Music as collective accomplishment
In his book Art Worlds (1982), sociologist Howard Becker presents a simple assumption: “All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people.” It challenges some preconceived notions about how art is made.
Growing up, I took for granted the idea that art was a product of individual "genius." My younger self assumed that great works of art emerge out of the intellect and effort of great artists alone. Thinking about it now, maybe back then I just did not have another way to explain art creation.
After more than a decade of being a musician, my perspective about art creation has evolved and has leaned more towards emphasizing the social dimension. I do think that we should keep talking about individual accomplishments in the world of music, but we should also talk more about music as a collective accomplishment.
As a musician, there are some tasks that I do on my own, but at some point in the process of working on a song or performing on stage, I have to rely on and cooperate with a bunch of people with their own bundles of important tasks that contribute to the song or the performance. Exactly how many people are involved varies, depending on what is needed and what can be afforded. As Becker says, “Situations of art making lie somewhere between the extremes of one person doing everything and every smallest activity being done by a separate person.” I can think of the mostly solitary act of writing songs, and the team effort involved in planning and executing our Alegorya: A Munimuni Concert as clear examples of these extremes.
We can talk about "creative process" as a process that involves both individual and collective work. From my point-of-view as a songwriter/performer, I can identify two main creative processes that I normally engage in: the creative process behind recorded songs and the creative process behind live performances.
Recorded songs
Songwriting is probably the most solitary among tasks a musician takes part in, and in my case, it is true that, more often than not, I write the lyrics and basic instrumentation on my own. My bandmates write their songs in a similar way. Yet, there are times when we do get to write together. I can think of the tracks Ako Lang Ba? and Matimtiman from the latest album Alegorya as examples. We were able to collaborate on these songs from the beginning to the end of the songwriting process.
After songwriting, we go through a process of arranging the songs. This part we usually do together as a band. It’s a long and tedious process that involves sitting down in a rehearsal studio, doing some trial-and-error, and having open discussions about the different ways we can approach the song and represent it musically in a meaningful way. In a way, the final arrangement of the song is a product of coordination and negotiation between the five of us.
When my bandmate Owen and I were listing down all the people involved in the creation of the album Alegorya, we came to realize how much help we received from others after songwriting and arrangement. We had to schedule several days of recording sessions at our recording engineer friend Daniel Monong’s Kwarto Studio. After recording the songs, we pass them on to our mixing engineer Tim Recla, and then to our mastering engineer Nick Azurin for the final touches. Their contributions to recording, mixing, and mastering are works of art in themselves, and it is only after their work is done that we can say that the songs are in the form that our listeners hear.
Live performances
Other than working on songs, our day-to-day activities as musicians revolve around live performances or "gigs." We perform our songs in all sorts of venues: bars, cafes, schools, music halls, festivals, etc. Part of the job is coordinating our work with the organizers of the event. We coordinate with them through our manager, starting from bookings through our email.
The songs we hear through our devices and the performances we witness through live events are both the artistic creations of a community.
On the day of the event, we have a "road manager" who helps us out, managing our schedule for the day and communicating with the organizers. We also have with us our roadies who help set up our equipment and make sure everything goes smoothly during the performance. So far I have just enumerated a few of the people we work with, and I cannot overemphasize the importance of the work all these different people do that make live performances possible and enjoyable.
The amount of people we work with also depends on the scale of the event. For Alegorya: A Munimuni Concert, which took place on July 20 in UP Theatre, we collaborated with Gabi Na Naman Productions—from creative direction to logistics and every little detail in between—to produce a show that not only involves our own music, but also collaborations with other musicians, stage design, and light direction, among many others. For all these, we rely on the contributions of other people, and those are things that we cannot possibly do all by ourselves.
There is so much more to the music world than talented musicians, and I think it necessitates more conversations surrounding music as a collective accomplishment. The songs we hear through our devices and the performances we witness through live events are both the artistic creations of a community. I love the thought that, however "success" is defined in music, whatever success I achieve is not merely a product of my own "ingenuity." It’s a comforting thought.
