Reflection

I responded directly to some of those questions:

• How has this process been different from how you "normally" work? Or how you've worked in the past?

Usually my musical collaborations have been score-based and rehearsal-based; getting the notes right, portraying what’s on the score as accurately as possible, etc. — this collaboration was different for me in that it involved much more creative and social collaboration: concept building, narrative and world building, intuition and feeling exploration — I am used to generating these aspects of a project independently as a composer, so it was refreshing to collaborate with others in this way. It felt connected to social “play” and conversation. 

• What will you take away from this way of working in your future work? 

Planning is overrated! Trying is better. My group discovered a bulk of what we did and did not want to include in our piece simply by trying — by playing, by practicing incorporating certain elements, by experimenting together — it seemed to be a much more effective way of figuring out what we wanted to and could include in the piece, what direction we wanted the piece to go in, etc. I think this approach is linked to intuition and feeling things freely in the moment. 

• What kinds of compromises have you or others had to make for the sake of moving forward?

Since our piece had a lot of ideas (and still has lots of ideas), I think we took on an approach of throwing out lots of ideas and trying them but not getting too attached to them. An approach of only doing the things that feel right and contribute well to the piece, not trying to force things that we were initially excited about but might not work anymore. Maybe if we had more time, there are some ideas we could explore more in depth, but that's the pace we adopted for this project. 

• Have you borrowed styles or processes of working from other disciplines?

Film and acting, I suppose? This piece is rather theatrical and puts a lot of weight on personal presence and characters changing within a narrative. Making that narrative clearer with strong character shifts and intentional staging are concerns that are related to film and acting. Especially in my singing and speaking sections, I considered my physical presentation pretty carefully.