Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending was first performed, in a version for violin and piano, at Shirehampton Public Hall on 15th December 1920. This page gives details of that concert, based on the original programme, which is held in the Philip Napier Miles Archive in Bristol University Library.
Continue reading →Category: Case Studies
English Christmas Concerts
Concert-Diary has been advertising classical concerts since 2000, mainly in the UK, and (unlike some listings websites) allows you to go back and look at historic data. Concerts can be classified under several headings – one of which is “Christmas”, so I thought it would be interesting to look at this century’s Christmas concerts.
Continue reading →Desert Island Discs Revisited
My article on Desert Island Discs from April 2020 has been, by some margin, the most popular page on this site, in terms of number of visitors. Last year, I was approached by some researchers from the Alan Turing Institute about sharing the data with them so that they could do their own analysis. I was delighted to see this Turing Data Story appear on their website in March this year – they have updated my dataset, added further information from Wikipedia and Spotify, and looked at some different questions. Excellent stuff!
Continue reading →Christmas Number One Singles
The UK Number One Christmas single is a hotly contested honour – presumably representing a substantial number of sales for the lucky artist. Looking back at the Christmas charts reveals some interesting patterns.
Continue reading →Eurovision: Love Thy Neighbour
In the annual Eurovision Song Contest, it is well known that countries often tend to be generous in their votes for the songs of their neighbours. This article looks at the evidence for this in the 2021 competition, and uses it as an opportunity to illustrate the technique of “bootstrapping” to assess statistical significance.
Continue reading →Eurovision Voting: a likely cliff-hanger
As in several recent Eurovision Song Contest finals, this year’s competition in Rotterdam ended with a cliff-hanger, with the result being uncertain right up until the last few votes were revealed. The Italian group Måneskin finally triumphed with their song Zitti E Buoni. In this article I will discuss how the Eurovision voting system is very likely to result in uncertainty until the very last minute.
Continue reading →The Voice UK: 10 Years of Blind Auditions
A few weeks ago saw the final of the tenth series of The Voice UK – a reality TV singing competition. The first stage of The Voice consists of blind auditions, where contestants sing, unseen by the four coaches whose chairs face away from the stage. If a coach likes what they hear, they press a button to turn around. If more than one coach turns, the contestant chooses which team to join. The blind auditions finish when each coach has a team of ten. Subsequent rounds reduce the field until four remain for the final, with the winner chosen by public vote. This article looks at the blind audition rounds over the ten series.
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 9 – Advertising and Reviews
This final article in the series looking at the Calendar of London Concerts 1750-1800 dataset considers the characteristics of the information that is the source of the data on most of the concerts – the advertisements in the daily press.
Continue reading →The Impact of Covid-19 on Concerts in England
This article uses data from concert-diary to analyse the impact of this year’s Covid-19 restrictions on classical concert activity in England. The website concert-diary.com is a listing of (mainly classical) concerts, primarily in the UK. Any concert promoter is able to submit details of their events, so, whilst not covering all UK concert activity, the listings include a wide range of small and large concerts, in various formats and genres, from across the country. Historical data on the site goes back to the year 2000.
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 8 – Performers
The previous article in this series looked at the composers featuring in eighteenth century London concerts. Also encoded within the “programme” field of the dataset is information on the performers at the concerts, and they are the subject of this article.
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