  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.
