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Paul McCartney’s Major Creative Collaborators: John Lennon and the Creative System

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Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture ((PASCC))

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Abstract

This chapter in Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice: The Beatles and Beyond, emphasises a multifactorial and confluence-based view of creativity that demonstrates how both Paul McCartney and John Lennon contributed individually and significantly to the songwriting output of The Beatles and, importantly, that the overall success of the songs they were credited with was attributable to a largely collaborative system at work. In the beginning both McCartney and Lennon acquired the skills and knowledge of the symbol system and this extensive knowledge of songs of all types provided, in Bourdieu’s terms, the possibilities of action for them but while they both shared a major context for the acquisition of this musical material, each absorbed it within his own idiosyncratic way. Both had an evident set of interactions between the standards and traditions of a structured domain of musical knowledge and they also had significant interactions with the many operatives who exist in the arena of social contestation, that is, the field of popular music, which includes publishers, managers, record producers, engineers and fellow musicians, and the individual songwriters who formed the collaborative partnership of this creative system. This partnership was both enabled and constrained by the structural factors of the domain and the arena of social contestation that is the field of popular music, which afforded this creative pair to produce some of their best work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Creative Industries, University of Newcastle Australia, Newcastle, NSW, Australia

    Phillip McIntyre

  2. Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

    Paul Thompson

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  1. Phillip McIntyre
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  2. Paul Thompson
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Correspondence to Phillip McIntyre .

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McIntyre, P., Thompson, P. (2021). Paul McCartney’s Major Creative Collaborators: John Lennon and the Creative System. In: Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79100-1_5

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