Abstract
This article presents a case study of the creative process underpinning The Gramophone Played, jointly composed by Tom Armstrong and the New York-based cellist Madeleine Shapiro between 2018 and 2021. The focus of the study will be to examine the mediating effect of technology within a composer/performer collaboration undertaken in an asynchronous and distributed fashion. The Gramophone Played is appropriate for such an aim because digital technology assumed a much more prominent musical and creative role as the project progressed, a process intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic that was reaching its height as the piece was being completed in early 2021.
The article examines the mediating effects of digital technology for communication and music-making during our work on The Gramophone Played. We show how we embraced the asynchronous working that technology facilitates, working alone in geographically distant locations (London and New York) and sharing results at our leisure in contrast to the high stakes workshop sessions that frequently characterise collaborations such as ours. We examine the mediation of the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) showing how the fine editing it facilitated began to solidify Madeleine’s improvised part, moving it towards the status of text rather than practice. We describe the long ‘tail’ to the project and the last-minute but crucial decisions the endless refining possibilities of the DAW permitted us. Lastly we examine Madeleine’s attempts to re-learn her improvised part and the extent to which the spirit of the original improvised material might be reclaimed; we invoke the term comprovisation at this point to explain the type of work we have created.
Our case study adds to the understanding of collaborative music creation as a cultural phenomenon and provides an insight into one particular artistic strategy for negotiating the pandemic lockdown of early 2020–1.