Revisiting the 10-Year Rule for Composers From the Great American Songbook: On the Validity of Two Measures of Creative Production

Although genius-level creativity is sometimes associated with leaps away from ordinary cognition, evidence suggests otherwise. Here we present analyses of the careers of 5 important composers from the Great American Songbook: Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers. Using those composers as test cases, we evaluated the 10-Year Rule hypothesis for creativity-high-quality creative products emerge only after a long period of immersion within the field. We employed a panel-model approach, an analytic model for cross-sectional, time-series datasets used within the field of econometrics. We found evidence to support the hypothesis in the cases of all 5 composers. More importantly, we showed strong convergent validity between 2 citation indices for composers, 1 compiled from a Web based database, and the other compiled from citations in reference books. We also tested this against a third metric, length of Broadway show run, which also converged. This means that crowd-sourced information and expert opinions on the quality of songs from this era converge, and that both show evidence that composers indeed improved as their careers progressed.