Open Source Composition

[Tombo Rombo]

I started thinking about this today.  Successful song writing partnerships stretch back to Lennon/McCartney and I'm sure much further (Rodgers/Hammerstein comes to mind) but I can't think of any composing partnerships.  For instance, Mozart and Haydn getting together to work on a symphony...Does "serious" composition preclude any such "nonsense"?  Beyond a two person partnership however, I was thinking of "open source" composition, in the sense that Wikipedia is open source.  Of course, Wikipedia hasn't done that well at producing high quality output.  Would it all be doomed to failure?  And of course there would have to be some sort of frame, boundaries, parameters, whoever set those may be considered the "composer proper", although that role could in theory be filled by a group as well.

 

Does anyone know of any examples of successful open source compositions, or has anyone been involved in such a project?  I don't mean free improvisation or jazz, they are in the moment arts.  I am speaking of a group planned project, like the open source movies and such.

[Chris Alpiar]

Its done often, although it can be VERY difficult. I had a partnership in Los Angeles with a very very close friend and we actually wrote quite a few pieces of music, side by side on the piano, hashing out every single note, motif, chord change, counterpoint. It was extremely painstaking and required a LOT of being willing to put everything out there and be shot down and to shoot down nonstop without ego getting in the way. If you go to my website the music we wrote for the musical "Shapin Up!", much of it was done that way. Some of them we split up sections or entire pieces but at least half a dozen of the 29 pieces we wrote 100% together. He was a concert pianist tho so it would work often I would sketch stuff, he would sequence it with me running the sequencer and talking about each improvised orchestration and so I was closely directing his mastery of the keyboard. Again this was a very painstaking process and probably would not be possible were we not such close friends

[Sam Umar]

In movie score composition, Hans Zimmer has been collaborating with several other composers in his Remote Control Productions, such as Lorne Balfe, Ramin Djawadi, among others, although the credit went to Mr.Zimmer but these guys also contributed to the music for the movies. I think the idea of open source composition is quite interesting :)

[Jon Brantingham]

It seems like this would be a very good exercise for teaching someone to compose. You have the master, and the student. As the student, you would be able to instill the master's composition process organically. As the master, you would have the added benefit of additional creative power from the student. On top of it, as the student you would get to have your name on the finished composition, which would probably help you out emotionally with a sense of accomplishment.