Rethinking the creative process: The systems model of creativity applied to popular songwriting

Abstract

This article addresses innovation and creativity in compositional practice and music production by focusing on the creative processes exemplified in popular songwriting. It does so using a cross-disciplinary approach that encompasses the perspectives of psychological, sociological and popular music studies. The research on which the article is based is an ethnographic study of contemporary western popular music songwriting using participant observation, artefact and document analysis, and an extensive set of interviews with local, national- and international-level songwriters. It examines one confluence model of creativity developed within the discipline of psychology at Chicago University, that is, the systems model of creativity that the author considers to be similar in some significant and primary ways to the ideas on cultural production developed by the empirical sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The study concludes that the author/genius model of creativity is highly problematic and provides evidence to suggest that the creativity involved in songwriting comes about from the confluence of a domain of knowledge, a field or a social organization that understands and uses the domain of knowledge and an individual person who makes novel variations to domain information.

Luovia valintoja rajoitetussa tilassa: Popkappaleen tekeminen ryhmätyönä Biisilinna 2015 -leirillä

“…Toynbee 2003;McIntyre 2011;Wicke 1990Wicke [1987). Inspirationaalisen näkemyksen mukaan luovuus on jotain mystistä ja jopa yliluonnollista.…”

Voicing passion: The emotional economy of songwriting

“…Academic literature pertaining to songwriters has tended towards either a musicological approach -studying song forms and characteristics -or the study of creativity itself. Examples would include Burns's (1987) typology of 'hooks' in popular records, Fitzgerald's (1995) Bennett (2011Bennett ( , 2012 and McIntyre (2008McIntyre ( , 2011 are two authors that have examined creativity in songwriting teams, particularly in the recording studio. The most instructive and relevant work pertaining to this study is Groce's (1991) look at professional socialization and the process of becoming a songwriter, though that has little to say on the question of passion and its role in the life and work of the songwriter.…”

Nests, arcs and cycles in the lifespan of a studio project

“…Amabile (1996) incorporated a version of the basic stage model into her componential model of creativity. popular music composition (McIntyre 2006) and production (McIntyre 2008)and to produce something new (see also McIntyre 2011McIntyre , 2012. (Lubart 2001, p. 297) In Amabile's model, motivation is a crucial factor in sustaining creative activity over a period of time sufficient in duration to yield valuable results.…”

“…It takes time for people to acquire the skills and knowledge required to operate within a domain – e.g. popular music composition (McIntyre 2006) and production (McIntyre 2008) – and to produce something new (see also McIntyre 2011, 2012). When the field accepts and values the new artefact, the ideas encoded within it (and the objects as iconic representations themselves) are sustained to the point where the accumulated effect is domain change: ‘creativity occurs when a person makes a change in a domain, a change that will be transmitted through time’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1999, p. 315).…”

“…By this point there is a sense of confidence that the distribution of roles between the two core members will produce viable musical results. The invocation of ‘usual working methods’ indicates that the lifespan-level gestation period has ended and that domain acquisition (Csikszentmihalyi 1999; McIntyre 2011) is well underway; ethos, the boundaries of musical materials and working processes have been sketched and are now available for use. The working process continues: once the skeletal material has been replicated to form a bare-bones structure, improvisational responses constitute the main strategy for ideation.The spontaneous moment plays an enormous part in the very early stages of writing – improvisation around rhythmic and harmonic structures acts as a generative tool and it's the material that strikes us as effective in the moment that gets retained.…”