Abstract
On a wintery evening in November 1966, The Beatles arrived at EMI’s Abbey Road to begin work on what would become ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (1967). Over the course of four weeks, The Beatles recorded a further 25 takes each with a different approach, or an alternate arrangement, sometimes at different tempos or even in different musical keys. In doing so, John Lennon and George Martin were appraising each of the track’s alternative takes, selecting some performances over others. This chapter briefly outlines the theoretical framework used throughout this book to explore the creative process of commercial record production and presents the idea that creativity occurs through the interaction between an agent, a knowledge system and their related social context (Csikszentmihalyi 1997). Creative products, such as records, are therefore result of a creative system in action (McIntyre 2012).
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Notes
- 1.
These ideas are explored in more depth in the following chapter.
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Recordings Cited
The Beatles. (1967). ‘I Am the Walrus’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, Magical Mystery Tour. Parlophone.
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Thompson, P. (2019). Introduction. In: Creativity in the Recording Studio. Leisure Studies in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01650-0_1
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