Drawing from Roland Barthes, Michael Pickering and Keith Negus, Howard Becker and others, Jason Toynbee asserts that the value of creativity as found in musical artefacts can only be measured to the extent that listeners recognise it.129 Toynbee draws from Howard Becker in suggesting that artworks emerge
from the interaction among artists, their co-‐workers and audiences, and argues that:
When interaction is intensely repeated, it may solidify in conventions that organize both the way the artist works and the audience responds. Rather, in making a creative choice he or she works intuitively. Becker calls this the “editorial moment”, that is, when the artist identifies creative options and then selects from them according to informal criteria that represent, in the case of music, an ideal listener’s point of audition. For Becker, then, creation involves small amounts of individual agency and large amounts of regular, if complex, social interaction.130
Allying these ideas to literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin131 – and with the
expected caveats about the distinctions between language and music – Toynbee
129 Roland Barthes, Image – Music – Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Michael Pickering and Keith Negus, ‘Rethinking Creative Genius’. Popular Music 23/2 (2004), 198-‐203; Toynbee, ‘Music, Culture, and Creativity’, 103. Assigning to listeners the authority to determine value is a more nuanced expression of Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of the role of the field, and privileges audiences in interesting ways. Keith Negus and Michael Pickering (2004) usefully suggest: ‘Yet it is surely crucial to distinguish between artistic and cultural production on the one hand, and its critical acceptance and celebration on the other. They cannot simply be conflated. In Beethoven's case, this is an impoverishment of the historical imagination. It fails to address the question as to why his music endures beyond the time and place in which he lived, or how it connects with huge numbers of people. Is this only due to a social and political construction of belief in his genius, which serves elites, and nothing to do with the popular appeal of the music?’ (201) This point is generalisable across the arts and might equally be applied to the work of William Shakespeare or the paintings of John Constable.
130 Toynbee, ‘Music, Culture, and Creativity’, 104.
concludes that music ‘needs to be understood as an ensemble of coded voices.’132
Mastery of the coded voices and the systems used to organise them into a comprehensible dialogue is what constitutes the competent social author. Such competence will mean authors are able to meet ‘a minimum threshold of stylistic accomplishment. However,’ Toynbee cautions, ‘this does not necessarily amount to creativity.’ Sometimes what listeners identify as creative in a work is in fact a relationship between that work and a stylistic norm. ‘This [relationship] may involve transcendence of the norm, or even, in the case of avant-‐garde
aesthetics, its transgression. But just as often, the work will strive to implement or express the norm completely. This is a centripetal tendency where what is at stake is crystallization of a style.’133
I would agree with Toynbee that, when creative practice is guided by the stylistic norms of an idiom, creativity is limited (and perhaps not present at all if the work simply crystallises the elements of the style). Toynbee suggests that possibilities for expressions of greater creativity do occur, but that they are toward the outside of the radius of creativity (i.e. remote from the generally agreed characteristics of the genre). Such an occurrence may be transgressive, but will still need to use coded voices that are meaningful if the work is to be acceptable to those who encounter it. What is not clear from Toynbee’s account is whether these coded utterances will be from within the argot of the style or genre in question, or from outside of it but still recognisable to the audience. I would suggest that incursions from outside of a domain are more often than not a pre-‐requisite for transgressive creative acts (as ‘combination creativity’) although when Margaret Boden’s ‘transformational creativity’ occurs that coded voice may just as well originate within the genre, albeit altered in some
fundamental way (Boden’s terms are more precisely defined later in this
chapter).134 When creative choices are genuinely eccentric, it is the combination
132 Toynbee, ‘Music, Culture, and Creativity’, 105. Once again, this principle is generalisable and
might apply to any group creativity including improvised theatre practice, some team sports, conversation and so forth.
133 Toynbee, ‘Music, Culture, and Creativity’, 105.
134 Boden, ‘Creativity: How does it work?’ The contrast between combination and
transformational creativity in the work of a single artist will illuminate this distinction in the case studies that follow.
of the surprising with the familiar, or the transformation of the unexpected to correspond somehow with the familiar (or vice versa) that yields the creative insight.135 Toynbee makes the point that choices of this kind are often made by
social authors who are in the field but not necessarily conditioned by it and proposes Hector Berlioz as an example: a composer whose less than adequate training in composition led him to make less than conventional choices, and which in turn led to something new. From the world of fine arts, painter Jean-‐ Michel Basquiat is another example: a graffiti artist untrained in the academy, yet who produced work that continues to be celebrated by the field.
Toynbee’s model is extremely useful for describing some of the kinds of creativity that we will examine in this study, and is consonant with the inclusive view of creativity Negus and Pickering adopt.136 These writers propose a model
that explicitly makes room for both inclusive and exclusive definitions of creativity and so is sufficiently open to accommodate modest (little c) creative work of the kind Toynbee is primarily concerned with – that achieved using shop-‐worn materials in what might be considered routine ways – and
exceptional (Big-‐C) creativity. Of particular relevance to this study, their model suggests that exceptional or paradigm-‐shifting creativity depends upon routine (‘little-‐c’) work.