Collaboration as the Initial Stage of Artistic Group-Work: The collaborative stage of co-creation between music composers and other artists

There are as many different approaches to artistic collaboration theory as there are authors who have created them. This paper postulates that collaboration is a stage of the artistic co-creative group-work process. Theories of collaboration were examined to isolate verbiage used in various attempted definitions of artistic collaboration. Two theories were selected to serve as a joint model for the creation and maintenance of a collaboration stage during the artistic co-creative group-work process including a derived series of conditions required for a co-creative initial stage to qualify as collaboration. Those conditions were then applied to five collaborative situations to determine if each situation had established a collaboration stage, how that establishment occurred, if that collaborative atmosphere was maintained over the life of the co-creative process, how the presentational outcome of the group-work was affected by the presence or lack of a collaboration stage, and finally this collaborator’s general reactions to the process.