- Title
- A songwriter’s journey from little-c to pro-c creativity: an applied analytical autoethnography
- Creator
- Harrison, Clive Maxwell
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- In this thesis the author, a successful songwriter and professional musician with a forty-year career in Australian contemporary music, describes, analyses, and reflects autoethnographically upon his own creative activity. In seeking answers to the research question posed, ‘How do songwriters go from fair, to good, to great?’, its similarity and relevance to the little-c, Pro-C and Big-C creativity favoured by Kaufman and Beghetto (2009), was identified as a useful construct to focus research. The approach employed in this research reveals a creative journey from its beginnings in the early seventies from little-c creativity, in James Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto’s terms of everyday creativity, to an establishment of Pro-C creativity, that is professional creativity, followed by an effort to move towards more significant, Big-C or eminent creativity (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). The primary research question employed to focus the research was ‘how do songwriters go from fair, to good, to great?’ The creative activity revealed in answering this question adds a necessary professional practitioner’s perspective to the growing research knowledge the scholarly community now has about the creative process. An applied analytical autoethnographic methodology was used to capture the experiential elements of creative practice rarely addressed in the available research literature. The work of scholars (particularly Bourdieu, Bastick, Gardner and Csikszentmihalyi) from the domains of psychology and sociology are examined in this thesis through the lens of personal experience in the field and referenced to recent songwriting-specific research (e.g. McIntyre, Bennett). A comparative analysis of five albums recorded over a span of thirty-six years (from 1976 to 2012) by the researcher provides initial insights into an evolving personal creative practice. The observations, distinctions and potential generalisations of this analysis are summarised to form a platform for further exploration of the author’s creative process. Interviews with highly successful songwriters help to crystallise this autoethnographic account. Significant scholarly models of creativity are applied to the realm of the author’s songwriting practice, documented in long-held journals and current blogs. This application is carried out using four lenses - person, process, product and place. Particular focus has been given to the multiple intelligence theory of Howard Gardner, located within the system of songwriting, as a productive lens through which to view this writer’s creative practice. This autoethnographic examination revealed signs of tactical thinking, flow states, intuition, motivation, focus, and divergent thinking as well as an indication of a creative system at work. The evidence revealed here supports notions of creative novelty, value, productivity and consistency. Finally, conclusions are drawn connecting the work of Bourdieu, Bastick, Gardner and Csikszentmihalyi into the realm of songwriting and creative practice more generally, and a new term is proposed: ‘Adeptus’: the attributes of an expert or master (from adept: expert, skilful, nimble-fingered, capable, polished, professional, and masterful). These attributes are derived from the combined expertise and tacit knowledge acquired from the confluence of habitus (through deep domain immersion), intuition (non-linear parallel processing of global multi categorised information), the unique distinctions borne of discriminant pattern recognition (naturalistic capacity) and the application of recursive, directed practice and reflection over an extended time period.
- Subject
- creativity; songwriting; pro-c; multiple intelligences; autoethnography
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1315652
- Identifier
- uon:22980
- Rights
- Copyright 2016 Clive Maxwell Harrison
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Abstract | 868 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Thesis | 5 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |