ABSTRACT
Asking music performance majors in a university music program to write essays about their practice and the practice of others presents a challenge, as it requires a change to engagement in analytical and reflective thought, as well as an effective writing style – skills different from those employed in practicing and performing. Teaching music-making in ensembles and groups engages students with collaborative creativity in both the rehearsal process and performance outcome and this, in turn, encourages thinking about the potential of collaborative essay writing. Could essay writing in pairs offer students the chance to move beyond individual thinking, into a collective where shared and exchanged ideas creatively and academically benefit all involved? Collaborative essay writing, and the act of playing collaboratively, present challenges to students’ thinking, requiring them to move beyond themselves into what is potentially an enriched creative outcome. And when the essay is to be written through an online portal, a third challenge is introduced. Fujiwara (2000) draws on Joseph Conrad to reveal the fears and potentials of creative collaboration:
There is no inner life in collaboration. Life is out there, where the other can get at it. This openness summons forth primeval anxieties: fear that the self will be diminished or lost, resentments and nagging uncertainties about attribution and precedence. The collaborative malaise is an external, explicit manifestation of the drama of all creative work, whose ‘only legitimate basis’, Joseph Conrad wrote, ‘lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous – so full of hope’.
(Fujiwara 2000: 8)