The labour that dare not speak its name

The is chapter argues that to understand the distributed nature of musical creativity we need to examine its connection to large-scale social structure and to capitalist relations of labour. These relations have a ‘downward’ causal impact on creative acts. Firstly, this is through the division of labour, which plays out in different ways across genres from classical to pop. Secondly, creative musical labour involves engagement with the concrete, material world. The distributed nature of creativity is determined not only by the drive to divide or consolidate music-making tasks but also depends on the nature of the musical materials to hand, and methods of dealing with them. Two methods are described in this chapter: translation and intensification. Each (sometimes they are combined) entails the making of relatively autonomous creative choices which are emergent from the structural and material conditions of musical labour.