Network Analysis of Orchestral Concert Programming

Orchestral concert programming is a challenging, yet critical task for expanding audience engagement and is usually driven by qualitative heuristics and common musical practices. Quantitative analysis of orchestral programming has been limited, but has become more possible as many orchestras archive their performance history online. The contribution of this work is to use statistical network models to quantitatively explore orchestral concert programming, focusing on which factors determine if two composers are programmed together in the same concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We find that the type of composition is the most important covariate in determining which composers are performed together and the additive and multiplicative effects are logical from an orchestral programming perspective. These results suggest that a network analysis is a promising approach for the analysis of concert programming, with several directions for future extensions.