A Bourdiesian Analysis of Songwriting Habitus

Brazilian songwriting, as well as the music from other countries, is featured by orality, intuition and tacit knowledge. The present research applies the concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) to understand the creativity of local songwriters such as Conceição Rosa Teixeira (Pelotas, Brazil, 1930-), who wrote more than one thousand sambas without knowing how to play musical instruments or music theory. Ivan Lins (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1945-), from another point of view, is a wolrd-famous Grammy winner who also highlights intuition and spontaneity in his creative processes. As pointed by several authors (Burnard, 2012; Csikszentmihalyi, 2013; McIntyre, 2016; and others), creativity is not a romantic genius phenomenon but occurs socially according to the agency of individuals. Through observing, interviewing, transcribing, performing, recording and analysing songs, the ongoing investigation develops the conept of songwriting habitus as a formulation to study popular music creative process