Co-composing

Composing is mostly a solo act and most composers (out of the film business) lack the ego-checks required to collaborate on a score. The most famous co-compositions are probably those pieces left unfinished by one composer and finished by another (Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Ives, Berg, Cage) and the younger colleagues who have prepared completed versions are often subject to heavy criticism.

There have been a few composers over the centuries -- from Lully to Scelsi -- who have had the means to employ assistants in readying their scores. In some cases, this is unproblematic, with the assistants merely doing the fill-in work in an well-established style, in Lully's case supplying the internal voices (in that beautiful five-part, viola-dominated ensemble texture) to his melody and bass line, but in the case of Scelsi, at least one of the hired-hands protested after Scelsi's passing that he was really the composer, although the scores penned under Scelsi's direction, based on transcriptions of Scelsi's recorded improvisations, and quite closely edited and vetted by Scelsi, sound all the world like something by Scelsi and nothing in the world like the assistant's own music. In other words, the labor might have been shared, but the imagination was Scelsi's own.

But co-composition less contentious, indeed jolly, form of co-composition is possible, as well. Cage and Harrison collaborated on the percussion quartet Double Music, agreeing to an ensemble, a number of measure, a metre and a tempo, and then each independently writing two voices, with the two sets of parts later superimposed onto one score (it should be noted that Harrison chose to compose his parts in a version of Cage's "square root" form). The party pieces of Cage, Harrison, Cowell and Thomson followed a surrealist graphic genre, the exquisite corpse, in which one artist draws something, then folds the page, leaving only a few dangling line segments which the next arts continues, blind to the previous image, when he or she then folds over and hands off to the next participant. In these Party Pieces, each composer would write one measure, and a note or two in the next, fold the page and hand it on. Both Cage and Harrison would later go on to further co-compositions -- Cage and Lejaren Hiller (who had himself co-composed the computer-assisted Illiac Suite with Leonard Isaacson) made HPSCHD and Harrison collaborated with Richard Dee on a Concerto for Violin with American Gamelan.

I've managed put my own misanthropy aside a few times to collaborate on musical exquisite corpses -- first, many years ago, with Steed Cowart and Jonathan Segel, and later, as part of an "avant garden party" concert by the Santa Cruz New Music Works in honor of Harrison's 80th. The corpses, mostly for an open-score instrumental trio, co-composed with Cowart and Segel were collected under the title The Original Sour Mash, a name which describes both the whimsical atmosphere and the budget potable that accompanied their composition. The later garden variety corpses were done by post and fax and email, a virtual composing party stretching over oceans.

I recommend the exquisite corpse as a genre, and as a game for social evenings. It's more fun to collaborate with a group of three or more, and not to keep too strict an row order, so that the pieces don't fall too quickly into a regular back-and-forth rhythm. And these corpses are one occasion in which more rapid and spontaneous composing can be an asset, keeping the spirit light and surprising.