Well, Somerset Maugham said that you cannot write well unless you write much, but I wonder about that composer data. Debussy and Ravel do not seem to have been especially prolific, but what they produced is almost always of high quality. Mahler wrote comparatively few large-scale works. Wallace Stevens's collected poems fills a single large volume.
To learn a craft, presumably you need to practise. But it all depends upon how you define quantity. Someone may write all day long yet discard much of what they've written. Take James Joyce, for example. Was he prolific?
ReplyDeleteThe divine Mozart? (prolific his middle name, in addition to Amadeus).
ReplyDeleteEven more interesting about Mozart is the fact that he didn't just toss it off. He was annoyed when people thought that, in fact. He worked hard at his music.
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