The Pleasures and Perils of Genius: Mostly Mozart.

This curiously titled book is one of the least satisfactory contributions to the 1991 Mozart bicentenary to have appeared in print. It is the outcome of a conference held in San Francisco during that year, and consists of thirteen papers together with the transcription of a closing panel discussion involving performers and music administrators. My sense of dissatisfaction arises from the varied quality of the contributions and the apparent lack of a coherent structure or logic underlying the collection.

The proceedings begin with chapters from two psychologists who have studied creativity and the development of exceptional ability. Dean Simonton has ploughed a lonely furrow for many years with studies using 'historiometric' techniques, in which quantitative methods are applied to the study of genius. Unfortunately, the material on which many of the calculations in this chapter are founded is a 'melodic originality' index based on the first six notes of …