LAUSR

There is a lot of talk these days about human capacity for productivity, career longevity, and peak performance. In an article that appeared in the The Washington Post this past June, columnist Christopher Ingraham introduced readers to the Dutch economist Philip Hans Franses (Ingraham, 2016). Franses has been analyzing the creative output of individuals working in a range of fields in hopes of identifying when they typically reach their productive peak or produce their highest quality work. He determined that Nobel Prize–winning writers, for example, produce their most outstanding work around an average age of 45, modern art painters typically reach a creative zenith when they are about 42, and classical composers produce their most iconic pieces at roughly 39 years of age (Franses, 2013, 2014, 2016). While there are some notable outliers and late bloomer exceptions (e.g., American composer Charles Ives and painter Edward Hopper), most people engaged in creative work at the highest levels appear to “peak” in their late 30s or early 40s—at around 60% of their life span. Do these peak performance metrics apply to music education researchers? Several studies of researcher eminence and citation frequency have been conducted over the past 30 years, but I am not certain anyone has considered whether there are definable phases or a prototypical arc to music education researcher careers. While the quantity and quality of work produced by various music education researchers might always be measured and compared, perhaps more attention should be paid to institutional factors and shifting professional mores that influence research career productivity and longevity? And if members of our researcher community do tend to achieve a creative peak slightly before or around age 45, then what accomplishments might one aspire to in the later stages of a higher education career? There is no doubt that research productivity may be either facilitated or inhibited by personal dispositions and work habits, but work contexts and lived realities also come into play. Research, at its core, is a creative process. Researchers bring creativity to their conceptualization of a theory or problem, they employ creativity in designing a study, they may adopt creative approaches to analyzing data (while avoiding ethical