# "Lazy" composers?



## Abraham Lincoln (Oct 3, 2015)

Out of curiosity, are there any composers who can be considered lazy or extremely laid-back? 

So...yeah. That's all! Thanks in advance!


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Mussorgsky, but he was more "depressed alcoholic" than flat out lazy. His friends always had to encourage him to compose more.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Rossini? Retired at the age of 38 apart from a few 'sins of old age'


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## Guest (Dec 2, 2015)

On a bad day (a very, very, very, very, bad day) Beethoven was a bit lazy. 
The proof, M'Lud? Exhibit 13A, the infamous Battle Symphony ! 
I can easily imagine good old Louis wrote that one whilst sitting on his thunder box, pondering how to make a quick dollar.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Anatoly Liadov was notoriously lazy. Very small catalog.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

DavidA said:


> Rossini? Retired at the age of 38 apart from a few 'sins of old age'


It could be argued that he shoehorned a lifetime's amount of work into a period of less than 20 years. There are numerous theories as to why he lost the motivation to carry on but taking a back seat away from the pressures of the opera house may actually have saved his health.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Did Mozart procrastinate playing billiards a lot, or is that just apocryphal?


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## TwoPhotons (Feb 13, 2015)

Tchaikovsky thought of Glinka as a laid-back composer, who composed a few masterpieces but could've written a lot more:



> Sometimes inspiration slips away and refuses to be caught. However, I consider it to be the artist's duty never to give in, since laziness is very strong in people. There's nothing worse for an artist than to succumb to laziness. Inspiration is a guest who doesn't like to drop in on those who are lazy. It comes to those who summon it. Perhaps the Russian national character is faulted, not without reason, for a lack of original creativity precisely because the Russian is lazy par excellence. The Russian likes to put things off. He is talented by nature, but it is by nature, too, that he suffers from a lack of will-power and endurance. It is necessary, nay, essential to overcome oneself in order not to lapse into dilettantism, which even such a colossal talent as Glinka suffered from. This man, who was endowed with tremendous, original creative powers, lived if not till old age, then certainly till he was well into his years of maturity, and yet he wrote surprisingly little. Read his Memoirs. You will see from them that he worked like a dilettante, i.e. by fits and starts, when he happened to be in the mood for it. No matter how much we take pride in Glinka, we must nevertheless admit that he did not fulfil the task which was incumbent on him, bearing in mind his astonishing gifts. Both his operas, in spite of amazing and truly original beauties, are marred by a striking unevenness, as a result of which alongside passages of genius and unfading beauty we come across utterly childish and naïve numbers. But what would have been if this man had been born into a different milieu, if he had lived under different conditions, if he had worked like an artist, conscious of his strength and of the duty to perfect his gifts as far as possible, rather than as a dilettante who composes music for want of anything better to do!


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## Grizzled Ghost (Jun 10, 2015)

I think Dukas was a bit pokey.


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## Abraham Lincoln (Oct 3, 2015)

TalkingHead said:


> On a bad day (a very, very, very, very, bad day) Beethoven was a bit lazy.
> The proof, M'Lud? Exhibit 13A, the infamous Battle Symphony !
> I can easily imagine good old Louis wrote that one whilst sitting on his thunder box, pondering how to make a quick dollar.


...I see what you did there.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Weston said:


> Did Mozart procrastinate playing billiards a lot, or is that just apocryphal?


Mozart was a very hard worker, and it's only from the point of view of his productivity-obsessed father that he could be deemed the slightest bit lazy.


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## Guest (Dec 2, 2015)

This great composer might have looked it, but looks are notoriously deceiving...


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

I believe Richard Strauss was considered a bit lazy (or just uninterested) as a conductor. I've read stories about him rushing through concerts so he could get the card game started back stage. 

But i don't get the impression he was a lazy composer.


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> Anatoly Liadov was notoriously lazy. Very small catalog.


Well, his catalog is not so small in fact. He wrote a rather sizable amount of piano music, among other things.
-->http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...dov&qid=1449078126&ref_=sr_1_4&s=music&sr=1-4
-->https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Lyadov
And besides, he was a very busy man.

Speaking of laziness, which I'm sure it's not the whole story in many instances, *Ives* wrote very little after the 1920s. Another candidate is well, *Glazunov*. I love his music and there's no mistaken of the esteem I have of him (he wrote a huge body of works and with fairly consistent solid quality). I do think, however, that his music would have benefitted a bit had he revised a number of his compositions for greater depth or profundity (or breadth as Tchaikovsky once put it to him) rather than resorting to some of the formulaic in rhetoric and expressive devices. Then again, a number of (Russian) composers had that problem.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Orfeo said:


> Well, his catalog is not so small in fact. He wrote a rather sizable amount of piano music, among other things.


How is his piano music?


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> How is his piano music?


It's wonderful, but not ambitious. Shows a keen musical mind, that wasn't interested in troubling itself with larger forms.


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> How is his piano music?


I agree with Clavichorder. Also, temperamentally speaking, he's like Sauer and Balakirev with some tantalizing piano writing, but not as penetrating as, say, Rebikov, Catoire, Blumenfeld, and of course, Rachmaninoff & Scriabin. In some ways, he's more appealing than Tchaikovsky for the instrument because of, in part, the lucid quality of his writing, much like Glazunov's, and yet less ranting as too many of Tchaikovsky's piano pieces.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

I think Eric Satie is a good candidate. He had musical perceptions that were keen, and he was highly creative, but he wasn't hauling a very heavy load.

Regarding Lyadov, here is some really good stuff of his:


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

I read once that Rossini was extremely lazy. If a page of his manuscript fell behind the desk while he was writing, he wouldn't bother getting down on his hands and knees to pick it up -- he'd just recompose the page.

But I'm not sure if that's laziness or something else entirely.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Abel Decaux
Earned the label "composer", yet spent an entire life composing 4 small piano pieces, 1 set of variations for piano, 1 song, 1 organ Fughetta, plus some transcriptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Decaux
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Decaux


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

I'm fascinated with those artistic types who do some really small amount of excellent work, that they spent a long time working with on and off. I think I'm a little like that myself.


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

clavichorder said:


> I think Eric Satie is a good candidate. He had musical perceptions that were keen, and he was highly creative, but he wasn't hauling a very heavy load.
> 
> Regarding Lyadov, here is some really good stuff of his:


And this:
Anatoly Liadov - Deux morceaux, Op.24 - No. II, Berceuse
-Olga Solovieva, piano.




My heart simply melts whenever I hear it.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

About Rossini, when Donizetti was asked if Rossini really composed "The Barber" in a fortnight. "Oh, I quite believe it," said Donizetti; "he has always been such a lazy fellow."

In a similar vein to the story about Rossini writing a new page rather than picking up a dropped page, there is this about Heitor Villa Lobos: 
_Because Villa-Lobos dashed off compositions in feverish haste and preferred writing new pieces to revising and correcting already completed ones, numerous slips of the pen, miscalculations, impracticalities or even impossibilities, imprecise notations, uncertainty in specification of instruments, and other problems inescapably remain in the printed scores of the Bachianas, and require performers to take unusual care to decipher what the composer actually intended. In the frequent cases where both the score and the parts are wrong, the recordings made by the composer are the only means of determining what the composer actually intended._ ... and that assumes that he even remembered what he wanted and wasn't improvising!


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## tortkis (Jul 13, 2013)

Scelsi, who relied on his assistants to make scores from his improvisations?


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## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

I don't think there are too many lazy composers out there. I mean, if you're lazy, composing music is the last vocation you'd want to pursue.


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## Gouldanian (Nov 19, 2015)

Morimur said:


> I don't think there are too many lazy composers out there. I mean, if you're lazy, composing music is the last vocation you'd want to pursue.


Well... maybe not the last


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Weston said:


> Did Mozart procrastinate playing billiards a lot, or is that just apocryphal?


I suspect he composed _while_ playing billiards.


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

violadude said:


> Mussorgsky, but he was more "depressed alcoholic" than flat out lazy. His friends always had to encourage him to compose more.


In mother Russia, music *is* drink! до нижней странице!


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Orfeo said:


> Another candidate is well, *Glazunov*. I love his music and there's no mistaken of the esteem I have of him (he wrote a huge body of works and with fairly consistent solid quality). I do think, however, that his music would have benefitted a bit had he revised a number of his compositions for greater depth or profundity (or breadth as Tchaikovsky once put it to him) rather than resorting to some of the formulaic in rhetoric and expressive devices. Then again, a number of (Russian) composers had that problem.


Interesting theory as to why he didn't revise things. Glazunov was like Mozart in that he wrote instantly what he had in his head with very little brainstorming beforehand, so there are very few sketchbooks and stuff other than the main manuscript. HOWEVER, when he was younger he had tons of sketchbooks and diaries that he didn't use for composition, but for composition _practice_. And that I can say definitely isn't a sign of a lazy composer, but in fact a composer who really worked out his technique so that he'd never have to practice sketches later in life, and instead learned to let go of his past. But that's just me speaking. :tiphat:

About Liadov, yes... there are many stories to tell...


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> Interesting theory as to why he didn't revise things. Glazunov was like Mozart in that he wrote instantly what he had in his head with very little brainstorming beforehand, so there are very few sketchbooks and stuff other than the main manuscript. HOWEVER, when he was younger he had tons of sketchbooks and diaries that he didn't use for composition, but for composition _practice_. And that I can say definitely isn't a sign of a lazy composer, but in fact a composer who really worked out his technique so that he'd never have to practice sketches later in life, and instead learned to let go of his past. But that's just me speaking. :tiphat:
> 
> About Liadov, yes... there are many stories to tell...


And plus, he was sort of pressured (at least earlier on) to compose new works for upcoming premieres just days ahead. So he was under tight deadlines. I should've mentioned that yesterday.

I may have misused the word laziness in this context. 
:tiphat:


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

No composer was lazier than Handel. He re-scored works so many times rather than create new things.


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## ribonucleic (Aug 20, 2014)

Carl Ruggles only produced 80 minutes of music in 95 years of life. That's got to be a record.


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