beginnings
Composing "Singer, Writer" was a long, involved process, one with several beginnings. In one version of the story, perhaps the project began as I video-recorded Mary Hocks and Jody Shipka's panel presentation at the Computers and Writing (C&W) Conference in June of 2013. I captured footage of both women speaking, showing videos, and answering questions from the audience about composing with sound and placing an emphasis on the use of sound in the writing classroom. As part of the presentation, Hocks showed a video where she discussed and presented student audio work, and Shipka showed her video "Stealing Sounds." After recording, I thought I might remix scenes from the footage into a video literature review on new media and multimodal composition.
In another version of the story, "Singer, Writer" began as I started to make connections between writing-as-composing and singing in choir. Singing with others, trying to blend, learning lyrics and notes, rehearsing, memorizing, performing—all of this seemed, at times, a lot like writing. These processes related to writing and singing seemed to me to be often outside of the linguistic, as well. As Patricia Dunn (2001) pointed out, our field has a tendency to ignore ways of knowing and being that are outside of the written, to our and our students' disadvantage. Knowledge and communication, Dunn (2001) argued, are and always have been multiple, multivocal, multisensory.
I began making connections while singing in the University of Michigan Choral Union. We were in the midst of intense rehearsals for an upcoming performance of Johann Brahms's "A German Requiem." The piece is gorgeous, but it is long and difficult, and we were singing it in German. While I was rehearsing Brahms for hours in the evenings, I was also transcribing and cutting up footage from Hocks and Shipka’s C&W presentation in the afternoons. As I participated in and moved between both activities, I began to see and experience more and more overlaps: both composing with sound and singing used the body, for example; both were highly emotional experiences; both were done in collaboration with others. I continued meditating on the comparison as I collected other media assets to combine with the conference footage: I set up cameras to capture various acts of writing. I wrote a poem. I brought my phone to choir rehearsal and recorded warmups and pieces of songs. With permission, I cut up Jessie Meria's (2014) professional promo video "Behind the Scenes with UMS Choral Union – Brahms German Requiem." I asked Jerry Blackstone, our conductor, for his permission to use images and sounds of our choir.
Composing "Singer, Writer" really began, in yet another version of this story, when I started putting these materials together and editing them. I combined quotes from Hocks and Shipka's conference presentation, footage of my writing and speaking my poem, audio and video of Choral Union rehearsals recorded with my phone, and Jessie Meria's (2014) professional footage of our choir rehearsing. I used Final Cut Pro to compose and edit the video, traveling to campus and composing in a media center that had the software and private work rooms.
I composed by collecting, assembling, combining and rearranging, putting together what new media theorists such as Geoffrey Sirc (2004) have called "a loose unthematized collection, the parts not necessarily inflecting each other as in a traditional essay" (p. 120). When I wanted them, I went in search of new materials: I cut up Shipka's "Stealing Sounds" video and borrowed some scenes and sounds; I found a complete version of the Brahms Requiem in the public domain on archive.org performed by St. Matthews Choir and put pieces in. I pulled things apart and put them back together in different ways. I was drawing on what Anne Frances Wysocki (2010) and Geoffrey Sirc (2010) might have called shifted definitions of persuasion and analysis and what Kathleen Welch (1999) and Jeff Rice (2007) described as a new performative, postmodern logos that is associative, fragmented, repetitive, and mixed.
The result of these multiple beginnings and the mixing and combining was the first draft, which I presented at the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). I was nervous and excited to show this version at the conference. The draft felt very personal, and still unfinished. Speaking about it to attendees at the session, though, caused me to think more explicitly about the role and function of juxtaposition and repetition in my compositional process and in the product I had created. After CCCC, the video (and my thinking about it) was still in process, and I wasn't really sure where I wanted the project to go or how I wanted to change it. But I knew that I wanted to continue to invent, to revise.