Being Prolific

Lynn ruminates a bit on Alan Hohvanhess, the American composer of mystical bent who produced quite a lot of music. LOTS of music. The man was a fountain of music. Lynn's point of concentration is on the question of whether producing a large output necessarily means that the quality of that output suffers.

The answer is, of course, Yes. Except for when the answer is No.

It's tempting to scoff at the very idea of balancing prolificity with quality. "Look at Mozart!" we think. "As Kochel counted them, old Wolfgang A. produced 626 pieces in just 35 years, and the vast majority of those pieces are of high quality, with some being among the greatest musical works ever produced! QED!" And yes, those who argue against the idea that being prolific gets in the way of being good run into trouble here: they either have to discard their thesis, or argue that maybe the corpus of Mozart's work really isn't that good, after all. "Well, really -- maybe you'll regularly hear six or seven of the symphonies, but who cares about the other thirty-four? And yeah, Die Zauberflote and Le Nozze di Figaro are genius, but is anyone banging down the doors at the Met to get the good seats when they dust off Idomeneo?"

Of course, that argument doesn't get very far. Fact is, most folks will scoff at any argument whose crucial thesis lies in positing Mozart as fully subject to Sturgeon's Law as anyone else. And that provides the answer, really: Mozart's the freakish exception. Surely there were other prolific composers of Mozart's day -- how much music did poor Salieri write? -- but those guys' scores gather dust, while Mozart still lives on. So, maybe you can be prolific and good. But to pull that off, you merely have to be a genius.

I recall an essay I once read by Isaac Asimov, in which he described the life of a prolific writer. I seem to recall him implying that quality was, in fact, a secondary concern to the prolific person, but then, Dr. Asimov often wrote his essays from a tongue-in-cheek standpoint. Did Asimov produce some great work? Absolutely. Did he also produce some clunkers? Yup. So, I suspect, did Hohvanhess.

One thing that has stuck with me from the Asimov essay was that if you're going to be a prolific writer, you have to really like writing -- and not much else besides writing. I wonder if Alan Hohvanhess liked not much else besides composition?

(I don't have any real opinion of Hohvanhess's music. I haven't particularly liked the works of his that I've heard, but I've only heard two of his works, which is, as we well know, not a representative sample. And the two works that I have heard, I listened to over five years ago. So I suspect that his work is due another listen, one of these days.)