Call for Papers – Collaborations: Creative Partnerships in Music
- Posted:
- April 2nd, 2009
- Guest
The following is a call for papers for the following seminar sponsored by the Performance and Social Aesthetics Research Unit (PASA)
Creative processes in the arts have been under renewed scrutiny over the last decade in a variety of ways. These have included the increasing links made between ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ that also involve the blurring of business and artistic work; how creativity is measured or ‘captured’; and tensions between older, Romantic notions of the creative process that stress the individual artist, and more contemporary theories that emphasise group/systematic processes.
Creative partnerships are common in music. They can be poisonous, vexed, tragic, difficult, strange, mercurial, placid, business-like, un-emotive, sadistic and masochistic. They are also essential. Twentieth-century music is inconceivable without the partnerships of Jagger and Richards, Plant and Page, Stravinsky and Balanchine, Cage and Cunningham, Warwick and David, Reed and Cale, or Davis and Evans. We welcome explorations of music creativity and collaboration across all music genres and contexts of production. By ‘collaboration’ we mean loose or tight associations between artists and surrounding personnel; and the forms of artistic endeavour which involve co-operation, partnerships, strategic alliances, and/or a group aesthetic as the basis for music production.
Collaborative contexts for papers might include famous and infamous collaborations between songwriters; studio producers and artists, or musical directors and artists – Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle); artist managers and artists, such as Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols); inter-family partnerships; or collaborations that challenge legal, political, artistic or social convention (for example, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn).
A key subtext of the seminar is to explore/discuss why partnerships are important in musical creativity, what makes them work and why they fail.
Submission deadline: 15th April