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.