In response to my post last week on Artistic Integrity, I received a reply from, Lily Yu. Her comment, “collaboration is the new compromise,” nudged me to rethink the idea of compromise as a loss. When I wrote my post last week, I was thinking about an artist I used to work with named, Allan Holdsworth; he’s the only artist I’ve worked with that absolutely would not compromise. It was in Allan’s DNA. Why anyone would ask him to play like someone else didn’t make sense. When other players worked on his recordings, he gave them complete freedom, sometimes even leaving the room while they recorded.
Film scoring, editorial, sound design, and mix are not just arts in and of themselves—they are part of more massive creative undertakings. There is no edit-recording-mixing-sound-design business without collaboration and compromise. In these endeavors, intertwined with other arts or crafts, the true art becomes “the art of collaboration.”