Democratic composition

Great idea! Sounds rather like what the lyricist/writer/TV presenter Richard Stilgoe used to do when he presented the Schools Prom concerts back here in the UK when I was growing up. At the beginning of the concert he'd get the audience to shout out random words, which he'd write down. Then during the first half and interval he'd go away and write a humorous poem using the words. Always amazed me how he did that, and so fabulous if your word was part of it!

Not sure if it's ever been done in a mainstream kind of way - it does sound quite like education projects which are composition based. I know of the City of Birmingham Symphony's recent effort which involved several weeks of musician-led workshops in schools where the children 'composed' on a theme, which were then threaded together by a professional composer for performance to parents etc. Or this concert: http://www.timeout.com/london/classical/event/131353/music-and-chance.html which was all about chance in music, and included a piece made up of several segments of music, the order of which was decided by dice throw on the night. But music written by the mainstream audience submitted online - now that would be interesting! The next YouTube project perhaps, since the Orchestra concludes tomorrow?!

I see plenty of Twittering going on, so maybe a performance isn't too far off... do keep us informed!

Fascinating idea. Please follow-up on this and report how it goes!

Well if you want to really go off the deep end, perhaps tweets from the audience could be incorporated into a composition in real time. A composer could concievably write an algorithm for score generation based on keywords, ideas, images, etc and the program pumps out the parts to music stands with an embedded screen (these exist).

Minimalism might work best - the cells would change in accordance with the audience input.

The performance would be a function of the audience and ambience of that particular concert - something like the way jazz works.

Is it time for "Star Trek" yet....

Stepping out on a limb here and sharing my initial, gut reaction (not my final thoughts):

This is the kind of thing that I don't think I'd especially want to hear but I'd quite enjoy participating in. What does this say about such projects ultimately?

Probably it says that we don't know anything ultimate about projects like this. Though there would be many way to do projects like the one Leah suggested, and some might work out better than others. And then some audiences might be better at composing than others! So it might be hard to draw any hard and fast conclusions about what kind of music would result, if people tried this.

For what it's worth, I can report on the results of the workshop I was in with Jon Deak. This took place in Cleveland, at one of the meetings of the orchestras involved in the Mellon Foundation's Orchestra Forum (a long-term funding program, now defunct, that involved around a dozen American orchestras, who were encouraged to do innovative things). There might have been 20 to 30 participants, musicians, staff members, and board members from the participating orchestras. Jon had recruited some Cleveland Orchestra musicians to join him in playing the compositions that got written.

Jon's method was, first, to have the musicians demonstrate what their instruments could do. Jon then showed some ways to do graphic notation, for those -- the vast majority -- who couldn't read music. Somehow he did this (and this is his absolute genius in doing these things) in a way that got everyone inspired.

So then came time for people to do their compositions. We were put in pairs, and each pair of people were supposed to compose something. I was teamed with the late Randy Adams, at that time the executive director of the St. Louis Symphony, a man with no background in music. He got very excited, and knew exactly what he wanted to compose. My job then became simple. I had to serve as his scribe, writing down in graphic form or with notes (when he'd sing a short theme to me) what he had in mind. I didn't mind doing this at all. I have plenty of outlets for composing, and I was amazed and excited to see how specific and forceful Randy's ideas were.

Finally all the teams had their compositions done. Each was then played by Jon and the Cleveland musicians. All the teams could give verbal instructions, to supplement what the notation said. What was most compelling about the result was how different -- and how individual -- all the pieces were. There was no doubt that we were hearing real creations from real people, real music, in short, even if the actual notes might not have been planned. The flow of the pieces and the type of music involved -- all those things were quite distinct from piece to piece.

So one conclusion I'd draw is that the project is most interesting if you create more than one audience-composed piece. When you have only one, you can't quite judge what you're hearing. If you have three, you begin to see what the audience's contribution might have amounted to.

Leah, by the way, tells me that she loves reading the comments. Maybe she'll comment here on her own.

I initiated this exact type of project with the a fairly visible chamber music presenter last year, even to the extent of including Jon Deak to be the composer to help bring it to life. Unfortunately, it got nixed once I left that job. It doesn't surprise me that it got nixed, and it doesn't surprise me that I don't hear of any other classical music organizations making this happen, other than Greg's Cleveland example.

And the Cleveland workshop was private, a kind of creativity exercise for people at a conference.

I remember your plan for this, Chris. You're ahead of the curve, as usual. Can you do it, do you think, with the organization you're with now?

Now that your comment filled in some details, this rings bells in terms of things I've done myself, and I don't mean to imply anything exceptional about myself - it would only take a solid ear training and keyboard harmony skill set, and it's just itinerant stuff I've stumbled into.

I once composed a mini-musical for a comedy group, they had a vague idea of the "kind" of song they wanted and a couple of melody fragments that they could sing clearly, and of course the verses. I harmonized their melodic ideas and extended them, and added some fairly stock textures that reflected the atmosphere they wanted.

In my young children's classes I get the occasional student who has my most prized skill, she will just sing improvised melodies to herself. I play them back to her at the piano, harmonized - she and mom are amazed that it is real music she's making.

The point is, there are plenty of people with this same skill set and I could see projects like this taking off, in principle, all over the place. One can definitely lead "average" people or groups of them into composing a piece.