Professional Song-Writing: Creativity, in collaboration, and tensions between higher education song-writing and industry practice

Musical creativity has been scrutinised from a variety of perspectives (See Burnard, 2012), however, research into the creation of the song itself remains limited (Bennett, 2013). This chapter presents research that explores the creative process of songwriting. Two contrasting perspectives are considered; a professional songwriting team and a student songwriting team, both working to the same real-world brief. Key findings reveal that both teams worked in a similar way in terms of the procedure of songwriting, however, there were great differences in the way that each team searched for and selected ideas, and evaluated the emerging song. We question why these differences occurred, offering a discussion of the context and role of songwriting in the curriculum in relation to the growing trend placing entrepreneurialism and creativity at the centre of Higher Education (HE) agendas (Odena & Welch, 2013).