I Don't Wanna Break Hearts (Like That)

Dear Jesse,

I'm a musician who often works with and leads a band. Over the last ten years, I've worked with a rotating cast of talented musicians, all of whom I value deeply. I try to be clear about my expectations, compensate folks as well as I can, and keep things as organized as possible so I don't waste anyone's time. However, when I'm finding that the fit isn't right, or if I want to work with new collaborators, someone ends up feeling spurned, and I haven't always been able to salvage a friendship or future working relationship with them. Is there something I can do to ease this pain for them (and for me?!)?

—I Don't Wanna Break Hearts (Like That)

One of my mentors is both a prolific musician/band leader and a community organizer of many decades. Once, when describing some of my artistic ambitions, I named my dream of being part of some sort of horizontal, anarcha-feminist artists’ collective. He sorta lovingly laughed at me, as he is wont to do. “You seem to not want hierarchy, but there’s a reason I want to call the shots.” 

The phrase that sticks out in your letter is “works with and leads.” Creative collaborations in different artforms often have different levels of hierarchy, and these power systems can shape the aesthetics and structure of the art itself. Those hierarchies can be ethical if handled clearly, but sometimes it’s hard to do so. I’m curious if some of the hurt feelings in your question come from some murkiness in between “works with” and “leads.”

In her essay “The Composer Keeps the Score: Writing Music, Sharing Power, Hearing Possibility”, New Music composer Sarah Hennies writes about moving from being a rock drummer and improviser to composing scored music. She speaks of “practitioners of free improvisation and politically minded composers, such as John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff” who criticised composed music for being hierarchical, placing the composer above the musicians. However, Hennies notes, Cage or Brown or Wolff are the names remembered, not the performers. “Are these composers having their cake and eating it too by removing themselves as leaders in the creative process yet still being cited as the primary artist of their work?” I might argue that these composers are blurring “working with” and “leading” a band. They love the ethics and aesthetics of “working with,” but can’t put down the esteem of “leading.” 

In my artistic utopia, collaborators would exchange power freely and joyfully. Sometimes we would experiment with sharing it equally (and witness the kind of art those experiments birth). Sometimes we would pass power from one person to another. Just as, in this utopia, we would all take turns changing diapers, taking out the trash, harvesting strawberries, facilitating meetings, we would take turns being auteurs or movie stars, playing bass in a collaborator’s band, setting up the chairs to assistant-stage-manage someone else’s play, managing the spreadsheets for a peer’s film. But, it hardly needs to be said that we don’t live in a utopia. There are artists who dream of helming projects who get forever stuck doing admin, taking notes at the director’s right hand, playing session gigs—and even more who get gatekept out of formal arts spaces altogether. Who leads and who follows creatively is shaped by the cruel hierarchies of our broader society: race, gender, class, etc (inherited wealth in particular in the arts¹). Most mainstream artistic spaces—the kinds with actual cash (record labels, film studios, symphonies, universities, regional theatres, ballet companies, etc.)—wield power rigidly, inequitably, and often abusively. Mainstream culture clings to the “great man” theory of artmaking, leaving little fame, credit, or money for other members of the team. Many of us who enter an artistic project as a “follower” arrive rife with wounds: the choreographer who always talked down to us, the director who ignored our ideas but immediately yes-and-ed the white dude’s, the professor who screamed at us, the countless arbitrary rejections at auditions or in submissions, and much worse abuses that artists bravely speak out about. Those wounds sometimes calcify into a fear of leading². Frankly, I think this is true of me: I resent spending such a large percentage of my life on others’ else’s artistic visions, but I feel so hurt by past hierarchies that I’m terrified of the immense vulnerability of leading my own projects again (I’m working on this! In the meantime, you’re witnessing my solo art practice).

On the other hand, those of us who want to lead artistic projects but really give a fuck about the well-being of our collaborators can sometimes engage in strange, fuzzy, compensatory behavior out of guilt for holding that power. For example, Hennies received some Twitter vitriol about her distaste for a trend of “poetic” instructions in new music scores. “Today it’s not surprising to see ‘Like the first ray of sunshine on a spring morning’ written over a simple melody or even a single whole note.” Her Twitter adversaries claimed that these kinds of notations were important because, in their words, “I want my performers to know that I respect them.” Hennies writes, “The implication is that the composer shows trust in performers by allowing them to ‘interpret’ the score. The underlying assumption is that writing ambiguous instructions gives the performer more freedom than clear instructions.” I have certainly done some weird emotional and artistic gymnastics while directing plays because I felt guilty about telling someone what to do. 

So, to bring it back to your letter, I am wondering if your collaborators might be entering this arrangement with wounds related to being on the “following” side of artmaking, potentially making artistic home feel scarce and leading their own projects impossible. And I am wondering if you are entering with guilt about being in leadership, and exhibiting that through subtle vagueness in communication or compensatory behaviors. Those two forces colliding could really hurt. All of this would be quite human and understandable within our present, dystopian artistic economy. 

So you get to choose: Would you like to work with a band or lead it? If it's the former, you could create explicit power-sharing practices (i.e. consensus decision-making or sociocracy). You may have less artistic control, and the shape and aesthetics of your work may shift accordingly (in ways that could be both exciting and uncomfortable!). Working collectively is far from immunization against heartbreak (in fact, it might be even harder since it’s so counter-cultural), but in a more horizontal structure, you would bear the responsibility for those heartbreaks collectively instead of alone (with great power, great responsibility, Spiderman blah blah blah). 

If you want to lead a band, more power to you (literally)! If this is the case, this could be a moment to deepen your commitment to clarity and reckon with any feelings of guilt or discomfort about holding power. Conflict often springs from hundreds of tiny moments of vagueness and indirectness, rather than a single betrayal. You could inventory how you’ve communicated (both verbally and non-verbally) the power structure of your band. What happens in your body when you think of yourself as the leader, the person on top of the hierarchy? Does it make you uncomfortable? When have you felt those sensations before? Have you done weird, confusing, compensatory, or vague things because of that discomfort? Do a bit of journaling about these sensations and memories. What are a few actions or commitments you could experiment with for behaving differently? 

A final thought: When was the last time you just let yourself follow artistically? If you have been leading a band for ten years, what might you learn from playing on someone else’s record, for example? If one of your collaborators is leading a project, being an artist under their leadership might help you create stronger and more reciprocal bonds. We learn so much about ourselves and our artforms both from leading and following. You might find pleasure, artistic revelation, and new relational perspective from switching positions. Write me back if you try some of these experiments. I’m curious what new, but hopefully different, challenges might emerge.

1  This privilege has certainly facilitated my ability to lead artistic projects.

2  I want to be clear that I’m not assuming that everyone who plays a supporting role in works of art is afraid of leading. I know a great number of artists who play supporting roles in projects who see that as their life’s work, are excellent at it, and have no desire to helm a project (though they too often lament the rigidity of the hierarchies they belong to). Leading a project isn’t better than supporting one.