Career Development in Two Seminal American Songwriters: A Test of the Equal Odds Rule

Abstract

This study investigated the pattern of lifetime creative productivity for two seminal American songwriters: Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. Earlier research has provided conflicting findings concerning the quality of creative output over the careers of classical musicians. In order to attempt to resolve the discrepancy between those findings, a quantitative case-study methodology was employed, using recording counts as a measure of quality of output across periods in each composer's career. In addition, the ratio of major works to minor works was calculated, to determine whether the quality of output changed across each composer's career. Results demonstrated that each composer's career was marked by an initial lull in quality of output, followed by a sharp and sustained increase in quality. Furthermore, in both cases, no significant correlation was found between the number of major and minor works. The results provided support an expertise-based account of creative productivity. Implications are discussed.

Quantitative case-studies in musical composition: the development of creativity in popular-songwriting teams

“…Despite some variation, the early collaborative career of the Gershwin team was marked by initial lulls in hit ratio, followed by substantial increases. That result is consistent with results reported by Hass and Weisberg (2009), and more generally supports the 10-year rule of creative development. Comparison of the two curves in Figure 6, and the analysis comparing the years in which George worked both with Ira and other lyricists, illustrate that George's work before teaming up with Ira lacked the consistent success rate of their collaborative efforts, and is further evidence of a long period of creative development for Gershwin as a composer of popular music.…”

Creative thought as blind-variation and selective-retention: Combinatorial models of exceptional creativity

“…Any singular realization may depart from those expectations (see, e.g., [54]). This possibility is analogous to what happens when someone conducts multiple experiments where an unbiased coin is flipped a dozen times.…”

Debating the BVSR Theory of Creativity: Comments on Dasgupta (2011) and Gabora (2011)

“…That regrettable mistake was the supposed theoretical basis for the ''constant-probabilityof-success model'' (Simonton, 1988a) and later ''equal-odds rule'' (Simonton, 1997) that connected quantity and quality of product output (cf. Hass & Weisberg, 2009;Kozbelt, 2008). That gross error is no longer to be found in my more recent work (Simonton, 2010a(Simonton, , 2011a(Simonton, , 2011b.…”