Here is a short festive quiz based on the lyrics of the top 30 carols on the carols.org.uk website. The challenge is to identify the carol from words that appear only in the lyrics of that carol and no other. So “merrily”, for example, only appears in one carol (clue: Ding Dong). It is just for fun – there is no prize other than a smug feeling and whatever you decide to reward yourself with!
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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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This article in the series covering the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset looks at composers. As previously discussed, composers can be identified as the names preceding a “Genre” code in the list of entries in the dataset’s “Programme” field. In most cases they can also be associated with the genre of the work in question (and sometimes the precise work can be identified, although this information is quite patchy).
Continue reading →A recent addition to the Concert Datasets page is Operabase, a database of over 500,000 opera performances worldwide since 2004. I plan to look at this data more closely in a future article, but for now, I thought it would be interesting to see if opera performances follow a power law.1
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This article looks at the types of repertoire included in eighteenth-century London concerts. As discussed in the first article of this series, information on the works performed is encoded, in a complicated way, in the “programme” field of the dataset.
The data is based on concert advertisements in newspapers, so there is considerable variation in the detail provided. Some advertisements spell out details of all of the works and who will perform them, but it is more typical for the focus to be on the performers, with the works often vaguely specified, such as “a concerto by Handel” (if you are lucky, it will say what instrument it is for).
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This article in the series exploring the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset looks at when the concerts were held. This covers questions such as in which decade or year they took place, at what point during the year, on which days of the week, and at what times of day? And how did this vary according to the type of concert?
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In this article about the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset, I will look in more detail at the prices of concert tickets.
The published data has multiple prices and categories listed in single cells of the spreadsheet. This needs to be parsed before it can be used for statistical analysis.
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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.
The first article in this series looked at how to get the data on Eighteenth Century London Concerts into a more usable form, and the second geocoded the locations and classified the venues by type. In this third article, we will start the analysis of the data by looking in more detail at the distribution of concert venues.
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In the previous article looking at Simon McVeigh’s “Calendar of London Concerts 1750-1800“, I considered how to organise the data to make it suitable for statistical analysis. In this second article, I will add to the dataset by identifying the exact locations of the concert venues.
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