This lecture-recital presents a case study of a ten year musical partnership between composer Tom Armstrong and cellist Madeleine Shapiro. Our aim is to reveal what happens when a long-standing composer/performer relationship is developed, and bears creative fruit, entirely online. Through this study we determine how closely a technologically meditated artistic partnership is able to approach “collective and communal music making” as well as revealing the effects of such mediation on the resulting music and its creation.

Now in its 11th year our musical partnership began in late 2012 when we met at a conference in Coventry; this has been our only face-to-face meeting to date - we have subsequently communicated entirely via email and, since September 2018, Skype/Zoom. The musical outcome of our partnership is The Gramophone Played (2018-21/23) for cello and fixed media electronics, to be played in the latter half of our presentation.  

The compositional process and music of The Gramophone Played clearly show traces of collaboration - evidence of mutuality and reciprocity, fluidity of composer/performer roles and joint working. By necessity there were also clearly distributed features - little intervention in each others’ materials, no shared listening back, no workshopping phase. This ‘together apartness’ was disciplined and made fruitful (communal?) through the technological medium of the DAW, facilitating the assemblage and subsequent micro-editing of our respective contributions.

During our lecture-recital we will highlight and explain key points within these collaborative and distributed creative processes. We will also draw on evidence from 2012-18 during which we were engaged in the equally creative work needed to initiate and sustain our relationship through gaining mutual respect, trust and, finally, friendship.