“We” is the result of an “I” that opened up (that opened up to what she is not), that expanded, placed herself outside, expanded herself” (Marielle Macé, “Our cabins”)
It has been 8 months since this project started. The first 3 months were dedicated to sort out bureaucracies, to review the literature, and to do preparations for the practical phase of the project.
It has been nearly 5 months, since August 2023, that I have been working with participants in the collaborative creative process of creating an online concert. It has already been a process full of nice surprises and inspiring learnings.
One of the highlights so far has been the collective making process in itself.
As a pianist, I got used to work on my own quite a bit. From hours and days and months of individual practice, to developing my own ideas and just getting to work with collaborators at later stages of the projects.
Here, in the ‘music as an invitation’ project, I have been seeing myself in the middle of a group of very sensitive, insightful and generous women. I ask them: ‘what do you want to explore?’, then we brainstorm ideas, people share thoughts, everyone talks, we comment on each others’ ideas, one idea inspires another one, and at some point we land on something that everyone feels excited about exploring.
Invariably, there is a feeling of high energy (also happiness and gratitude, for me) at the end of the creative workshops. Very often, we find ourselves quite moved after watching our works-in-progress.
This collective way to create has really been making an impact on me, on my understandings of ways to make music. I feel it as a beautiful process, a creative process filled with a sense of solidarity, generosity, kindness, companionship. Indeed, for me, a deep sense of satisfaction has been emerging from the collective creative process itself: satisfaction coming from the brainstorming, from feeling this synchronicity of focus when we are working on the ideas, a satisfaction from the act of creating. Then, a sense of pride also comes when we see our works-in-progress. Somehow the ideas show themselves as if dialoguing in the works-in-progress, and it feels really special.
For several times it happened of some ideas that I had brought ended up on hold as the group decided to work on something else. But, this was totally fine, as in the moment of the collaborative creative process, my feeling was of an expanded brain in action. Therefore, it felt naturally for some ideas to emerge and other ones stay in the background, and there was no problem where ‘my’ idea was, since all the ideas now were ours. And it is very inspiring to have the project taking unanticipated routes, as if the process has been constructed and revealing itself at the same time.
On one hand, the artist in me just feels inspired and reinvigorated within this collective creative process. On the other hand, the researcher in me inquires: “why? what does it make the collective process feel so poetic, so special?”
The authors Keevers and Sykes point out that “music-making involving rehearsal, rhythm, listening and cooperating desestabilizes boundaries and differences. Such practices invoke a yearning – an affective pressure that invites and enables connections, responsiveness to others (…). (Keevers and Sykes 2016: 1659).
In their study of groups of young people from diverse ethnic backgrounds brought together through a music development programme, Keevers and Sykes also highlight how giving voice to aspects of their own lives through music inevitably brings an affective dimension:
“Working with these creative, musical processes to perform the stories of their everyday lives and create contexts of meaning together is, thereby, suffused with affectivity” (Keevers and Sykes 2016: 1660).
Could that be the case, that the act of making music together is affective in itself? And, that the fact of sharing something personal through the music making process adds to the affective experience?
And, the interesting thing is that here, in ‘music as an invitation’, what I have been calling ‘music making’ is not really playing together. Due to the constraints of the remoteness, we haven’t really played together. The music making that we have been exploring is about sharing ideas for explorations, then putting our individual experiments together. Still, we are indeed making music together.
Of course, this process holds some challenges (for example, the vulnerability to depend on each other, whilst having deadlines and academic expectations to meet).
But, it has been an experience of embracing the process one step at a time. And it has been indeed special, a very poetic, beautiful, surprising and rewarding way to create, to make music together.