[EM] Classical music countdown balloting

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2025-12-12 03:50, Joseph Malkevitch wrote:
> Dear Kris,
> 
> WQXR tends to program to program warhorses rather than less well known 
> pieces by well known composers. Relatively recently it has given more 
> exposure to women composers and composers in various minorities.
> 
> I think some voters like to vote for pieces that will get played rather 
> than vote for pieces they want to "signal" are "great" music. 
>   Beethoven's Symphony Number 9 regularly comes in Number 1, but I would 
> rather hear one of Beethoven's late string quartets so I vote for some 
> of these but none of these will be played in the Countdown.

Yeah, that's a good example. If everything is a write-in then the pieces 
everybody knows about already has an advantage. (If you're going to meet 
somebody at a place in town but they were unable to tell you where, 
you're more likely to find them at the central station, say.)
> 
> Last year if memory serves no pieces by Haydn were played though many of 
> his compositions were nominated. One approach to counting ballots would 
> be to think of composers names like political party names, and tallies 
> for composers be maintained, and be used in some way to play his/her 
> music under some circumstances.

That's an interesting solution, a sort of party list for composers.

If you take it further, you could think of a feature landscape of music, 
and a PR method as one that tries to find clusters in the same region of 
the landscape and pick a "representative" from each. This would 
ordinarily work, but when everything's a write-in, it's hard to get the 
voters to list a bunch of strings-heavy music, a bunch of complex 
mathematical (Bach-like) music, etc. So if you don't want to go the 
random ballot way, "party list" might be the best you can do.

E.g. round 1, people name five composers they'd like to hear. There's a 
vote, five composers are picked by a PR method. The voters then get to 
pick five pieces by each winning composer. There's another PR vote which 
picks five winning pieces, which are played.

-km