COLLECTIVE CREATION IN MUSIC AND ‘LINKED VERSE’ COMPOSITION


The creative process of the composer has always been a private, isolated, individual act. For several years, instead, research has been directed to investigate the potential of collective creation in the fields of art and thought. The musical composition as a collective and inclusive act opens up large spaces of study and research in the strictly compositive sphere and in didactic, interpretative and sociological sectors (McAndrew, Everett, 2015).

This study investigates a new method of collective creation. A team of three composers from the Conservatory Arrigo Boito in Parma has developed a method of chain composition (Linked Verse) based on the writing rules of one of the oldest forms of collective poetry, the renga (Strong, 2007). The study will be presented including some audio and video excerpts about the final result of this project: the collective composition of “Die Zehnte”, a work based on ten fragments chosen by Beethoven's Skizzen for a Tenth Symphony. This opera is composed for seven performers: four pianists for two pianos, one inside-piano performer and two percussionists. The composition is developed in eighteen verses (six per author) — as one of the oldest forms of renga (hankasen) — articulated on four parts: omote (introduction), ura (overturning and negation), nagari no omote (recapitulation of the beginning, nostalgia) and nigari no ura (recapitulation of overturning). The three composers alternate each other with a prefixed scheme in which the passage is circular and the duration of the parts composed by each author is fixed and expressed in seconds, by deriving the time’s proportion from the number of syllables (297) and verses (45) of renga.

The result of this research shows all the normative aspects of work creation (form, duration, character and other) and of the internal organization of the composition process, based on the rules of renga.
The aim is to provide a replicable model of collective composition, rigorous and flexible at the same time, open to a freely associative construction (Yoneyama, 2003) and able to shape new compositions by accepting different variables (number of authors involved, level of skills, basic musical materials): a new form of “net-composing” (networking composition).

Keywords: net-composing, creativity process, renga, linked verse composition.

References

YONEYAMA, Masaru. Le renga (« poème lié ») et l’esthétique du lieu, Marges, vol. 1, no. 1, 2003, pp. 9-29.

MCANDREW, Siobhan; EVERETT, Martin. Music as collective invention: A social network analysis of composers, Cultural Sociology, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, pp. 56-80.

KONISHI, Jin’hichi. The art of Renga, Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1975, pp. 33-61 cit. in ROSSI, Diego. L'estetica del renga. Prospettive filosofiche sulla poesia giapponese, 2012, unpublished.

STRONG, Sarah M. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 66, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1174-1176.

Carla Rebora

Conservatory “A. Boito”, Parma, Italy

carla.rebora@conservatorio.pr.it

Carla Rebora (Genova, 1973). Composer, pianist, teacher and music analyst. Her music widens from theatrical to orchestral works.
She won the Stresa Musical Weeks contest (RAI Orchestra) with Karumi Kana, and she was awarded the prestigious “Play It!”, assigned by the Tuscany Orchestra for QUIMERAS : “… sad and excellent, luminous and disenchanted, folded on itself and energetic, like Rebora’s music”(Lenzi). She has always dealt with the translation of poetic forms and collective creation in music. Her scores and recordings are distributed by major publishers. She is on the editorial board of Quaderni del Boito and the SuonoSonda review, member of GATM (Group Analysis and Music Theory), scholar and author of published articles. She spent the last ten years presenting many research studies in the fields of Analysis and Interpretation, Analysis and Composition. She is artistic director of the Music Association ErrePomeriggi and Analysis teacher at the Conservatory of Parma.

www.carlarebora.it

 Marco Pedrazzi

Conservatory “A. Boito”, Parma, Italy

pedrazzi.marco@outlook.it

Marco Pedrazzi (Bologna, 1994) is a soloist, chamber music pianist and composition student with Antonio Giacometti. He has composed for festivals such as AngelicA in Bologna, EstOvest and ErrePomeriggi in Turin, Spazio15 in Modena, MasP in Como and for other occasions outside Italy in Madrid, Sydney, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro. He has also written soundtracks for Italian television, the last of which was performed by the Orchestra Teatro Comunale in Bologna. He sings baroque music, organizes festivals, gives lectures-concerts and runs radio shows on both classical and contemporary music.

Rosita Piritore

Conservatory “A. Boito”, Parma, Italy

rosita.piritore@libero.it

Rosita Piritore (Agrigento, 1996) is an Italian pianist and composer. She achieved the piano master’s degree with top marks, honors and honorable mention at the Conservatory A. Boito in Parma, where she also studies composition with Luigi Abbate. She performs a heterogeneous artistic activity as a soloist and with many ensembles in various European cities. She was awarded several times in national and international piano and composition competitions. Her works have been performed and broadcast on radios in Italy and America. Some of her compositions are published by Studiomusicalicata Edizioni Musicali and EROM.

Monica Rossetti

Conservatory “A. Boito”, Parma, Italy

rossetti.monica488@gmail.com

Monica Rossetti (Taranto, 1991) is a soloist, chamber music pianist and student of composition and choral conducting with Ilaria Poldi at the Conservatory A. Boito in Parma. Previously she studied orchestral conducting with Pietro Veneri and she also conducts classical works during the masterclasses of W. Doerner and H. Leenders. In 2015 she graduated in Cultural Heritage at the University of Salento in Lecce, which allowed her to integrate studies of twentieth-century music to the history of contemporary art, thus creating scientific research on the artistic relationship between Schoenberg and Kandinsky. She’s the creator and presenter of a university radio program dedicated to classical and contemporary music.