The Enchanted Forest: Exploring the Development of Relationships in Artistic Collaborations That Combine Individual and Collective Creative Practices
In this presentation I reflect on the activity of listening as prerequisite for relationships in creative processes in a composition collaboration. The creation process of my piece The Enchanted Forest (2023) with choir Musa Horti (cond. Peter Dejans) serves as example to shed light on some of the manifold aspects of the arising of relations when combining individual and collective work. It is part of my artistic doctoral project, where I investigate which insights an understanding of composing and improvising as conglomerates of entangled creative activities can offer and how different combinations of activities generate and steer different creative processes and knowledge types. Guided by asking how to listen to myself while listening to other(s), I describe my understanding of creative processes as contact processes and how listening engenders the transactional relation to the situation (Schön 2017:150), where my body interacts with the material and non-material participants, thus creating the musical happening and relations between it and all participants. A concept of listening inspired by listening’s etymological proximity to obeying or responding, gives a key to grasping the tactile dimension of human interaction with sound and a sociological concept of resonance (Rosa 2018). Through reflecting on The Enchanted Forest’s different stages of collaboration and my individual work with text and sound, I describe listening as something active that involves movement and transformation. Drawing on Rosa’s concept and the tactile dimension of improvising (Meelberg 2022), I trace the diversity of beginnings of developing relations between me, the choir and the musical material. Understanding thus listening to oneself as premise for listening to other(s), I show its necessity for the arising of the implicit knowledge and awareness of different forms of togetherness. Meelberg, Vincent (2022). Improvising Touch: Musical Improvisation Considered as a Tactile Practice. In: Kahr, Michael (ed.). Artistic Research in Jazz: Positions, Theories, Methods. New York: Routledge, 15–28. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2002). À l’écoute. Paris: Galilée. Rosa, Hartmut (2018). Unverfügbarkeit. Wien – Salzburg: Residenz Verlag. Schön, Donald A. (2017). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. London: Routledge.