Creativity, Innovation and Labour in Music
A symposium

Monday June 22nd – symposium, 9.30 – 5.00
Tuesday June 23rd – workshop on developing a network, 9.30 – 11.30

The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
Central Meeting Rooms

Organisers
Dot Miell, Mark Doffman, Mark Banks, Jason Toynbee, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open
University
Raymond MacDonald, Department of Psychology, Glasgow Caledonian University

Interdisciplinary research into music at the intersection of creativity, innovation and labour is an
emerging topic that presents many challenges for researchers. For example:

• the theme of labour calls attention to musical work, economic exploitation and the everyday
processes of music making,

• innovation takes in the problem of the nature of the new in different genres, but also
questions of how musical innovation gets evaluated, rewarded or ignored,

• and creativity gestures towards issues of origination and emergence, artifice and authenticity,
the individual and the collective.

This symposium brings together experts from across the disciplines in order to develop a more
coherent analysis of how these themes converge. The format consists of a series of presentations
each followed by discussion with the aim of advancing our understanding of the topic, and
establishing an informal research network to take things forward – a workshop on the Tuesday
morning is to plan next steps.

Speakers
Martin Cloonan, Glasgow University – Creating live music: an industrial perspective

Don Knox, Glasgow Caledonian University – Who are we innovating for? The need for
interdisciplinary input in setting goals for music information retrieval

Bennett Hogg, University of Newcastle – Working through the new

Fabian Holt, University of Roskilde – Creativity and innovation in contemporary live music
production

Matt Stahl, University of Western Ontario – Recording artists, employment, domination and
democratization

It is vital that tomorrow’s superstars and young musicians have somewhere to ply their craft, somewhere to play and that communities have a place to gather together.

From this BBC report.