The Listening Composer Revisited: Participatory Design Methods in the Co-Creation of Two Collaborative Music Compositions

This article describes participatory methods involved in the collaborative composition of two co-created pieces of music, showing how listening can be an integral part of the co-creation process. The approaches taken are adapted from Participatory Design – a method commonly adopted in manufacturing processes and software design. The Listening Composer projects resulted in two finished co-composed works: Healing Tales (2023), and A Gathered Stillness (2024), featuring notated scores created by non-musically trained participants under the leadership of a trained classical composer. The scores were performed by professional classical players, and accompanied voice and environmental recordings telling the stories of the participants themselves in their own words. Both projects began with 1-1 interviews of each participant and a narrative structure co-created by the groups themselves based on their lived experiences (in the first case, healthcare workers’ experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, and in the second, Quakers’ silent meeting for worship). The second project used graphic scores and writing exercises to elicit musical material from the participants, and it also explored the group’s own conduct of business meetings as a method of accountable decision-making. Evaluation suggest that the approach could be very useful for classical ensembles wishing to create artistic outputs which authentically represent the voices of the people in the communities they are located amongst, with no compromise in artistic quality.