Practicing Collaboration

 

 In a collaboration, everything is negotiable at the start. Over time, it becomes less negotiable as pieces of music get winnowed down to something that's manageable. And people just have to give up some ground on things. And if you keep doing that, you can create a style. And you can create a lot of music.

Take bands that are completely collaborative, like the band Rush. They seemed to work well together, they didn't seem to argue about things--which was different from the Beatles, a band of dominant (or potentially dominant) songwriters. If Ringo was more assertive, and presented more ideas, he would probably have been at the same level (perhaps).

Collaboration is a skill that you have to practice like anything else. But it becomes difficult when, say, you want to negotiate tonality and you write something that's going to be completely diatonic. Then someone presents a more chromatic chord, perhaps a chord in fourths or something outside, and they particularly liked that chord and want to negotiate its use. So how does that get incorporated? Who surrenders to what tonality? Will it move towards something more pandiatonic? Do we want that vibe? Does it have to "fit"? So that's part of the negotiation process. But in the end, it has to sound like it's been well-negotiated.  Everyone can contribute something but do people want to hear free-form playing? I don't think so. Collaboration is a skill to be practiced, which of course must involve the word "surrender" at some point.

It will be interesting to see how we collaborate with machines, which don't understand "surrender".

From Bono's recent memoir, Surrender:

"We joke that some guitars have songs already in them. That's sometimes true of chord sequences. I felt like the melody [of "Sunday Bloody Sunday"] was already there. Of course it wasn't. At moments like this, Edge and I disappear into each other....The greatest songwriting is never conclusive, but the search for conclusion. I had an idea for a song that would later be called Surrender and another called Red Light. And one called Two Hearts Beat As One. Some of the best titles are that obvious."