Blogs

Collaboration. This seems to be a buzz word that floats around business offices, social networking companies, arts non-profits and educational institutions .  Enabling groups and companies to innovate more quickly, teamwork and shared ideas are taking over the old command-and-control style leadership.

We were taught in Kindergarten that teamwork is valuable and that two people working on a task can get it done faster and better than one. Some of us have attended seminars put on by Music Paradigm, or Benjamin Zander, who use the symphony orchestra as a metaphor for an organization to demonstrate teamwork and personal responsibility within.

I'd be greatly remiss if I didn't applaud personal practice and growth, the essential hours a musician spends in a practice room, perfecting and refining scales, studies and masterpieces.  The time we as students spend in libraries poring over text and memorizing equations.

As a young child, I was put in piano lessons, which I abhorred to my core. The initial beginner classes, where several children were seated together in front of our Yamaha magnetic notation boards, were fun. I loved the sounds coming from all our keyboards and the teacher singing the notes we were to play.  But later, as I got better, I practiced alone and endured long private sessions with my piano teacher. 

Switching to clarinet by way of making a deal with the 'rents, I found that I loved the interaction I was able to have with other players, and that our individual notes produced a thing greater than what we could have done alone. It was a new way of thinking and making music.

In this age, and especially our current economic climate, as we try to stay afloat by restructuring our companies, we turn to this word again, collaboration, to see what it has to offer.  I think the art of collaboration has taken a new turn.  As the push for growth wanes and the push for quality deepens, we have all started to focus on the core values of our organizations: what our mission is, what we stand for, and the fact that success is measured by how well we align ourselves to these values.   Instead, we offer something to collaboration, we are creatively innovating upon it:  we are bartering services, we are sharing resources, we borrow equipment and exchange talent. 

We are developing the relationships that raise the value of our organizations, brokering the ties that raise us all up in the end.   Instead of competing against one another for audiences, funds or participation, working together could generate vastly greater community awareness and engagement. For example, it was noted that after Pittsburgh-area arts organizations shared their donor lists, the average collected contributions of all the participating organizations went up 20%!

As pointed out by Diane Ragsdale of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, who spoke recently at the University of Cincinnati in an address entitled "Surviving the Culture Change", an aggregation of cultural arts products meant that the arts-conscious crowd could have many more options than before. If our arts organizations bundled artistic experiences in a horizontal fashion, people can choose from an array of events that they didn't even know existed, and thus increase cultural participation overall. 

It's counter-intuitive, why should we share our donor list with you? Our initial reaction is to defend our territory and our keep our subscribers for ourselves.  This attitude is changing, and the only fallout is a better-educated, more culturally aware community. 

Collaboration between artists of varying genre is similar.  Works of ballet and opera that have "built-in" musical-theatrical elements are wonderful, it's a miraculous world of physical and melodic precision and grandeur.  The music is written by a composer, the text by a librettist.  The music by a composer, the dance by a choreographer.    How can shining a light on a work from the perspective of a differing genre of art, science or school of thought inform the work?  Philosophy on Also Sprach Zarathrustra, painting on Mussorsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, industry on Adam's Short Ride in a Fast Machine… the list continues.

In my world of the symphony orchestra, our collaborations are a delicate nexus of individual players, conductor and often, a soloist.  Paavo Jarvi, our music director, continually exhorts the CSO,"Always play chamber music!!"  A fascinating challenge onstage with ninety-five colleagues.  I'm often caught wondering, what is the evolution of my particular brand of collaboration?

Recently we experimented.  The themes of hope and timelessness appear in masterworks by playwright Samuel Beckett and composer Olivier Messaien.  Although sharply contrasting in philosophy, the interplay of thematic elements and perspectives provided answers to fundamental questions of  human existence.  And we had to figure out how to engage two masterpieces in one room.  When does the actor speak during Abime des Oiseaux?  How do we time a segment of video to a live performance of music which will be a different length at each performance? We found ourselves engaged in the work in unexpectedly rich and rewarding ways.  Collaboration has many faces.

Pushing the boundaries of collaboration builds new bridges, forges new ideas and challenges conventional methods to keep our lives continually enriched by new thinking and exciting innovations.