PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

4. THE RISE AND FALL OF CREATIVITY
scholars? Would I thus be inflating Mozart’s work unfairly? I needed a
more objective criterion to decide which ones of Mozart’s compositions
were worthy of consideration.
Posing this question to musicians, I found that the work had already
been done by the Austrian musicographer Ludwig Koechel (1800–
1877), who studied and catalogued Mozart’s works in a way that is universally
accepted today. Every “worthy” composition of Mozart carries
a K number, according to Koechel’s classification. Koechel used numbers
all the way to 626, but there are only 568 works indisputably
attributed to Mozart today. 2
MOZART DIES OF OLD AGE
• • •
It is Vienna, 1791. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is frantically
composing in his sickbed. He has been ill for some time
with an undiagnosed disease. He has been composing all
along; even more so ever since he fell ill. His illness and rate
of composition are going hand in hand. They both intensify.
He is only thirty-five years old and has had a brilliant musical
career. His wife is deeply worried. She helps in whatever way
she can with the music scores and with the sickness, and she
wonders about her husband. Is he going to live or die? The
doctors are perplexed. Whom can she ask? Who can tell her
the future? Exhausted, she slips into a chair and instantly falls
asleep.
Back into the future: Geneva, 1987. A VAX-8800 is cranking
data through a four-parameter, Chi-squared minimization
fit to a logistic function. The data are all Mozart compositions
carrying a Koechel number. The fit turns out to be successful.
An S-curve is found that passes impressively close to all thirtyone
yearly points representing the cumulative number of compositions.
There are two little irregularities, however; one on
each end.
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