Welcome to my 2nd Annual Survey of Classical Music on Radio 3 outlining the music broadcast in 2010.
As I’ve kept the survey running only a few days behind the broadcast dates this year I’ve managed to complete it fairly swiftly over the past couple of days, so here it is!
For those who weren’t familiar with the 2009 survey methods outlined on the R3 message boards, here is a brief resume:
The survey is compiled using both playlists and by listening (largely using Iplayer) and I think I managed to log almost all (95%+) of the classical music played on R3. Each extract or complete work counts as one piece broadcast ie an aria from an opera and an opera both count as one work and a song from cycle and the whole cycle count as one work. This gives a more accurate picture as firstly R3 now often prefers to play extracts and short works rather than complete works and secondly this evens things out between composers who largely only wrote large scale works such as operas and those who mainly wrote shorter. If you say on average that each piece has lasted around 10 minutes then you get some idea of the amount of actual broadcast time given to each composer so a composer with 100 works/extracts broadcast has roughly had around 16 hours of air time during 2010. For a composer like Verdi where you have had around 97 extracts and 3 full operas in every 100 works broadcast, each aria/extract averages around 4-5 minutes and each of the three operas around 150 or so minutes then you still get an overall average of around 10 minutes per extract/work played, though of course not 100% accurate this at least gives you some idea of how many broadcast hours each composer has had.
Overall Observations
1. Anniversary composers
Good years for Schumann, Chopin and Mahler as you would expect though there were far to many performances of Schumann’s Piano Quintet and Piano Concerto but Chopin’s delightful 1st Piano Concerto was surprisingly largely overlooked, especially at the expense of the dull 2nd Concerto. Samuel Barber, appears on the figures to have had a reasonable year, however these mask the reality that coverage of Barber was very lopsided with key works such as the Operas, the Piano & Cello Concerto’s, the large scale works being totally ignored (and the Piano Sonata also nearly suffering the same fate) and far too much emphasis on the Classic FM Barber of the Violin Concerto for example. Thomas Arne did quite well with over 80 pieces, but Wolf was actually down on 2009 and around a third of the works broadcast consisted of the Italian Serenade. Dohnanyi had less than 40 works/extracts which was very disappointing and poor William Schuman was almost snubbed (as I expected with RW) with just 5 works, 4 of which being his best known works which appeared during one week in November and Cherubini whom I thought R3 would have been interested in, was pitifully represented.
2. General observations
Early music still doing very well and the balance here among the composers being generally much better than for post 1700 composers. Still a tendency to favour certain French composers and a greater interest in Spanish composers in 2010. British composers outside the better known ones are still doing rather poorly, though Walton had a surprisingly good year. However the figures here mask the reality, with most of the Arnold broadcast being his light works, a considerable proportion of the Vaughan Williams being shorter popular works (his symphonies and large scale choral works still poorly represented) and almost 50% of the Holst broadcast consisting of extracts or complete performances of The Planets (mainly Jupiter). American music is also poorly represented far too much Gershwin and popular Bernstein (West Side Story & Candide extracts accounting for almost 50% of the Bernstein broadcast), apart from Adams and Barber very little else was broadcast, even Ives & Carter seem to be doing poorly. Scandinavian music too is not doing well, outside of Sibelius and Grieg. Nielsen had a very poor year and in general Scandinavian music was largely relegated to repeats of the same group of works on TTN.
3. Popular Repertoire Increase
This is one of the most obvious and most worrying continuing trends in 2010. For example nearly 50% of Bizet broadcast consisted of Carmen, around 30% of Prokofiev being Romeo & Juliet and the Classical Symphony, 15% of Dvorak the Slavonic Dances, around 18% of Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake & Sleeping Beauty and 11% of Brahms the Hungarian Dances. La Valse was played 36 times and Prelude de L’apres midi d’un faune 34 times. It was not just Breakfast and In Tune that were responsible for the popular repertoire increase, this seems to have become a staple part of Morning Collection, is appearing more regularly on Afternoon on 3 and even invading TTN more frequently than before. Another interesting fact is that over 50% of the music broadcast consists of the music of just 35 composers. Certain composers have remained as poorly represented as they were in 2009, mainly 20th century symphonists (outisde of the well-known ones), and composers such as Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Honegger, Hindemith, K A Hartmann, Panufnik, Carter, Holmboe don't seem to be much in favour with RW.
The Results
There were over 33,500 works/extracts performed in 2010 (over 1000 more than in 2009) by over 2400 composers. There were around 700 composers who featured in 2009 that didn’t feature in 2010 but 800 composers who featured in 2010 that didn’t feature in 2009. However over 860 of these composers are represented by one extract/work only and only a little over 320 composers had more than 10 works/extracts broadcast. The amount of non-classical music broadcast in programmes that are mainly considered to be classical was around the same as last year, though with the overall increase in the number of works/extracts in 2010 this showed actually showed a slight overall decline from 4% to 3.4% of the total.
As R3 now loves its charts below are the 55 composers who had over 100 works/extracts broadcast on R3 in 2010 in descending order with the 2009 position and the % increase or decrease compared to 2009 indicated (the minus indicates a percentage decrease).
Apologies but I can't get my spreadsheet to copy in to the posting or line up the columns, the information in order is as follows:
2010 position, name of composer, number of works, 2009 position and % difference from 2009
1 BACH J S 1430+ 1 11.2%
2 MOZART W A 1370+ 2 16.2%
3 BEETHOVEN 960+ 6 17.5%
4 SCHUBERT 940+ 5 2.1%
5 CHOPIN 900+ 10 67.2%
6 HANDEL 750+ 3 -30.0%
7 SCHUMANN R 710+ 12 58.8%
8 BRAHMS 700+ 9 21.4%
9 HAYDN F J 630+ 4 -40.4%
10 TCHAIKOVSKY 510+ 16 35.5%
11 DVORAK 500+ 13 18.7%
12 DEBUSSY 500+ 11 7.6%
13 MENDELSSOHN Felix 440+ 7 -39.1%
14 VIVALDI 430+ 14 2.8%
15 RAVEL 430+ 15 11.3%
16 STRAUSS R 380+ 17 4.4%
17 LISZT 330+ 22 16.7%
18 SIBELIUS 320+ 18 6.8%
19 BRITTEN 300+ 20 0.3%
20 PURCELL H 290+ 8 -51.1%
21 WAGNER 290+ 27 45.8%
22 MAHLER G 280+ 35 70.1%
23 RACHMANINOV 280+ 21 -4.8%
24 GRIEG 270+ 24 5.8%
25 ELGAR 260+ 23 -3.2%
26 TELEMANN 250+ 25 12.7%
27 STRAVINSKY 250+ 19 -16.2%
28 VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 250+ 28 28.6%
29 VERDI 240+ 30 26.6%
30 MONTEVERDI 240+ 39 73.6%
31 PROKOFIEV S 240+ 29 25.4%
32 SHOSTAKOVICH 230+ 26 12.0%
33 ROSSINI 220+ 31 15.7%
34 FAURE 220+ 32 18.9%
35 SAINT-SAENS 200+ 33 10.8%
36 BERLIOZ 200+ 36 28.5%
37 BYRD 190+ 40 44.9%
38 GERSHWIN 170+ 48 52.6%
39 BARTOK 160+ 34 -9.2%
40 SCARLATTI D 150+ 38 6.3%
41 POULENC 140+ 45 14.7%
42 STRAUSS J II 130+ 44 6.9%
43 JANACEK 130+ 37 -4.1%
44 BARBER 130+ 83 83.1%
45 RAMEAU 120+ 42 -4.5%
46 BACH C P E 120+ 47 4.2%
47 WEBER 120+ 50 8.0%
48 WALTON 120+ 61 37.5%
49 PUCCINI 120+ 53 15.4%
50 TALLIS 110+ 65 35.3%
51 SMETANA 110+ 57 19.8%
52 BIZET 110+ 55 11.1%
53 BERNSTEIN L 100+ 69 32.3%
54 MUSSORGSKY 100+ 63 23.3%
55 GRAINGER 100+ 49 -11.5%
The following six composers had over 100 works last year but less this year:
Holst -20.2%, Bruckner -15.2%, Martinu -41.4%, Corelli -21.6%, Nielsen -45.5%, Kodaly -35.8% .
I hope you find this of interest and will try and answer any questions when I’m logged into the Radio 3 Forum. My thanks must be extended to frenchfrank for these message boards and all the excellent work that has been put in to these Boards.
Best Wishes
SC
As I’ve kept the survey running only a few days behind the broadcast dates this year I’ve managed to complete it fairly swiftly over the past couple of days, so here it is!
For those who weren’t familiar with the 2009 survey methods outlined on the R3 message boards, here is a brief resume:
The survey is compiled using both playlists and by listening (largely using Iplayer) and I think I managed to log almost all (95%+) of the classical music played on R3. Each extract or complete work counts as one piece broadcast ie an aria from an opera and an opera both count as one work and a song from cycle and the whole cycle count as one work. This gives a more accurate picture as firstly R3 now often prefers to play extracts and short works rather than complete works and secondly this evens things out between composers who largely only wrote large scale works such as operas and those who mainly wrote shorter. If you say on average that each piece has lasted around 10 minutes then you get some idea of the amount of actual broadcast time given to each composer so a composer with 100 works/extracts broadcast has roughly had around 16 hours of air time during 2010. For a composer like Verdi where you have had around 97 extracts and 3 full operas in every 100 works broadcast, each aria/extract averages around 4-5 minutes and each of the three operas around 150 or so minutes then you still get an overall average of around 10 minutes per extract/work played, though of course not 100% accurate this at least gives you some idea of how many broadcast hours each composer has had.
Overall Observations
1. Anniversary composers
Good years for Schumann, Chopin and Mahler as you would expect though there were far to many performances of Schumann’s Piano Quintet and Piano Concerto but Chopin’s delightful 1st Piano Concerto was surprisingly largely overlooked, especially at the expense of the dull 2nd Concerto. Samuel Barber, appears on the figures to have had a reasonable year, however these mask the reality that coverage of Barber was very lopsided with key works such as the Operas, the Piano & Cello Concerto’s, the large scale works being totally ignored (and the Piano Sonata also nearly suffering the same fate) and far too much emphasis on the Classic FM Barber of the Violin Concerto for example. Thomas Arne did quite well with over 80 pieces, but Wolf was actually down on 2009 and around a third of the works broadcast consisted of the Italian Serenade. Dohnanyi had less than 40 works/extracts which was very disappointing and poor William Schuman was almost snubbed (as I expected with RW) with just 5 works, 4 of which being his best known works which appeared during one week in November and Cherubini whom I thought R3 would have been interested in, was pitifully represented.
2. General observations
Early music still doing very well and the balance here among the composers being generally much better than for post 1700 composers. Still a tendency to favour certain French composers and a greater interest in Spanish composers in 2010. British composers outside the better known ones are still doing rather poorly, though Walton had a surprisingly good year. However the figures here mask the reality, with most of the Arnold broadcast being his light works, a considerable proportion of the Vaughan Williams being shorter popular works (his symphonies and large scale choral works still poorly represented) and almost 50% of the Holst broadcast consisting of extracts or complete performances of The Planets (mainly Jupiter). American music is also poorly represented far too much Gershwin and popular Bernstein (West Side Story & Candide extracts accounting for almost 50% of the Bernstein broadcast), apart from Adams and Barber very little else was broadcast, even Ives & Carter seem to be doing poorly. Scandinavian music too is not doing well, outside of Sibelius and Grieg. Nielsen had a very poor year and in general Scandinavian music was largely relegated to repeats of the same group of works on TTN.
3. Popular Repertoire Increase
This is one of the most obvious and most worrying continuing trends in 2010. For example nearly 50% of Bizet broadcast consisted of Carmen, around 30% of Prokofiev being Romeo & Juliet and the Classical Symphony, 15% of Dvorak the Slavonic Dances, around 18% of Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake & Sleeping Beauty and 11% of Brahms the Hungarian Dances. La Valse was played 36 times and Prelude de L’apres midi d’un faune 34 times. It was not just Breakfast and In Tune that were responsible for the popular repertoire increase, this seems to have become a staple part of Morning Collection, is appearing more regularly on Afternoon on 3 and even invading TTN more frequently than before. Another interesting fact is that over 50% of the music broadcast consists of the music of just 35 composers. Certain composers have remained as poorly represented as they were in 2009, mainly 20th century symphonists (outisde of the well-known ones), and composers such as Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Honegger, Hindemith, K A Hartmann, Panufnik, Carter, Holmboe don't seem to be much in favour with RW.
The Results
There were over 33,500 works/extracts performed in 2010 (over 1000 more than in 2009) by over 2400 composers. There were around 700 composers who featured in 2009 that didn’t feature in 2010 but 800 composers who featured in 2010 that didn’t feature in 2009. However over 860 of these composers are represented by one extract/work only and only a little over 320 composers had more than 10 works/extracts broadcast. The amount of non-classical music broadcast in programmes that are mainly considered to be classical was around the same as last year, though with the overall increase in the number of works/extracts in 2010 this showed actually showed a slight overall decline from 4% to 3.4% of the total.
As R3 now loves its charts below are the 55 composers who had over 100 works/extracts broadcast on R3 in 2010 in descending order with the 2009 position and the % increase or decrease compared to 2009 indicated (the minus indicates a percentage decrease).
Apologies but I can't get my spreadsheet to copy in to the posting or line up the columns, the information in order is as follows:
2010 position, name of composer, number of works, 2009 position and % difference from 2009
1 BACH J S 1430+ 1 11.2%
2 MOZART W A 1370+ 2 16.2%
3 BEETHOVEN 960+ 6 17.5%
4 SCHUBERT 940+ 5 2.1%
5 CHOPIN 900+ 10 67.2%
6 HANDEL 750+ 3 -30.0%
7 SCHUMANN R 710+ 12 58.8%
8 BRAHMS 700+ 9 21.4%
9 HAYDN F J 630+ 4 -40.4%
10 TCHAIKOVSKY 510+ 16 35.5%
11 DVORAK 500+ 13 18.7%
12 DEBUSSY 500+ 11 7.6%
13 MENDELSSOHN Felix 440+ 7 -39.1%
14 VIVALDI 430+ 14 2.8%
15 RAVEL 430+ 15 11.3%
16 STRAUSS R 380+ 17 4.4%
17 LISZT 330+ 22 16.7%
18 SIBELIUS 320+ 18 6.8%
19 BRITTEN 300+ 20 0.3%
20 PURCELL H 290+ 8 -51.1%
21 WAGNER 290+ 27 45.8%
22 MAHLER G 280+ 35 70.1%
23 RACHMANINOV 280+ 21 -4.8%
24 GRIEG 270+ 24 5.8%
25 ELGAR 260+ 23 -3.2%
26 TELEMANN 250+ 25 12.7%
27 STRAVINSKY 250+ 19 -16.2%
28 VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 250+ 28 28.6%
29 VERDI 240+ 30 26.6%
30 MONTEVERDI 240+ 39 73.6%
31 PROKOFIEV S 240+ 29 25.4%
32 SHOSTAKOVICH 230+ 26 12.0%
33 ROSSINI 220+ 31 15.7%
34 FAURE 220+ 32 18.9%
35 SAINT-SAENS 200+ 33 10.8%
36 BERLIOZ 200+ 36 28.5%
37 BYRD 190+ 40 44.9%
38 GERSHWIN 170+ 48 52.6%
39 BARTOK 160+ 34 -9.2%
40 SCARLATTI D 150+ 38 6.3%
41 POULENC 140+ 45 14.7%
42 STRAUSS J II 130+ 44 6.9%
43 JANACEK 130+ 37 -4.1%
44 BARBER 130+ 83 83.1%
45 RAMEAU 120+ 42 -4.5%
46 BACH C P E 120+ 47 4.2%
47 WEBER 120+ 50 8.0%
48 WALTON 120+ 61 37.5%
49 PUCCINI 120+ 53 15.4%
50 TALLIS 110+ 65 35.3%
51 SMETANA 110+ 57 19.8%
52 BIZET 110+ 55 11.1%
53 BERNSTEIN L 100+ 69 32.3%
54 MUSSORGSKY 100+ 63 23.3%
55 GRAINGER 100+ 49 -11.5%
The following six composers had over 100 works last year but less this year:
Holst -20.2%, Bruckner -15.2%, Martinu -41.4%, Corelli -21.6%, Nielsen -45.5%, Kodaly -35.8% .
I hope you find this of interest and will try and answer any questions when I’m logged into the Radio 3 Forum. My thanks must be extended to frenchfrank for these message boards and all the excellent work that has been put in to these Boards.
Best Wishes
SC
, well into the top 50, with an average of 3 plays per week. Distinctly hmmmm, considering the distinguished names which don't figure at all. He's a treasure for the popularisers because he genuinely straddles the fields of classical and popular (like Bernstein). The snag is that his concert hall pieces are very few, particularly considering his high placing in the list. Which pieces of his got the mosts plays, sc?
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