My Butterfly Lovers collaboration continues... with enforced virtuality

So, the collaboration project on which I've embarked at Surrey already had some trickiness: issues around language, culture, artistic/musical references and, well, age, perhaps chief among them. All surmountable, of course, and we're getting there, but I could have done without another hurdle, in this case not being able to do today's session in person, thanks to omicron. (Actually, I'm testing negative, but a sandpapered throat and prodigious quantities of snot suggest otherwise.)

Our group is actually making reasonable progress, I think. We've settled on a format for our "Butterly Lovers" adaptation: a four-song mini-music theatre piece, with live singing and piano, and backing tracks supplied by me. And we've already begun work on the first song of the set, "Who is he Actually?" Here's the original, from a Shan Guan's musical "Butterflies"*:

So, one of the key aims of the project is to get us to work outside our comfort zones. Regular readers (you know who you are) will recognise that this is certainly some way outside mine, aesthetically speaking. But, well, in for a penny etc... I thought I'd have a go at writing a string arrangement for our rendition, and my god it's hard to make it convincing. As I said to our module leader Tom Armstrong earlier today, it's all very well to take the mick out of schmaltzy strings, but just try writing some. It certainly put my fairly shonky grasp of voice-leading to the test. In the end, I've added a bit of sequencer/synth stuff, aiming to give it an Angelo Badalamenti/Laurie Anderson vibe (although my son Frank reports back that he thinks it sounds like Floating Points, which I'll take**). Here's a rough mix:

Simon Hopkins · Who Is He Actually? (Backing track)

So... on the collaboration issues today. On the logistics front, my being about 30-odd miles away certainly didn't help things. Yi, Chaoran and Jingyi were rehearsing the song in a room on campus, playing back my initial attempts at the backing track over a laptop and relaying the results to me over WhatsApp audio. In terms of the-future-ain't-all-it-was cracked-up-to-be, this was up there with the fact that I'm still waiting for a jet pack, or at the very least a flight on Concorde. For one thing, Our language issues were definitely exacerbated by the situation (trying to explain what rubato is and why it's not a cakewalk in Ableton Live was a particular challenge), but mostly it's just the lack of immediacy that's a real problem. That said, my fellow collaborators were able to ask for changes, and I was able to supply them, if not in real-time, at least without too much delay. But I would dearly love to have been in the room to hear how it all really sounded.

On the "softer" issues, well it's interesting. In his feedback last week, Tom suggested that I'd taken on a facilitator role, which I think is fair (better than "bossy" at any rate). By this week, however, I seem to have become an arranger for hire. A bargain basement Van Dyke Parks, maybe? I'm more than happy with that, to be frank: it's pushing me to work in ways I wouldn't, ordinarily, and on material I wouldn't normally go near. But I would like to see the others make themselves a little bit more uncomfortable. The funny thing is, I think they feel that what I'm putting forward is a bit on the weird side! I'll keep pushing, gently...

Oh and I've done a re-cut of the "overture" to the show, with an added narration of the story - in Chinese - by Jingyi. Here it is:

Simon Hopkins · Butterfly Lovers Overture

* I can tell you no more about either the composer or the piece, I'm afraid; my Googling and my Chinese have somewhat let me down.

** He's also asked for the stems, of course... 

Comments

[Tom Armstrong]

Excellent, Simon. You are quite right about the dangers - collaboration-wise - of being a 'bargain basement' arranger and this was a little bit of the vibe I picked up at these sessions (and the one after Easter). Your collaborators need to read out towards you (the dynamic of mutuality) otherwise it isn't a collaboration (at least it isn't for them but maybe it is for you). I'd suggest engaging with a bit more of the theory covered on the module (and in your own reading) in these posts; they are great, and reflective as well as descriptive, but engage with others' ideas too.