2014-15 Orchestra Season by the Numbers
The Baltimore Symphony’s blog released an amazing infographic by Rachel Upton and Ricky O’Bannon that quantifies the 2014-15 season for 21 major symphony orchestras. It’s well-worth exploring. It shows a little more diversity than one may assume — almost 10% of the music performed was written after 2000. That’s pretty significant, though 1886 remains the average year of composition.
And among living composers performed, almost 15% were women which gets us closer to representing the actual mix of men to women in the field (although there’s still quite a ways to go).
I’d love to see someone do a similar study of the classical music aired on WTJU. I suspect there would be some significant variance. After all — we have a dedicated contemporary music program and many of our other shows also air modern music. We don’t just stick to music from German or Austrian composers either — we’ve aired a fair amount of music from South American composers, as well as those from Scandinavia, the Balkans, and even Africa, the Middle East and the Far East.
There’s nothing like hearing classical music performed live. But the sad fact is that for many composers (and many works by even the most famous composers), the only place you’re likely to hear it is on the radio. And even then, if you’re looking for real variety, there’s only one choice — WTJU. And we do our best to deliver on that claim every time we air classical music.
