Tellsong
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Poet: Aodán McCardle
Composer: Sam Smith
Baritone: Matthew Sprange
Cello: Lioubov Ulybysheva
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Aodán McCardle on Tellsong
My experience with the grouping London Under Construction (LUC) is very much a collaborative process where the individual input could barely be measured or plotted and the Song Project began for me by following this process. The end product was perhaps a little more defined as to where input began and ended and in this sense it wasn't a true collaboration. I think however that this was in part due to the technical difficulties of coming from differing creative fields and for me the experience gained is vital in all ensuing projects. The poem, the words which were essentially my input came from the actual conversation Sam and I had about the difficulties of communication and collaboration. The essence of the poem is that words are not enough when talking about either poetry or music, especially when the subject is composition itself. The poem and the words within it reflected this dilemma. This part of the project was a collaboration in that it involved both participants in the improvisational sense of conversation. However the next part of the process, adding the music and the work with the musicians lost the improvisational sense and the collaborative sense broke down. The end product was indeed beautiful but not as challenging as it might have been. The crucial part of this process for me was learning to be more assertive about the practice, and in future collaborations I would insist on the integrity of the process being if not maintained, as I'm not sure how possible that is, then available as a difficulty within the various parts of any outcome or performance. I see this as an invaluable lesson which could only really come from the experience within the project.
The other measurement of success for me has become the question as to whether the final piece makes something more of the poem than might be available in the experience of reading or hearing the poem itself. What Sam and I created will indeed have been able to take contemporary poetry to an audience which would otherwise have perhaps found it difficult to deal with but as a future performance I would insist on the poem being heard/experienced as a reading alongside the song performance, this is what I mean by 'the difficulty' being included in the performance. However I think the collaborative process a project like this provides is perhaps the most creative way to break new ground if the integrity of the course can be held to.
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