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Last week marked the release of Lost and Found, a new album featuring percussion music by Robert Honstein. Two of the pieces on that album were the result of long-term collaborations of which I was fortunate to be a part. Working with composers for a sustained period of time is central to Hannah and my work in New Morse Code, and has become a part of my practice as as soloist. How (and why) do performers collaborate with composers, and how does it impact the learning process? Here's one example of a long-term partnership which has resulted in a number of new pieces for cello and percussion, and some lessons learned within.

TL/DR:

1. Empower your musical friends and see where it takes you.
2. Be attached to a process, not an outcome.
3. Collaborate as yourself, not as your discipline.

October 2012: New Morse Code plays Robert’s Patter for our very first concert. We ended up recording Patter with Four/Ten Media, beginning what has been another long-term relationship. Robert also suggested recording three versions of Patter, so we tracked a marimba/piano and marimba/marimba/marimba version.​

Summer 2014: We meet in Lake George with the intention of beginning work on a duo.

In developing our repertoire, Hannah and I were interested in works which challenged notions of melody and accompaniment, and consider the two of us on more equal ground. In fact, sometimes composers even write our names on the score instead of instruments.

We asked Robert if his nascent work might incorporate these ideals, to consider our duo as Hannah and Mike, not just cello and percussion. Since I owned a marimba, Robert decided to see what Hannah and I could do on our wooden compatriot. We met in Lake George, and amidst mini-golf, penny arcades and dubious Indian food, we slapped, scraped, rustled, and tapped away.

After a few months, a gift! Out of frustration with this “prepared marimba” project, Robert completed work on 2x2 (now called Unwind) a meditative process-piece. Robert intended for Hannah to play the marimba and vibraphone with me, like a total boss.

We recorded Unwind for our first CD, Simplicity Itself, pairing the piece with a video from amazing artist Hannah Wasileski that emphasized and complemented the forms in the video.

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DDB

In the meantime, Unwind took another turn. No longer 2 people 1, we were now headed towards… 2 people 1 CELLO. Enter Simon, a wonderful cello Hannah purchased to avoid our

We spent part of the summer of 2016 workshopping ideas at Avaloch Farm Music Institute for what would become Down Down Baby. Inspired by how his young child engaged with the world, Robert was interested in how Hannah and I might approach the cello with fresh perspective. Enter tapping, rubbing, flicking, plucking, dinging (sorry Simon!). We revised, balancing compositional integrity with (relative) performative feasibility. I build faux kick drums out of Ikea trash cans, Hannah becomes an outstanding percussionist.

January 2017: we record Down Down Baby at Oktaven Audio, releasing the video, filmed in a Philadelphia park by Four/Ten.

Sidebar

I have a philosophy about commissioning new music for percussion. I’m looking for works that are

• Expressive
  • Where the expressive intent of the performer can and/or should be a part of the work’s performance practice. Where a human might be an improvement from a synthesizer.
• Idiomatic
  • Not that the piece is easy to play, but that it could only exist for this instrument, that it takes into account the unique sonic, performative, and theatrical properties of the instrument
• Subversive
  • Finally, I look for works that challenge our conception an instrument, performer, or idiom. Is a snare drum capable of melody? (yes!) Might a marimba be able to make a glissando? (yes!)

These principles have allowed me to avoid micromanaging composers with compositional requests while encouraging collaboration and experimentation.

In addition to these ideas, I was thinking at the time about where my own contributions to our art form might fit. Long one to eschew physical virtuosity, I was looking for repertoire with a sense of poetry, grave, and plasticity, parameters not so common in percussion playing.

The Janky Marimba

In between food comas at Avaloch in 2016, I asked Robert if he might be interested in writing a piece for the marimba which explored a more expressive side of the instrument while adding additional timbres to the marimba. I wanted to explore pathways to the instrument which I felt were under-explored, and had a sense that Robert’s approach to melody and harmony might be a nice fit. And, much more obviously, we had spent many hours gathering sounds of me playing the marimba, which could (I hoped) be easily deployed into a new piece.

We dubbed our experiment the Janky Marimba, since it seemed to fly in the face of everything I had learned about the marimba (it’s not a table!). Hot on the heels of Robert’s terrific Economy of Means, a vibraphone solo commissioned by a large group of percussionists acting as a consortium, we decided to try the same approach with our piece. I wrote a cadre of amazing percussionist whose work I admired, asking if they might be interested in taking part in our quest, and in 2017 the 34 of us were off. We spent more time at Avaloch, creating a lexicon of notation, timbre, and gesture that we thought effectively expanded the sound of the marimba. The piece became very difficult… and I resolved to get my act together.

Along the way, we bring Robert’s music to my students at the University of Kansas, hosting a residency in which we played as much of his extant percussion repertoire as we could take (a lot!).

READY FOR LAUNCH!

After a few years of revisions and back and forth (and practicing!), I premiere Lost in Found at Tribeca New Music. What to pair the piece with? Another summer job-themed work?

We decided to split the show, and I recommended Amanda Gookin and Sam Suggs, who brought some absolutely stunning music, including my favorite, Sam’s Giant Hummingbirds.​

In June 2020, I drove to Chicago (bringing my own toilet paper as most rest areas were closed…) to record Lost and Found with Patrick Burns and mega-producer Doug Perkins at Shirk Studios.​

In March 2022, I rented a minivan and a marimba, and we laid claim to an empty (we hoped) swimming pool in Philadelphia, taking the plunge with Four/Ten Media (notice a theme here?), thereby bringing Lost and Found back to conceptual roots.

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Reflection

I’ve learned so much from these collaborations, and so much from my performer friends like my amazing duo partner Hannah Collins through these experiences. In fact, most of my performer and composer colleagues work in this fashion, eschewing transactional commissions in favor of more reciprocal relationships. It’s what I love about our contemporary music landscape. Heck, it’s what inspired me to be a musician! I’m especially excited about the trend towards collaborating with one’s entire musical personality, not just the practices and styles we study in our more narrow conservatory training.

Since learning is experience + reflection, time to reflect!

I. Empower your musical friends and see where it takes you.

Approaching new projects with a desire to support your friends is a powerful motivator, and building friendships through music making seems to result in more effective music.

II. Be attached to a process, not an outcome

In 2013, New Morse Code wanted a duo for cello and percussion. In 2018, I premiered a marimba solo, which is…not the same thing. The process though, trying out ideas and seeing where the collaboration goes, is a wonderful luxury. More broadly, this kind of work is more emblematic of what it means to be a percussionist than any single piece. If percussion has a canon, it’s more a practice than a bounded repertoire: a mindset of experimentation, a bias to action, and an emphasis openness to new ideas.

III. Collaborate as yourself, not as your discipline

One of the turning points in our work as New Morse Code was a meeting with composer David Lang. His advice—look for things we can do as people, not just our instruments. Here, our work with Robert was based philosophy. Robert took inspiration from our extant work, our musical sensibilities. We generated and refined material over an extended time frame, and the resulting work represented at least some of our artistic embedded in Robert’s ideas. It wasn’t even a piece for percussion and cello, but Mike and Hannah. This is the ultimate benefit of long-term collaboration: music where advocacy is easy.

​III.V? Design Thinking​

Along the way, we did unfurl practices of design thinking: prototyping, failing fast, bias to action, radical collaboration. Maybe not on purpose, but it still counts, no?

Next question: WHY does this work? Framing, style, advocacy.

Framing

1. A few weeks ago, I wrote about 3 framing mechanisms when learning a piece of music
   1. Generalized cultural/historical study
   2. Some kind prescriptive instruction (a score)
   3. Orally transmitted performance practice, both active (how people say to play music) and oblique

This collaboration reveals that making music with your friends through long-term collaboration is a powerful way of accomplishing these framing stages of learning.

As I’ve discussed previously, performance practice moves the opposite direction as fine wine with age, becoming rigid, faded, inaccurate—more vinegar than body.

In my case, these composers and I are rough contemporaries—I hope!—sharing at the least similarities born of taking part in a narrow band of overlapping and coexisting cultures. At the same time, while orally transmitted notions of performance practice are notoriously fallible, notions of how to do something from a composer based upon one’s own performance of a work seem to be the least risky situation.

Through long-term collaboration, a performer is also exposed to a composer’s body of work, and not in an Outbreak kind of way. Repertoire exposure leads to framing which leads to performance practice.

Part 1 ✅

Style

Likewise, where better to get insight on style—to me the most important element in developing an interpretation, a learning strategy, a mental representation—than by spending time with the creator of a work?

In my opinion, the details of one’s world are a strong indicator of style. More specifically, how people engage reveals something about one’s intuitions and assumptions. Speaking of intuition (and I am!)…performance practice can and should be centered on intuition. Intuition can be developed and honed through immersion, and there’s no better immersion than friendship. Likewise, having a window into someone’s process can lead to ideas about which parameters of a piece of music are prioritized in a composer’s work, which in turn can/should/maybe could/I think could lead to a hint at what kind of performance could be effective, or at least honest.

Advocacy

Because of this shared journey, advocating for the music of your long-term collaborators is more facile. On the one hand, because these pieces of music are written for me, including my own strengths and weaknesses, there is a sort of implication that I should be empowered to bring to them my full self. More powerfully, these relationships connect the dots between performance, curation, writing, speaking, recording, community building; all the elements of advocacy we aspire to as performers.

A Caveat

Ok, this isn’t to say we should spy on our collaborators, secretly undertaking a participant observation project with each collaboration. My point is more that contemporary music is a great way to sidestep the issues with performance practice we get

Of course, this way of working creates other problems—overly jargon-y practice, closed circles, feelings of moral superiority, maybe some eye-rolling. But that's a topic for another time.

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