Visualizing NY Phil Performance Data

Do arts still matter in the society? Where are the positions of high arts nowadays? The high arts are always treated as detached to social changes, but is it true? In this study, I want to answer these questions by creating an interactive app visualizing NY Philharmonic performance history data.

The original dataset comes from NY Phil's Github page, and the composers’ nationalities data come from scraping Wikipedia pages on composers by nationalities. To measure the popularity of each composer, I used the percentage of the number of performance of a composer over the total number of performance of the year. The data visualization app shows some interesting trends: The percentage of German composers’ works decreased after WWII. The percentage of American composers’ works increased after WWII because of the rising nationalism. The cold war was not associated with the popularity of Russian composers’ works being performed in the US.

Wager became so popular at the end of 19th century perhaps because of Der Rheingold, yet his popularity decreased after WWII potentially because he was Hitler's favorite composer. The cold war does not seem to correlate with the popularity Dmitri Shostakovich; He was never very popular in the United States. Art is a form of representation. It does not determine, yet it matters. Classical music and other forms of high arts are not as elastic on reflecting social changes as pop art, yet data show that they do reflect the changes in society.

Future work includes creating life line for different performers and see the rise and fall of their stardom. It is hard to see how gender is played in the classical music composer just because there were too few women composers. But seeing how gender changes among performers would be interesting. In addition, it would be fun to give the users the option to interact different variables and create their own graph.