Creativity Within Constraint: Time Horizons and Meaning Making for Contemporary Violinmakers

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 19. Production, Consumption & Evaluation in Arts Markets

Abstract

In this paper, I synthesize in-depth interviews conducted with fifteen full-time violinmakers based in Europe and the US to study meaning-making in craft fields. Sociologists have studied the meaning of work within other arts and sciences, but violinmaking is a particularly interesting lens through which to investigate this question because violins are associated with artistic production yet are simultaneously extremely constrained: a beautiful and well-functioning violin was defined 300 years ago, so violinmakers today must work within a narrow set of parameters. I assess the utility of the word “creative,” which I do not define for interviewees, to understand the time horizon within which a violinmaker understands their work. I found that some violinmakers in my study experience their craft as creative, even within these narrow parameters, while others discount the term’s utility. Furthermore, the former group tends to think on the scale of the process involved in making a single instrument; they situate their work within a relatively short temporal context. The temporal horizon that the latter group situates their work within, however, is comparatively long: they tend to think in terms of progress made over a career. Following Kuhn’s theory of puzzle solving in normal science, I conclude that violinmakers make meaning of their work within time horizons that depend on the scale of the puzzle they define. The subjects of my study define puzzles at different levels of abstraction, which in turn imbue their craft with meaning. These data demonstrate that people who appear to be working within the same constraints in the same sociological position nonetheless vary in their understandings of the meaning of their work. Further research could investigate whether defining puzzles makes meaning in other crafts as well, and whether time horizons again come into play in defining those puzzles.

Author

• Elyas Greenwald Boyan, University of Chicago