Toynbee — Making Popular Music

Author: Jason Toynbee
Title: Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions
Year: 2000
Type: Academic book (Arnold, London; Oxford University Press, New York)

Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions is a study by the media scholar Jason Toynbee, published by Arnold in London and Oxford University Press in New York in 2000. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on cultural production, it argues that musicians in popular music create within a “radius of creativity,” a bounded space of choices shaped by their dispositions and by the conventions of their field, and it calls the musician’s part in that process “social authorship.” Its later chapters take up what musicians do, technology and genre, and the last turns to dance music. Its publisher reports a nomination for the book prize of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Keith Negus later traced its idea of social authorship to Bourdieu and Howard Becker.

Arnold published the book in London in 2000, with Oxford University Press in New York.¹ When it appeared, Toynbee was a principal lecturer in communication, culture and media at Coventry University.² Bloomsbury reissued it in 2016, and its author note describes him as a senior lecturer in media studies at the Open University.³ The publisher’s description sets Toynbee against cultural-studies critics who reject the idea of the individual author; in its words he “suggests that creativity should be reconceived rather than abandoned.”³

Toynbee builds his account on Bourdieu’s work on cultural production. The musician-creator, “individual or collective,” he writes, “stands at the centre of a radius of creativity. The creator identifies and selects musical possibles within this radius according to her habitus, but also the rules of the field of musical production - conventions, techniques and so on.” Habitus is Bourdieu’s term for the dispositions a person acquires. The options open to the creator, Toynbee adds, are “tightly constrained.”² For the creator’s part in the process he proposes a name: “we need a new term for this function: ‘social authorship’ seems appropriate.” He also takes authorship as a “speaking position,” an answer to “a powerful criticism of the romantic conception of the artist,” namely “that he is white, ruling class and male.”²

The middle chapters are titled “Making up and showing off: what musicians do,” “Technology: the instrumental instrument” and “Genre-cultures,” and the last is “Dance music: business as usual or heaven on earth?”^{2, 3} Of genre Toynbee writes that “generic coding is inevitable. Even in the limited case of free music, which purports to be pure expression, a matrix of conventions delimits what musicians can and cannot play.” He sets out “a typology of genre-cultures: race music, crossover, mainstream and the remote canon.”²

The publisher reports that the book was nominated for the book prize of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.³ Mike Jones reviewed it in Popular Music in 2003.⁴ Keith Negus, writing on authorship and the popular song in 2011, held that the work of Bourdieu and Becker “informs” Toynbee’s use of the term “social authorship.”⁵

Key contributions

• “Social authorship”: the musician as an author whose choices are made within a social field.
• The “radius of creativity”: a bounded space of possible choices, set by the musician’s habitus and by the conventions of the field.
• Genre treated as an inevitable set of conventions, with a typology of “genre-cultures.”

See also

• Distinction — Pierre Bourdieu’s 1984 study of taste and social class
• The songwriter-performer divide — the division between writing songs and performing them
• The pop factory — the debate over industrial production in pop
• Pop as craft — the debate over pop as a craft
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music