The Alchemy of Collaboration

Collaboration is not a method—it is a way of being. A kind of music made between people. At its best, it’s telepathic. At its most difficult, it’s transformative. The most meaningful work I’ve done has been forged in the fire of creative difference and built on the scaffolding of deep mutual respect. I call it the crucible. When collaboration works, it changes you.

Making Sound for a Nation

When we created the sonic branding for T-Mobile, it wasn’t just five notes—it was a collective intuition. Mike Harvey had the voice of global zeitgeist. Lance Massey offered up the indelible motif. Tim Leitner made it sing. My role was to guide the process and tune the room. It was a delicate, months-long ballet between marketing needs and musical instinct. In the end, the solution felt obvious. That’s how you know collaboration has worked: when the outcome feels inevitable.

Stories That Run on Rails

In children’s television, nothing moves in a straight line. On Chuggington, every element—story, voice, design, sound, emotion—had to align. Sarah Ball held the center with grace and precision. It was a show made in layers, across continents and time zones. The voice actors had to feel the beats of the animators. My role was composer, finding the unique and eccentric heart.  It was a rolling machine, but with a heartbeat. That heartbeat was shared trust.

A Break, A Beat, A Moment

The Kit Kat jingle was already was magic. One of my first projects as an advertising agency producer. The original composition by Michael Levine had exactly what a piece of branded music should have—clarity, brevity, earworm perfection. Our job was not to to deliver it. Faithfully. Precisely. With feeling.

That kind of production is its own form of collaboration: between composer and producer, between score and sound, between legacy and interpretation. And in this case, the band too, who ended up gathering around a mic and singing. We didn’t just record a jingle. We captured a cultural touchstone—and helped it reach new ears with the same irresistible snap.

A Hundred Voices, One Vision

But perhaps the deepest collaboration of my life was Turandot.

Boston Opera. Beijing Opera. Sarah Caldwell’s impossible dream.

Puccini’s final, unfinished opera was a test of every collaborative skill I had. The Beijing artists brought centuries of tradition. The Boston team brought the American spirit of scale, speed, and improvisation. And then there was Sarah—wrangling language, politics, movement, music, and meaning into one singular event.

We didn’t always agree. In fact, we often didn’t. But disagreement is part of collaboration. Out of friction comes fire. Out of difference comes something richer. Producing opera is opera. Drama. Murder. Sex. Crazy tensions in 100-hour work weeks.

That production was never just about opera. It was about possibility. It was about strangers making something that none of them could make alone. That’s the essence of collaboration—not compromise, but creation. On opening night I stood at the back of the theater and wept.

The Invisible Thread

The best collaborations don’t feel like work. They feel like discovery.

They push you past your limits. They force you to listen more closely—to others, to the work, to the quiet instinct you forgot to trust.

This is the thread we follow. Every show, every story, every sound.

Not to control the outcome—but to listen deeply into what wants to emerge.