ABSTRACT
Although creativity might seem an obvious topic for the cultural study of music, little attention has been paid to it, certainly within the field of cultural studies. Perhaps the main factor has been a populist current that runs through this field as a whole (McGuigan 1992). Its logic can be set out as follows. Authorship and creativity are associated with high art; high art is elitist; therefore creativity is not an appropriate subject for cultural studies, concerned as it is with the culture of the people. Several intellectual tributaries have then strengthened this position. Structuralism, particularly important in the 1970s, focused on relations between elements in the text while ignoring the stage of production. Poststructuralism went even further. For example, in his highly influential essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes (1977) lampooned the “author-god” and argued that the meaning of literature is realized at the moment of reception rather than creation. Finally, the ethnographic tradition in cultural studies, where culture equates to way of life, has focused almost entirely on the consumption of artifacts. Interestingly, the concept of creativity does persist here, but as “symbolic creativity,” a phenomenon that animates everyday activities, like listening and dancing to music (Willis 1990). From this perspective, then, creativity is widely distributed through the cultural practices of ordinary people.
