but funding structures too are just another part of music's collaborative discourse.
The final article in this issue takes us somewhere that at first sight might seem to be completely different: Seaton Snook, a small town on the coast of north-eastern England. Peter Falconer gives a touching account of the ways in which various types of music-making can flourish within a single community. Yet they too, through their variety, articulate a sense of a shared culture. In Seaton Snook, as in the opera house, as in the rehearsal room with Helmut Lachenmann, everything depends on working together.
