Taking creativity seriously: Developing as a researcher and teacher of songwriting

Abstract

This article provides a brief overview of extant scholarly songwriting literature as well as accounting for the broader research into creativity, primarily from psychology and sociology. It outlines work from popular music studies that focuses on creativity before zooming in closer to studies directly addressing songwriting. Combining this research tradition with the wealth of primarily anecdotal, non-academic material about songwriting, this article then sets out an autoethnographic account of the author’s own development as a teacher of songwriting with reference to how my scholarly and musical work has informed the development of my own teaching of songwriting.