I’m delighted that my article “A Matter of Perspective: Taking a Distant View of Music History” has just been published in the National Early Music Association Newsletter. The article sets out the case for using statistical techniques to study music history, with particular reference to early music, and specifically the Boalch Mould Online dataset of early keyboard instruments. You can read the article here.
Update (21 January 2025): The paper also got a mention on the BMO Blog.
I’m delighted to have an article “Eurovision Voting: a game of two halves” published in this month’s (April 2023) edition of Significance magazine.
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I’m delighted to have my article about power laws and musical fame and obscurity featured on the cover of this month’s Significance magazine.
It has been a pleasure to work with the editor Brian Tarran to get the article ready for publication. It is a condensed version of my longer paper Fame, Obscurity and Power Laws in Music History, published a couple of months ago.
I’m pleased to report that my article “Fame, Obscurity and Power Laws in Music History” has been published in the journal Empirical Musicology Review.
Continue reading →Christmas music is everywhere at the moment, so I thought I would look at the history of it. In the British Library Music Catalogue, of the one million or so total publications, almost 10,000 – very nearly 1% – have the words ‘Christmas’, ‘Noel’ or ‘Weihnacht’ in the title. This chart shows the proportion by publication date…
Franz Pazdírek was a Viennese music publisher who, in the first decade of the twentieth century, compiled a ‘Universal Handbook of Music Literature’ – a composite catalogue of all sheet music then in print, worldwide. This ambitious undertaking (which, perhaps not surprisingly, was never repeated) was published over six years, and resulted in nineteen 600-page volumes listing music publications by 1,400 publishers covering every continent except Antarctica. Continue reading →
The gentleman pictured to the right is Welsh composer Henry Brinley Richards.1 Although he is little-known today, his piano nocturne ‘Marie’ Opus.60 was the most published British musical work in Germany in the nineteenth century. German music lovers could purchase ‘Marie’ in its original form or in various arrangements in an impressive 34 separate publications from 27 different publishers between 1861 and 1877.2
That conclusion comes from an analysis of Hofmeister’s Monatsberichte – a monthly listing of music publications appearing in the German market, compiled by Leipzig music publisher Friedrich Hofmeister from 1829 onwards. The Monatsberichte up to the end of the nineteenth century are available as an online database, listing about a third of a million publications from over 36,000 composers. This article is about the British composers and their works that appear in Hofmeister’s listings. Continue reading →
If you go to the British Library online catalogue, search for music scores published in each year from 1650 to 1920, and plot the number of ‘hits’ by year, the result looks like this. 
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