More about those 2010 statistics

Following the interest in our league tables for 2010, here is some more data. There's some more detail on the profile of the composers whose works were performed in 2010, a note about concert times (with a challenge to promoters) and some lists of the top works in different categories.

Forever young - concerts by date of birth of the composer

The chart below is grouped by the decade in which the composer was born: the blue line shows the number of composers born in that decade whose works were played in concert, while the green line shows the number of concerts featuring them. To make the chart easier to read, I've left out anything before 1600.

The basic trend is fairly obvious: most music played is by composers born before 1880, after which the amount falls off steeply. However, the number of composers represented increases until around 1950.

In other words, a large number of living composers get a small number of performances each. Anyone born in the 1960s or later, though, doesn't get much of a look-in - the highest numbers are for Eric Whitacre (with 31 concerts) and Thomas Adès (with 26). Compared to Beethoven's 1,576, there's obviously a long way to go before our current composers make that kind of impact on performance schedules.

But the graph by date, it turns out, doesn't tell you much about musical style. Here's part of the table the graph came from, showing the names of composers who had more than 50 concerts each:

Two things strike me. The first is quite how few composers we listen to from the time of Mozart and Beethoven. It's as if those two giants grabbed all of our attention for music of that period, leaving no room for any others. The second is that after about 1860, a composer's date of birth doesn't tell you much about his style - Piazzolla was born in the same decade as Ligeti, Villa-Lobos in the same decade as Webern.

The main subject of discussion seems to be the well-aired one of "is classical music dying", which has a tendency to reduce to the opposing camps of "Schoenberg set classical music on the path of the future" and "Classical music all started to go wrong with Schoenberg". The basic numbers say that the amounts of 19th century and 20th/21st century music played are not all that dissimilar, but that's not really enough information: the 20th century produced a lot of music in a wide variety of styles.

To really understand what's going on with musical styles and tastes, some deeper categorisation is needed, certainly at the level of the composer, and perhaps even at the level of individual works. For the benefit of anyone who wants to have a go at this, I've published the 2010 league tables raw data as an Excel spreadsheet. You'll need to register to download it, but once you've done so, the data should be suitable for you to do pivot tables to your heart's content.

It's Too Late - About concert times

Here's a table of the times of day at which concerts start. I've excluded free concerts, which would add around two thirds to the lunchtime number.

It astonishes me that the vast majority of concerts are put on at 7:30pm (35%) or 8pm (26%), since these are the worst times, it seems to me, for most concertgoers. Generally speaking, you want to fit a concert around the time at which you end work and the time you have dinner. Therefore, either you want the concert to start immediately after work (with time to have a relaxed evening meal afterwards), or you want a later concert, giving you time to get home and put the kids to bed (or if you don't have kids, have a drink and a bite beforehand).

Cinemas get this right: their weekday showings are often clustered around 6pm and 9pm, with some staggering to improve handling of ticket queues at multiplexes. Rock and Jazz venues also get this right simply by starting late (which may, of course, be due to the average rock musician being a fairly nocturnal creature). Classical music and live theatre, in my view, get it badly wrong by insisting on a 7:30 or 8pm start. The only people for whom this works best are the minority who work moderately late (but not extremely so), or those who have long journeys both from work to the concert hall and home afterwords.

So if any concert promoters are reading this, can someone explain why it's done this way?

My Favourite Things - lots of top 10 or top 20 lists

The usual caveats apply: this data comes from all the concerts that were input into our database. This is NOT a random sample of all concerts across the world, so if you are drawing a conclusion from this data, you have to consider the extent to which there may be correlation between whatever feature you're looking at and the bias of the sorts of concerts which get put into Bachtrack.com.

David Karlin
27th January 2011