The Popes Opera – Composing in a Shared Sound World

excerpt from the book

NET.CREATORS
Unlocking the SwarmCreativity of Cyberteams through Collaborative Innovation Networks
©11/28/2004, Peter A. Gloor

www.ickn.org

I learned about the most amazing example of swarm creativity when I was drinking coffee in a friend’s home in Switzerland. She was telling me about virtual collaboration among three Jazz composers and musicians. The conductor of a choir where she was singing was part of a geographically spread-out three-people team of Jazz musicians that plays together at the same location, but composes and records in parallel the same piece by coordinating over the Internet. They even had jointly composed and recorded the opera “The Popes” without ever getting physically together during the process.

I met David Hoenigsberg, one of the composers of “The Popes” in his composer’s study in his house in the Swiss countryside. David is an accomplished composer, pianist, and flautist who grew up in South Africa and obtained a classical musical education at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Of mixed German Jewish and Afrikaans background, David early on protested against apartheid. During apartheid, David worked as an Assistant Choir leader for the Imilonji nKantu Choir in Soweto, an activity that was officially forbidden to white people in those years. In the early nineties, he moved to Switzerland. David has been a highly productive composer and musician, whose operas, symphonies, violin concertos, and numerous other pieces have been performed all around the globe. He is publishing a large subset of his works on www.sibeliusmusic.com. David has also been a teacher of music at a Swiss private International School.

David met Douglas Grannell and Gareth Dylan Smith five years ago when he was the conductor of the orchestra for a musical in the Swiss town of Zug. Douglas and Gareth both graduated with a classical musical degree from the Welsh College of Music in Cardiff, Wales. Douglas is a bass player and composer, while Gareth is a percussionist and composer. When David, Douglas, and Gareth met in Zug, they immediately started playing and improvising together. After their initial encounter, they periodically got together to play Jazz, staying in touch mostly over the Internet. When David learned of the OOPPERA project of recording label Yuccatree, he convinced his two friends to participate as a composer team. OOPPERA is a large-scale teamwork exercise itself, consisting of seven short operas composed by seven different composers.

David, Douglas, and Gareth decided to take the teamwork even further, creating their part, Popes – an electroacoustic opera, as a composer team collaborating from Switzerland and Great Britain. As Douglas describes: “It was in the early autumn of the year 2000 that I received an e-mail from David suggesting that the three of us collaborate on a ten-minute opera for Yucca Tree. Havingworked with Gareth and David before on various performance-based projects, this seemed like a
great idea on which to work together – except that we were not to work together at all. David’s concept for the opera was that each of us would compose in isolation and in very different and distinct media, the only common threads being the text, tempi and the framework of ten one-minute songs stipulated by David. Thus, David would compose the vocal score, Gareth would write for percussion, and I would compose, to use David’s words, ‘by any means possible’.” Based on a text by Nostradamus in Medieval French, David drafted the vocal lines, and divided the total duration of the opera into ten continuous short pieces: seven verses and three instrumental parts. Each of the three musicians composed his part on his own. After David had set the music for the voice, Gareth composed the percussion part, while Douglas added the electronic instruments. Using electronic music editing software, each of the three composers created his segments quite independently. Although they wrote in parallel, intimate knowledge of each other’s musical preferences, tastes, and thinking helped them to stay virtually in synch. According to Douglas “I had it in my mind how the others would think and act. Listening to each other’s work gave me the feeling how the others would have done it.” In the end, the fragments were put together digitally in the studio of Douglas, with the voice of the singer being digitally inserted. When I listened to the final product, I was really amazed as I experienced the opera as one homogeneous piece, the ten pieces flowing together into one unified whole. I let Douglas describe his own feelings when he heard the final product for the first time: “I cannot describe the first ten magical minutes of hearing all the components playing together for the first time. It was an unbelievably simple task to layer in the percussion and vocal parts, maintaining the order of David’s seven verses but spreading them out to allow for three ‘instrumental’ sections. Having spent a lot of time producing the final mixed version it is impossible to imagine how the three elements could have worked any way but together.”

As David resumes, “without the technology, without digital music composition software and without the Internet we would never have been able to do this.” Asked, why he decided to make this a team composition effort, David said, “we played together, we jammed together, it just felt right to do it.” For him, composing in parallel at the same time was like playing jazz together. Thethree of them immersed into a common sound world, where David was doing the choral and vocal pieces, Gareth would do the percussion parts, while Douglas added the electro acoustic. They are currently working on their next project, the Thomas Passion, again collaborating as a virtual team of composers, with David composing the solo voices of the choir and choral parts, and Gareth and Douglas adding the percussion and electric instrument tracks, writing independently
but in parallel synch.

For me, this team of three composers and performing musicians is a perfect example of swarm creativity. After meeting face-to-face, and improvising together, they discovered their mutual compatibility. They shared common behavioral and musical patterns, a joint way to tackle a musical task, or as David calls it, a “common sound world”. This is familiar for accomplished jazz musicians, who get together to play for hours without written melodies, operating as a perfect team, where a theme is taken up, and passed from one instrument to the other, with team members switching from playing in the background to getting the solo part. Sitting in his studio in the Swiss countryside, David explained this concept to me. He went to the piano to play an original piece from Schoenberg. Afterwards he played me back a recording of their Jazz trio where their team had taken up the original theme of Schoenberg and converted it into a beautiful jazz piece. This whole Jazz transformation of Schoenberg did not need any written music, because David, Douglas and Gareth share, according to their own words, a “common musical world.” David, Douglas, and Gareth extended the same concept into the cyberworld, virtually improvising together over long distance when they in parallel composed their joint opera. The three of them were immersed into the same virtual world, collaborating as mutually aligned musicians, using the same musical and behavioral patterns. They produced an end product where the sum is larger than its parts, and that none of them could have done on his own. These three composers provide a perfect blueprint for a self-organizing creative team, which is innovating together, and collaborating by sharing a common behavioral code.

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