# Composer Polls: some results



## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Though I'd like more and more people to vote in all my A la carte polls, I thought I'd start a thread discussing what might be gleaned from the results.

The full list of polls, list of composers, and the "leaderboard" can all be seen at this page: https://sites.google.com/site/nereffid/
I've also started a new Group http://www.talkclassical.com/group.php?groupid=120 for those who might want to discuss in greater detail than might be of interest to the general TC member. But the most straightforward and interesting results can be presented here.

Now that a lot of people have voted in all 43 polls, I've been able to look for patterns in the kinds of music we like. This and other thoughts will follow in future posts, and I'll try to answer any queries that anyone has about what else the data might show.

In the meantime, here's a look at the top 90-ish composers - the ones that the highest percentage of people said they liked.

Liked by more than 90%:
Beethoven

Liked by more than 80%:
Bach, Debussy, Dvořák, Mahler, Mozart, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Schubert, Sibelius, Strauss, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky

Liked by more than 70%:
Bartók, Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, Chopin, Grieg, Handel, Haydn, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, Schumann, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, Vivaldi, Wagner

Liked by more than 60%:
Barber, Bizet, Borodin, Britten, Copland, Elgar, Fauré, Holst, Ives, Janáček, Nielsen, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scarlatti, Scriabin, Smetana, Weber

Liked by more than 50%:
CPE Bach, Berg, Falla, Gershwin, Glazunov, Hindemith, Messiaen, Monteverdi, Poulenc, Puccini, Purcell, Rameau, Respighi, Rossini, Schoenberg, Verdi, Villa-Lobos, Webern

Liked by more than 40%:
Albéniz, Bernstein, Boccherini, Bruch, Corelli, Couperin, Delius, Dukas, Dutilleux, Franck, Gluck, Honegger, Hummel, Khachaturian, Kodály, Korngold, Ligeti, Martinů, Palestrina, Rautavaara, Satie, Schnittke, Szymanowski, Tallis, Telemann, Walton


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## RRod (Sep 17, 2012)

WAM can't get up to 90%? Time to self-terminate.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

I can only say that the excitement is palpable.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Typical results for a conservative population. Not exactly a shock.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Great to see such a diversity.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

hpowders said:


> Typical results for a conservative population. Not exactly a shock.


The results are "typical" in as much as they're quite similar to attempts to rank composers by favourites or by importance. The same names do indeed keep popping up.
I don't know if that makes the TC voters especially "conservative", though.


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## Schumanniac (Dec 11, 2016)

Handel below Ravel, Saint-Saens and Stravinsky... I hope you all will enjoy your purgatory before you descend to an eternity in scorching hellfire, everlasting damnation, demon torture and all that jazz. Its the cheek that angers god, even more so than the sin! The GOD DAMN CHEEK of it!!! :lol:

Thanks for doing all these polls, Nereffid, has checked out a fair few new composers thanks to them. Although they are the breeding ground of above-mentioned heresy :tiphat: I cant fault you for that however.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

I'd be interested to hear from people which composer "percentage likes" surprised them. I'm not asking which ones you think ought to be different, but which ones you would not have predicted within some reasonable error.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

I'll give two composers whose percentages surprised me.

Satie at ~50 (I thought it would be lower)

Lalo at ~30 low (I thought it would be higher)
The following composers were around 30: Roussel 30, Gibbons 27, Piazzolla 27, Field 30, Feldman 32, Butterworth 28


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

I realize that some advocates of diversity on TC might not be happy with these results. However, I must say that I personally am quite satisfied. In fact, I have to admit that I'm absolutely thrilled to see my beloved Beethoven at the top!


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

^^^ Yes. These polls do verify that the TC posters are a predominantly conservative lot.

Trust....but verify.


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## TwoFlutesOneTrumpet (Aug 31, 2011)

Beethoven at 90%? What is wrong with 10% of people 

I expected Beethoven to lead the polls, yeah. Perhaps a little surprised that Mahler is more liked than Haydn or Brahms but not that much. Also I thought Rameau at 50% a tad low.

And the results affirm my status as a conservative as all my favorite composers are liked by 70% or more.


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

TwoFlutesOneTrumpet said:


> Beethoven at 90%? What is wrong with 10% of people
> 
> I expected Beethoven to lead the polls, yeah. Perhaps a little surprised that Mahler is more liked than Haydn or Brahms but not that much. Also I thought Rameau at 50% a tad low.
> 
> And the results affirm my status as a conservative as all my favorite composers are liked by 70% or more.


It actually says "liked by _more _than 90%" for Beethoven. I would like to think (or at least I hope) that the actual percentage is something like 99.5%!


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## Jacred (Jan 14, 2017)

I'm conservative then? Not surprised in the least...


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Very unsurprising poll results at the top, yet Schoenberg was liked by more than 50%, which is why if those who feel there isn't enough diversity on TC, do a search, they will find plenty of threads that would interest them, I'm sure.

There is no crime in resurrecting old threads concerning contemporary music, in which posters PetrB and Mahlerian, walked the earth.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Jacred said:


> I'm conservative then? Not surprised in the least...


Nothing wrong with that, don't let anyone bully you in a corner.


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## dzc4627 (Apr 23, 2015)

This looks good. Nice job! Excited to see more of this kind of stuff.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> Though I'd like more and more people to vote in all my A la carte polls, I thought I'd start a thread discussing what might be gleaned from the results.
> 
> The full list of polls, list of composers, and the "leaderboard" can all be seen at this page: https://sites.google.com/site/nereffid/


I've had a look through your tables and I can't see what I thought you had agreed to do, which has caused the long delay since the last poll No 43 was set up, namely produce a *matrix showing the voting pattern of each voter against each of the composers*.

Possibly I misunderstood what you said previously, or maybe I'm not looking in the right place? All I can see under the heading "Composers: Leaderboard" is a table showing the percentage achieved by each composer, ranked by size. This kind of table is very simple to produce as it involves no more than reading off the results from the various tables.

It would be far more interesting to see these percentages supplemented by data on who voted for which composer. I'm pretty sure you said that you intended to produce this info. I recall "mmsbls" saying that only by doing the kind of poll you have set up, based on "likes", enables this kind of comparison. I pointed out that this is not correct as the same can most certainly be derived from conventional composer polls where people are asked to list their favourites.

Anyway, on the limited presentation you have provided, for the top 50 composers I got the numbers below, showing rank, name, percent. I didn't bother going below rank 50 because the results at these depths are so unreliable that they're hardly worth reporting.

1 Beethoven 93.5
2	Bach J S	88.1
3	Mahler	87.5
4	Mozart	85.2
5	Dvorak	84.5
6	Sibelius	83.9
7	Schubert	82.8
8	Tchaikovsky	82.0
9	Debussy	81.4
10	Ravel	81.3
11	Prokofiev	81.1
12	Stravinsky	80.8
13	Saint-Saens	80.6
14	Rachmaninoff	80.2
15	Strauss R	80.0
16	Brahms	79.8
17	Haydn, J	79.8
18	Shostakovich	78.7
19	Bartok	78.0
20	Mendelsshon	77.7
21	Grieg	77.5
22	Chopin	76.6
23	Schumann	76.0
24	Berlioz	75.7
25	Vaughan Williams	73.0
26	Vivaldi	72.4
27	Mussorgsky	72.1
28	Handel	71.4
29	Bruckner	70.9
30	Wagner	70.2
31	Liszt	70.2
32	Faure	69.5
33	Barber	68.9
34	Elgar	68.6
35	Rimsky-Korsakov	67.2
36	Copland	66.3
37	Scriabin	65.7
38	Smetana	65.3
39	Nielsen	65.2
40	Holst	64.8
41	Bizet	64.8
42	Janacek	63.6
43	Britten	62.6
44	Ives	62.6
45	Weber	60.9
46	Borodin	59.7
47	Schoenberg	56.7
48	Gershwin	55.6
49	Monteverdi	55.0
50	Verdi	54.9
....

I accept that many of these individual ranks are not significant in the usual statistical sense. Nevertheless, there are some strange looking results here, in comparison with those one normally sees from conventional poll standards based on lists of members' favourites, as opposed to your "likes" system.

The main oddities seem to be:

- ranked too low: Mozart, Brahms, Haydn, Schumann, Handel, Wagner.

- ranked too high: Mahler, Dvorak, Sibelius, Ravel, Prokofiev, Saint-Saens, Rachmaninoff.

The most weird result is probably Wagner at rank No 30. What on earth is going on here? Also, seeing Brahms and Haydn outside the top 10 is very peculiar. Mozart outside of the top 3 is also exceptional.

On the basis of these oddities, I reckon your approach has failed on this occasion to produce a set of sensible results. Moreover, in the absence of the further data I referred to above - i.e. a cross tabulation of votes by each member against each composer - there is no redeeming feature that might have produced something of interest to look at and consider.


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

Martin D said:


> ...I accept that many of these individual ranks are not significant in the usual statistical sense. Neverthless, there are some strange looking results here. Those composers who seem to stand out significantly from the normal pattern of results from more conventional poll standards (i.e, when based on lists of members' favourites, as opposed to your "likes" system) are Mozart, Brahms, Haydn, Schumann, Handel, Wagner. Those who seem to be ranked too high are Mahler, Dvorak, Sibelius, Ravel, Prokofiev, Saint-Saens, Rachmaninoff...


I don't think that there's necessarily a problem with Nereffid's methodology. It seems to me that the wording of Nereffid's polls might explain some of the discrepancies that you've observed. Unlike many TC polls, Nereffid asks about likes rather than favorites. This of course produces a different set of results from the other polls, because "like" is a milder word than "favorite." I personally have voted for many composers in Nereffid's polls whom I would never include in a list of my favorites, and I assume that other TC members have done the same.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Bettina said:


> I don't think that there's necessarily a problem with Nereffid's methodology. It seems to me that the wording of Nereffid's polls might explain some of the discrepancies that you've observed. Unlike many TC polls, Nereffid asks about likes rather than favorites. This of course produces a different set of results from the other polls, because "like" is a milder word than "favorite." I personally have voted for many composers in Nereffid's polls whom I would never include in a list of my favorites, and I assume that other TC members have done the same.


I am fully aware that Nereffid's polls are based on "likes", not favourites. I understand that he has chosen to use "likes" rather than request members to list their favourites because he felt that asking members to rank their preferences is often a diffcult thing for some people to do. In fact, all of his polls, not just composer polls, have been based on "likes".

However, he has maintained throughout the 43 polls that his system based on "likes" should produce results for composer rankings that are broadly consistent with those one normally sees from conventional polls. Soon after the final poll No 43 was set up the results were not looking very good, with some odd looking results, e.g Strauss in the No 3 spot. He decided to extend the period of voting hoping to get some additional votes that might rectify such oddities. More votes were cast and some of the oddities were removed or reduced, but there are still some that stick out like sore thumbs, and are not likely to be changed by any further voting.

Besides, a claimed benefit of this long-winded way of estimating composer preferences based on "likes" was that it would shed light on the various composers that members liked, i.e. who voted for which composer. This type of information can be obtained from conventional polls and there is no need to go through this circuitous and hazardous procedure, based on an ill-defined "like" system, in which there is no commonality of approach, with different people applying different standards. In any case, so far as I can see, this analysis hasn't been presented, unless it's buried somewhere I haven't spotted. That, I thought, was one of the main aims of this whole exercise, as originally conceived last Autumn.

I gather that these polls attracted over 200 voters in total across all the composers. It means that there are many people who did not vote in all the polls, even to register their "not liking" or "not knowing" any of the candidates on offer. On that reckoning, I can't see why that higher number (200 or whatever) was not taken as the relevant denominator in each of the composer percentage, rather than the number who happened to vote in each poll. If the results are based only on the numbers who voted in each poll, since they under-record the total number of voters across all polls, it would seem that the procedure would give biased results.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Dvorak's ranking as the 5th most "liked" composer here seems to tell us that few people actually dislike Dvorak. Well, really, what's not to like, after all? Nice guy, lovely music, and that New World goin' home thing on the cor anglais... A lot easier to "like" than Love and Death in Bayreuth, yes?

I always like Dvorak when I hear him. I don't always "like" Wagner, but - I _revere_ Wagner, and consider him an earth-shaking genius who can rip my guts out and take me to unimagined and sometimes scary corners of my psyche. Not an experience I always "like"! But when I do want that experience, the likable Mr. Dvorak can just wait at the gate till I've come back from Valhalla.

It's a bit like "liking" people's posts on the forum. It means _something,_ but it seems best not to assume too much.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

TwoFlutesOneTrumpet said:


> Perhaps a little surprised that Mahler is more liked than Haydn or Brahms but not that much.


Really, I'd like to be able to present all the results with the statistical confidence intervals attached so people don't put quite as much store in the ranking. If we're talking about a 99% confidence interval (which is very strict) then technically Mahler scored 79.7-95.3%, Haydn got 70.3-89.4%, and Brahms got 70.7%-90%. So yeah, Mahler gets higher on the actual percentage of votes but there's quite an overlap between them.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Martin D said:


> On the basis of these oddities, I reckon your approach has failed on this occasion to produce a set of sensible results. Moreover, in the absence of the further data I referred to above - i.e. a cross tabulation of votes by each member against each composer - there is no redeeming feature that might have produced something of interest to look at and consider.





Nereffid said:


> I've also started a new Group http://www.talkclassical.com/group.php?groupid=120 for those who might want to discuss in greater detail than might be of interest to the general TC member.


In the group post:



> At the bottom of that page is a .csv file containing all the poll data - every participant's vote in every poll - up to date as of March 23.


The data are actually quite interesting. I don't see any oddities. I can't imagine why someone would think that actual stated preferences are somehow not sensible results.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Nereffid said:


> If we're talking about a 99% confidence interval (which is very strict)...


In my experience with statistics a 95% confidence interval is usually applied, which would narrow down the potential spread considerably compared to 99%.

And of course the "like" system will lead to some differences from the "favourite" system. Wagner is a clear example. In compilation of favourites he usually ends up top10, because the people who like him tend to love him and put him high in their list of favourites. But his music is certainly not universally liked. On the other hand we have composers like Saint-Saens who is rather easy to like, but would probably not show up as often in lists of say 10 most favourite composers. The general trend though is not that far off previous lists based on favourites.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Actually 95% is the confidence level. The confidence interval is expressed otherwise. E.g.,

We are 95% confident that the preference is 47%, plus or minus 3%...

Both the confidence level and interval are required for a statistical result to be weighed against the likely characteristics of a population being sampled.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Martin D said:


> I accept that many of these individual ranks are not significant in the usual statistical sense. Nevertheless, there are some strange looking results here, in comparison with those one normally sees from conventional poll standards based on lists of members' favourites, as opposed to your "likes" system.
> 
> The main oddities seem to be:
> 
> ...


Where _should_ Mozart, Brahms, Mahler, Dvorak et al be ranked? What should the % of people who like these composers be? Should that % be consistent across time and space, or should it just reflect the people who answered the question? Do you have a list somewhere that you're confident is a correct assessment of every composer's ranking, and if so, can you point me to it? If it's based on some sort of scoring system that would be really handy because we could correlate its results with my polls and see how they match up.

As to what's going on with Wagner being at no.30. Let's just break it down. 121 people offered an opinion on Wagner. 85 said they liked him. The other 36 didn't. This translated into a percentage score of 70.25%. 29 other composers got a higher percentage score. Your issue shouldn't be with me but with the 36 people who didn't say they like Wagner. 
I wanted to know how many people like Wagner, not whether he's their favorite or a great composer or anything else. My answer is 70%, and that figure applies specifically to TC voters circa 2016-17.
One response is to decry this finding as outrageous and wrong. Another is to wonder if it might reflect a broader reality: maybe a composer can be acknowledged as among the greatest, and a favourite of many, and yet still not be liked by a relatively large number of classical fans.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Art Rock said:


> In my experience with statistics a 95% confidence interval is usually applied, which would narrow down the potential spread considerably compared to 99%.
> 
> And of course the "like" system will lead to some differences from the "favourite" system. Wagner is a clear example. In compilation of favourites he usually ends up top10, because the people who like him tend to love him and put him high in their list of favourites. But his music is certainly not universally liked. On the other hand we have composers like Saint-Saens who is rather easy to like, but would probably not show up as often in lists of say 10 most favourite composers. The general trend though is not that far off previous lists based on favourites.


Yeah, I know 95% is more usual. 99% is futile ***-covering.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> Where _should_
> 
> As to what's going on with *Wagner* being at no.30. Let's just break it down. 121 people offered an opinion on Wagner. 85 said they liked him. The other 36 didn't. This translated into a percentage score of 70.25%. 29 other composers got a higher percentage score. Your issue shouldn't be with me but with the 36 people who didn't say they like Wagner.
> I wanted to know how many people like Wagner, not whether he's their favorite or a great composer or anything else. My answer is 70%, and that figure applies specifically to TC voters circa 2016-17.
> One response is to decry this finding as outrageous and wrong. Another is to wonder if it might reflect a broader reality: maybe a composer can be acknowledged as among the greatest, and a favourite of many, and yet still not be liked by a relatively large number of classical fans.


OK, let's take Wagner purely as an example. As you say, 121 members voted for him in the relevant poll (No 11), and 85 said they like him. That gave Wagner a percentage score of 70.25% (85/121), which placed him in position No 30 in your table.

Leave aside for the moment the matter of statistical significance, you stated recently in another thread that there were 212 voters in total across all the 43 polls, and that only 72 voted in all 212. I fully accept that some of those 212 who didn't vote in poll No 11 may have left the forum, or were unable to do so for other valid reasons. But I suspect that some of the 212 who didn't vote in Poll 11 could have done so but chose not to do so either because they didn't like any of the composers on offer, or for some other reason that one can only speculate upon. If you disagree, how do you account for the missing 91 voters?

This kind of thing (which affects many of the polls, not just Poll 11) suggests that the number of voters in Poll 11 is probably under-recorded, so Wagner's rating would otherwise be different. The same applies to other composers, in that they would all shift around depending on the precise denominator you use. One way around this problem is to base the calculations on the number of votes cast for each composer. If you do so, a different picture emerges: Wagner's position jumps to No 23.

Admittedly, this is not a big jump, but if you apply the same procedure to all the top 50 composers a rather different set of ranks results. Brahms moves up from rank 16 to 7, and Haydn from 17 to 12. Of course, other ranks move around somewhat. Looking at the ranks from a numbers approach, rather than your percentages, seems to me to produce a rather better correlation with ranks you tend to get from typical favourite-based approaches. Here I'm thinking of some of the past composer polls carried out here at T-C.

[BTW: may I ask who/what is "Jim Shine" as noted at the foot of the csv file?]


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

KenOC said:


> Actually 95% is the confidence level. The confidence interval is expressed otherwise. E.g.,
> 
> We are 95% confident that the preference is 47%, plus or minus 3%...
> 
> Both the confidence level and interval are required for a statistical result to be weighed against the likely characteristics of a population being sampled.


Agreed that 95% is the usual confidence level.

In the present context, rather than quoting confidence intervals for individual ranks it would also be useful to know what is the "least significant difference" between ranks, in order to be able to ascertain whether or not the rank for composer N is significantly different from composer N+1, etc, as one goes up/down the table.

I would guess that if such data was given it would show even more clearly that the ranks are not reliable beyond maybe the top few positions only.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

mmsbls said:


> In the group post:
> 
> The data are actually quite interesting. I don't see any oddities. I can't imagine why someone would think that actual stated preferences are somehow not sensible results.


I guess that since you were partly instrumental in encouraging the setting up these 43 polls last Autumn you may feel more inclined to support the method and results. I don't feel so constrained.

As I have said before, the trouble with all of these "like" based polls, not just the recent 43 composer polls, but the dozens of previous ones as well, is that they're all based on selecting an arbitrary number of items from a list of candidates deemed to be suitable by the OP, and the sole criterion is whether or not the item is "liked" or not.

This procedure seems to me to be a very poor way of going about sampling voters' opinions, as "like" is such a vague and elastic term. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that no definition of "like" is offered to assist voters in making make consistent selections, either between different voters' selections or across each voter's selections, with the aim of achieving a broadly consistent set of results across the entire set of polls.

For example, in the composer polls now under discussion it might have been suggested by the OP that a "like" may be given if the voter reckons that he/she has heard sufficient of a composer's work to form an opinion, and if so whether they would rate that composer at least somewhere in their list of favourites, or pay money to acquire more of their material/attend a concert etc.

As things are, a ragbag of responses has been attracted with all manner of different interpretations placed on the items voted for. It was apparently hoped that such variability will average out in the "wash," but I'm not sure this is justified, as the fundamental question being asked seems far too sloppy and likely to generate optimistic results for some of the composers who would normally be less favoured.

It has also been necessary to deal with the fact that it has taken 43 separate polls, and over 7 months to complete, to get through a very long list of 602 composers, many of whom most people have evidently never even heard or rate very low. This has involved making arbitrary judgements about which group of composers to include in each poll, and at the end of the long-winded process how to aggregate the results given the sizeably different response rates across all 43 polls. On this latter point, I don't believe this has been done properly, but rather fudged much as I guessed would happen, and probably introducing yet more bias.

This is hardly an efficient way of conducting polls that are supposed to form a consistent whole. Perhaps it would matter less if it was a one-off duff poll, but there appears to be an "industry" behind this latest bunch of polls, using this place as some kind of test-bed. It might have been better if just one poll had been taken that simply asked people to identify which of the 602 composers (if that's how many it's worth including, although it seems excessive) they happen to "like", and also given the members a clue of what is meant by "liked".


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Martin D said:


> I fully accept that some of those 212 who didn't vote in poll No 11 may have left the forum, or were unable to do so for other valid reasons. But I suspect that some of the 212 who didn't vote in Poll 11 could have done so but chose not to do so either because they didn't like any of the composers on offer, or for some other reason that one can only speculate upon. If you disagree, how do you account for the missing 91 voters?
> 
> This kind of thing (which affects many of the polls, not just Poll 11) suggests that the number of voters in Poll 11 is probably under-recorded, so Wagner's rating would otherwise be different. The same applies to other composers, in that they would all shift around depending on the precise denominator you use. One way around this problem is to base the calculations on the number of votes cast for each composer. If you do so, a different picture emerges: Wagner's position jumps to No 23.
> 
> Admittedly, this is not a big jump, but if you apply the same procedure to all the top 50 composers a rather different set of ranks results. Brahms moves up from rank 16 to 7, and Haydn from 17 to 12. Of course, other ranks move around somewhat. Looking at the ranks from a numbers approach, rather than your percentages, seems to me to produce a rather better correlation with ranks you tend to get from typical favourite-based approaches. Here I'm thinking of some of the past composer polls carried out here at T-C.


Of course, Wagner's position could change if more people voted. Here's an interesting fact: When 84 people voted in that poll, Wagner's score was 71.43%. When the number of voters rose to 121, his score was 70.25%. 
For the 602 composers, after adding 30-48 voters to each poll, the median change in score was -0.76%. 57 composers saw their vote drop by more than 4%, while only 14 composers saw it rise by more than 4%. 
So yeah, maybe all those missing voters would push Wagner into the top 20 or top 10 or top 5 or wherever it is you think he's supposed to be, but it's also possible that they don't like Wagner, and he would plummet out of the top 50. Or, as the above seems to suggest, it won't make much of a difference.

As to ranking composers by number of votes rather than percentages, sure, I've thought about that. But then if I produced _that_ ranking, I'd have to listen to complaints about Mozart not being in the top 3, Rimsky-Korsakov being no.14, Wagner only being no.23 etc etc.
Besides which, it's hard to phrase the numbers in a meaningful sense, and no doubt the following conversation would arise: "129 people like Beethoven". "Out of how many?" "Well, in theory out of 212, but only 138 people offered an opinion". "So what's the 212 got to do with it? Why can't you say it as a percentage like any normal person?"

Of course _all of this_ can be avoided if you stop obsessing over the rankings. We're all agreed that the specific ranks are meaningless. The interesting thing AFAIC is not that Wagner is the 30th most-liked composer (which isn't really true anyway if you take confidence levels into account) but that roughly 70% of people who expressed an opinion said they liked him.

Again, I ask: what percentage of people are _supposed to_ like Wagner?

And: Give me a definitive list to correlate the results against, preferably one with scores rather than ranks, and let's see how closely they correlate. I've said that the results are _broadly_ what one sees in other lists. Saying that Haydn is 17th when he should be 12th is just nitpicking.

Here's an example. I've not read Schonberg's _Lives of the Great Composers_, but I've been able to look at the index via Amazon and it appears there are 70 composers that get "detailed discussion" and presumably qualify as "great composers". There's not a great correlation between the number of pages Schonberg devotes to a composer and how popular that composer is on my polls. But 53 of his top 70 end up in _my_ top 70.
Here's the 17 that don't make it:
CPE Bach, Barber, Britten, Falla, Gershwin, Glazunov, Holst, Messiaen, Nielsen, Palestrina, Purcell, Rameau, Respighi, Satie, D Scarlatti, Villa-Lobos, Vivaldi.
Oh, wait... those are the 17 in _my_ top 70 not given a "detailed discussion" by Schonberg. _Here's_ Schonberg's 17 that don't prove so popular on my polls:
Auber, Balakirev, Bellini, Busoni, Cherubini, Donizetti, Glinka, Gottschalk, Gounod, Massenet, Meyerbeer, Offenbach, Reger, J Strauss II, Sullivan, Varèse, Wolf.
If you think that second list is more representative of the tastes of TC members, then fair enough, but I think most people would recognise the first list as a better reflection. Which is of course, as needs to be reiterated, all the polls were looking at.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Martin D said:


> I guess that since you were partly instrumental in encouraging the setting up these 43 polls last Autumn you may feel more inclined to support the method and results. I don't feel so constrained.


I do support the method and results. The polling was fun and interesting. As far as I can tell, you do not because you view the entire exercise as a way to generate composer rankings. _The exercise was not meant to generate rankings._ To me the results should be viewed as a list that gives estimates of _roughly_ how much people like a given composer's music.

Nereffid's comment is useful.



Nereffid said:


> Of course _all of this_ can be avoided if you stop obsessing over the rankings. We're all agreed that the specific ranks are meaningless. The interesting thing AFAIC is not that Wagner is the 30th most-liked composer (which isn't really true anyway if you take confidence levels into account) but that roughly 70% of people who expressed an opinion said they liked him.


Interestingly, you suggest a procedure that uses the total number of voters in all the polls as the denominator. Given that the intent of the exercise was to estimate the percentage of people who like a composer, do you think your procedure is useful? Is 54% a better number for Mozart than 85%?


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> As to ranking composers by number of votes rather than percentages, sure, I've thought about that. But then if I produced that ranking, I'd have to listen to complaints about Mozart not being in the top 3, Rimsky-Korsakov being no.14, Wagner only being no.23 etc etc.
> 
> Besides which, it's hard to phrase the numbers in a meaningful sense, and no doubt the following conversation would arise: "129 people like Beethoven". "Out of how many?" "Well, in theory out of 212, but only 138 people offered an opinion". "So what's the 212 got to do with it? Why can't you say it as a percentage like any normal person?"


I don't accept this. You created 43 polls because you couldn't fit all 602 composers into one single poll. Let us suppose you had been able to do so. You seem to be saying that if you had been able to list all 602 composers in one single poll, had asked the same question about "likes", had waited for 6 months for all the results to roll in after repeated proddings, you would not have expected Beethoven to be "liked" by 129, Wagner by 85 etc, out of a total of 212 voters in total, or numbers close to these. If so, what total number of voters would you have expected? And how many votes among these do you think that Beethoven and Wagner would have achieved?



Nereffid said:


> Of course all of this can be avoided if you stop obsessing over the rankings. We're all agreed that the specific ranks are meaningless. The interesting thing AFAIC is not that Wagner is the 30th most-liked composer (which isn't really true anyway if you take confidence levels into account) but that roughly 70% of people who expressed an opinion said they liked him.


That is manifestly not true. It is only correct to say that 70% of the people who expressed an opinion in the poll that you set up with limited coverage of composers selected by you that was based on some procedure that you invented. Taking a different sampling procedure would have produced a different set of percentages. For example, if you take Wagner's votes across the whole exercise he scored 85 "likes" (=40%) out of a total of 212 voters (or whatever the final number of voters was). Likewise, Beethoven's score was 129 "likes" (=61%) on the same basis. The fact that many of the 212 voters didn't bother to vote in all the polls is a reflection of the poor quality of the experimental design, not an excuse to parade faulty statistics based on the results.



Nereffid said:


> Again, I ask: what percentage of people are supposed to like Wagner?
> 
> And: Give me a definitive list to correlate the results against, preferably one with scores rather than ranks, and let's see how closely they correlate. I've said that the results are broadly what one sees in other lists. Saying that Haydn is 17th when he should be 12th is just nitpicking.


As you probably well know, all of the previous composer T-C polls placed Wagner much higher than rank 30 or 23. The same applies to Haydn. Both were normally well inside the top 10. I'm not suggesting that any of these polls contained the perfect solution. That doesn't exist. The fact is, however, that they were all roughly consistent with each regarding the top composers, within a few places. I accept that your results bear some resemblance to those results in the aggregate but they do contain some oddities among the normally regarded top composers.

I have no special regard for either Wagner (or Haydn), and have referred to him only because he is one of the more obvious composers who seem to be misplaced far too low in your rankings. There are a few others I mentioned previously who seem misplaced. I don't care that your system is based on "likes" and that others are based on favourites. I would still expect most of the top 10 composer on a favorites basis to appear in a top 10 in a "like" based system that is better constructed than yours.

In summary. I think your "like" based system is suspect in principle, and the inherent problems have been compounded by various practical problems resulting from the long drawn out process of collecting so many results over an extended period with disparate response rates. The whole thing could have been done in a more satisfactory way, even within a "likes" system that was better constructed and less ambitious, ab initio.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

mmsbls said:


> I do support the method and results. The polling was fun and interesting. As far as I can tell, you do not because you view the entire exercise as a way to generate composer rankings. _The exercise was not meant to generate rankings._ To me the results should be viewed as a list that gives estimates of _roughly_ how much people like a given composer's music.


I thought that your interest in this matter was first stimulated (last year some time) by asking how many T-C members liked the top 10 composers resulting from some previous poll that you cited. Do the present results answer your query? If so can you elaborate on why you think the present results identify an appropriate list of "top 10" composers, and how many people seem to like all of these composers. Do you have a percentage figure for this? The present set of top 10 composers is not the same as the ones in your previous list. Does this make any difference to you?

It is not correct that I dislike the approach because it is not a good way to generate composer rankings. I do not like approach because it is not a good way to generate any reliable results, including percentages based on "likes". In other words, the system that has actually been used is faulty both in principle and in practice. I gave the reasons earlier.



mmsbls said:


> Interestingly, you suggest a procedure that uses the total number of voters in all the polls as the denominator. Given that the intent of the exercise was to estimate the percentage of people who like a composer, do you think your procedure is useful? Is 54% a better number for Mozart than 85%?


The correct denominators are obviously important. One clearly can't take any old set of numbers. Taking percentages based on low poll turnout figures could be a reflection of the fact that the composers on offer in some of the polls were not that much liked, in which case using percentages would give inflated results in these cases. Do you agree? If so why not avoid the problem altogether by taking the number of votes cast for each composer across all the polls, which after all are inter-related?


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Martin D said:


> I thought that your interest in this matter was first stimulated (last year some time) by asking how many T-C members liked the top 10 composers resulting from some previous poll that you cited.


My poll was a bit different. For these polls, I was simply interested in getting a rough estimate of the percentages of TC member who like various composers. I think these polls do a good job in estimating that not to the nearest 1% but to within 10% or perhaps a bit more. I think it's reasonable to say that Bach, Sibelius, and Mozart are liked by similar percentages, but I wouldn't use these numbers to say that Sibelius is liked by more than Brahms. And I would not use these numbers to create rankings of composers.



Martin D said:


> The correct denominators are obviously important. One clearly can't take any old set of numbers. Taking percentages based on low poll turnout figures could be a reflection of the fact that the composers on offer in some of the polls were not that much liked, in which case using percentages would give inflated results in these cases. Do you agree?


No. The 50% turnout _could_ potentially be a reflection of members not liking any composer in that poll, but I highly doubt that. I think it's vastly more likely that the members who took each poll are reasonably representative of TC members in general. In that case we would assume that to within statistical uncertainty the results would be similar for those who did not vote. In fact, given that many who did not vote in the polls were asked to later vote and their votes made essentially no difference, we should _not assume_ any systematic error for those not voting.



Martin D said:


> If so why not avoid the problem altogether by taking the number of votes cast for each composer across all the polls, which after all are inter-related?


Because that would almost certainly give incorrect results. There were 69 members who voted in at least one poll but not in the Bach poll. Does anyone on TC believe that none of those people like Bach? Similarly for the 74 and 77 who did not vote in the Beethoven or Mozart poll, does anyone believe none of them like Beethoven or Mozart?

Basically one can assume those who did not vote are reasonably similar to those who did vote. I see every indication of that. Assuming that those who did not vote did not like any of the composers, seems to give rise to significant systematic error. Without any evidence, one would then be assigning votes to them. I just can't believe that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are liked by only 59, 54, and 61% respectively.


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## bharbeke (Mar 4, 2013)

The polls were never meant to be a rigorous, statistically accurate representation of the thoughts of forum members. They are going for a general idea of how whether each composer is liked or not (whether because they are unknown or detested, who can say), according to TC members inclined to respond to polls. I am sure that Nereffid would do things differently if he wanted something closer to a Gallup-style professional poll. He would probably even do things differently if he ran the same experiment now. However, I think the general outcome was successful, and we have some interesting discussion points that the usual "Who do you like best?" threads do not usually give us.

I am a little surprised that Mozart did not do better than he did, given that he is one of the current Big 3 and closer in time than Bach.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

bharbeke said:


> The polls were never meant to be a rigorous, statistically accurate representation of the thoughts of forum members.


Bingo! These polls are more "for fun" than anything else which is why I feel that Martin D is barking up the wrong tree.

I also have a problem with Martin D's criticism of the polls because they do not uniformly yield conventional results. If we are looking for conventional results, why bother doing a poll at all; already existing polls of a conventional nature could just be pulled out for reference.

I enjoy these polls as evidenced by the fact that I voted in every one of them. I thank Nereffid for starting and following through on his polls and hope that he continues doing some polling when the mood strikes him.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Martin D said:


> I don't accept this. You created 43 polls because you couldn't fit all 602 composers into one single poll. Let us suppose you had been able to do so. You seem to be saying that if you had been able to list all 602 composers in one single poll, had asked the same question about "likes", had waited for 6 months for all the results to roll in after repeated proddings, you would not have expected Beethoven to be "liked" by 129, Wagner by 85 etc, out of a total of 212 voters in total, or numbers close to these. If so, what total number of voters would you have expected? And how many votes among these do you think that Beethoven and Wagner would have achieved?


Given that when 102 people offered an opinion on Beethoven, 94 said they liked him, and when 138 offered an opinion, 129 said they liked him, I certainly would not expect 129 people out of 212 to say they liked him. It would probably be in the region of 90%, like the previous results, so that would be about 190 people I suppose, give or take a handful (more likely "take" because composers seem more likely to go down a bit with more voters).



> That is manifestly not true. It is only correct to say that 70% of the people who expressed an opinion in the poll that you set up with limited coverage of composers selected by you that was based on some procedure that you invented. Taking a different sampling procedure would have produced a different set of percentages. For example, if you take Wagner's votes across the whole exercise he scored 85 "likes" (=40%) out of a total of 212 voters (or whatever the final number of voters was). Likewise, Beethoven's score was 129 "likes" (=61%) on the same basis. The fact that many of the 212 voters didn't bother to vote in all the polls is a reflection of the poor quality of the experimental design, not an excuse to parade faulty statistics based on the results.


Wait, so do you actually think that only 61% of people on TC like Beethoven? And if not, how many do you think it is?
As for the 212 voters, this is something of a red herring. There were "212 voters" only in the sense that across the 43 polls, 212 people voted in at least 1 of them. I haven't seen any strong evidence that one block of 100 voters is greatly different from any other block of 100.
You might as well say that there were 2,410 voters, because that's how many active members there are on TC.
How about the 88 people who voted in all the polls? Can we accept that these 88 people have overcome the difficulties raised by the "limited coverage of composers selected by [me] that was based on some procedure that _ invented"?
Probably not. Mozart's in their top 3 but Wagner's even less popular.




As you probably well know, all of the previous composer T-C polls placed Wagner much higher than rank 30 or 23. The same applies to Haydn. Both were normally well inside the top 10. I'm not suggesting that any of these polls contained the perfect solution. That doesn't exist. The fact is, however, that they were all roughly consistent with each regarding the top composers, within a few places. I accept that your results bear some resemblance to those results in the aggregate but they do contain some oddities among the normally regarded top composers. 
I have no special regard for either Wagner (or Haydn), and have referred to him only because he is one of the more obvious composers who seem to be misplaced far too low in your rankings. There are a few others I mentioned previously who seem misplaced.

Click to expand...

Yet again I repeat my question: what percentage of people should like Wagner? And I repeat my comment: stop worrying about the ranks.

And again I repeat my observation: maybe the "wrong" results for some composers reflect some interesting reality.
Think about it. I've said all along that there would be broad similarities between this "likes" poll and the results of "favourites" methodologies. And as you say, there are, "in the aggregate" - cf. the Schonberg composers mentioned above. But instead of assuming that those "oddities" are wrong, why not ask why does this composer do considerably worse or better in this poll?
There's one aspect that should be obvious when looking at the top few dozen composers: a particular interest in late-19th/early-20th-century composers of orchestral music, and a relative lack of interest in opera. That's clearly a particular bias of the voting population (I would say of TC generally, going by thread content) and it probably explains quite a bit.
Wagner's a particular case. For goodness' sake, everyone knows that a significant proportion of classical listeners don't like Wagner. 
Or there was my suggestion a while back - pooh-poohed, alas - that in these polls modern composers like Ligeti, Rautavaara and Schnittke do about as well as Classical composers like Gluck, Boccherini and Hummel. If this seems wrong, why does it seem wrong? Why should it be wrong?




I don't care that your system is based on "likes" and that others are based on favourites. I would still expect most of the top 10 composer on a favorites basis to appear in a top 10 in a "like" based system that is better constructed than yours.

Click to expand...

Yet again I repeat my request: point me to a source that you trust and let me compare the results.




In summary. I think your "like" based system is suspect in principle, and the inherent problems have been compounded by various practical problems resulting from the long drawn out process of collecting so many results over an extended period with disparate response rates. The whole thing could have been done in a more satisfactory way, even within a "likes" system that was better constructed and less ambitious, ab initio.

Click to expand...

What is this I don't even_


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

:tiphat: Thank you so much for running the polls, Nereffid. I *loved* taking part in them and am very interested now to read about which composers are liked & known about on TC - *even though* my beloved Lully doesn't seem to have done all that well!


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## CypressWillow (Apr 2, 2013)

Ditto to Ingelou's post, thanks to you big time, Nereffid!
I'm only surprised that there wasn't a ranking of: More than 100% of people liked Chopin!!!!


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## musicrom (Dec 29, 2013)

I think the results of these polls turned out pretty well, and the "surprises" to me weren't that surprising. I think they more or less indicate the general preferences of those here at TC. I might be a little bit biased because the resulting list is really close to what my personal list would look like.

Since we didn't rank our favorite composers, but rather just chose whether or not we liked them, it's not a shock that Wagner was lower than usual. I know I'm not the only one here that's not a huge fan of opera, and that makes him pretty low at least on my list, although I also don't like much of his non-operatic oeuvre. If he's not in your top 15, chances are you don't like him. Furthermore, it seems to me that TC leans more towards the Romantic era and orchestral music, and that explains the high success of those composers. Even if a lot of us wouldn't rank Camille Saint-Saens or Richard Strauss in our top 15, they would likely be in our top 40 or so, which is probably within "liking" status.


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## DonAlfonso (Oct 4, 2014)

Well said Ingelou.

I think composers whose primary output was in opera were always likely to do relatively poorly in these polls. All those voters who don't know; don't like (or think they don't like) the genre could not, in honesty, "like" Wagner or Verdi.

I was interested in who those 9 people in Poll 3 who didn't like Beethoven did like. Turns out the favorites are: Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Schubert, Rinsky-Korsakov, Mihaud and Brahms in descending order.

For the 20 who didn't like Mozart in Poll 2 their favorites were: Sibelius, Beethoven, Ravel, Mahler, Ives, Dvořák, Brahms and Tchaikovsky


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## Faustian (Feb 8, 2015)

The biggest surprises for me were how *relatively* low Brahms and Haydn scored. I've felt for some time that symphonies are the most popular genre on TC, or at least the most common denominator, and therefore the great symphonists like Beethoven and Mahler get a lot of attention and love. But considering Brahms and Haydn both composed well regarded symphonies, this seems peculiar.

I'm not surprised that composers who primarily worked in opera or vocal mediums scored so low, as I've seen that there is a good portion of classical music listeners who avoid classical vocal music like the plague. Still. Verdi seems surprisingly low down there at just above 50%, behind even Rameau and Monteverdi.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Faustian said:


> The biggest surprises for me were how *relatively* low Brahms and Haydn scored. I've felt for some time that symphonies are the most popular genre on TC, or at least the most common denominator, and therefore the great symphonists like Beethoven and Mahler get a lot of attention and love. But considering Brahms and Haydn both composed well regarded symphonies, this seems peculiar.


Actually one thing with the leaderboard that I presented at the start of this thread is that it's quite a blunt instrument. In fact both Brahms and Haydn were a fraction of a percentage point off 80%, so you should probably view them as being in the higher tier. That said, they're still about 8 percentage points below Mahler.

Of course the particular voting population is responsible for this difference, but I can break this down a bit further:
In the overall leaderboard, there were 17 composers who scored 80% (rounding to the nearest integer, so this includes Brahms and Haydn).
However, when I look at the 88 people who voted in all the polls, divide them into 4 groups based on how many composers they liked, and then specifically look at the 22 voters who liked the fewest composers, this number falls to 7 (Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Dvorak, Debussy). Brahms and Haydn only got 68% and 64%, respectively. 
Obviously 22 people is a small number so one should be wary of extrapolating further, but the implication is that among listeners who have narrow tastes (for whatever reason, inexperience or otherwise) there aren't very many "universal" composers.
Speaking only anecdotally from my own experiences, I can say that in my first years of listening to classical Brahms and Haydn struck me as composers I'd "get to eventually".
Among the 22 people who liked the most composers (I'm in that bunch now...), Brahms gets 91% and Haydn 95%.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

mmsbls said:


> My poll was a bit different. For these polls, I was simply interested in getting a rough estimate of the percentages of TC member who like various composers. I think these polls do a good job in estimating that not to the nearest 1% but to within 10% or perhaps a bit more. I think it's reasonable to say that Bach, Sibelius, and Mozart are liked by similar percentages, but I wouldn't use these numbers to say that Sibelius is liked by more than Brahms. And I would not use these numbers to create rankings of composers.


This reply doesn't answer the question I put to you. I asked you whether the present results reported by Nereffid enable you find out how many people seem to like all of the present set of top 10 composers. This was the question you posed in the thread you started on 26 September 2016: _"Do you enjoy all the "top" composers?"_.

The reason I ask is that I can't work out from the the so-called detailed table of results that Nereffid has put up on his website any useful information at all, let alone the percentage of voters who like a combination of different composers. I had been hoping to see a cross-tabulation of votes by each voter for each composer, but it's not given.

Given this, I wondered whether you had been able somehow to glean any information on the percentage of voters who said they like all top 10 composers. Without such ability to examine this kind of information, I can't see much value in the approach.



mmsbls said:


> Basically one can assume those who did not vote are reasonably similar to those who did vote. I see every indication of that. Assuming that those who did not vote did not like any of the composers, seems to give rise to significant systematic error. Without any evidence, one would then be assigning votes to them. I just can't believe that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are liked by only 59, 54, and 61% respectively.


I disagree.

Those who did not vote in all of the polls could theoretically fall into one or more of several categories. I agree that it is pessimistic to assume that they would all fall into the category of not liking that composer. However, I would say that it is optimistic to assert, as you do, that they are likely to fall solely or predominantly into the category you assume, i.e. if they had voted they would replicate the pattern of votes of those who did vote.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle ground, but the problem is that the exact position will probably vary across the various composers, and we have no information to guide us on identifying of these positions. Therefore there is a big margin of uncertainty on this aspect alone, over and above the other types of uncertainty inherent in any poll of this nature.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Bulldog said:


> Bingo! These polls are more "for fun" than anything else which is why I feel that Martin D is barking up the wrong tree.
> 
> I also have a problem with Martin D's criticism of the polls because they do not uniformly yield conventional results. If we are looking for conventional results, why bother doing a poll at all; already existing polls of a conventional nature could just be pulled out for reference.
> 
> I enjoy these polls as evidenced by the fact that I voted in every one of them. I thank Nereffid for starting and following through on his polls and hope that he continues doing some polling when the mood strikes him.


I can agree that many people probably saw the polls as mainly for "fun" rather than anything more serious.

However, it would appear that Nereffid himself appears to believe that they have in addition a wider value, namely to get an approximate idea of the general musical taste on TC. He has also said that he expects to find a considerable overlap between his top 100 composers and those produced by various other methodologies employed on T-C in the past.

Given this, I had understood that the purpose of this thread is to discuss Nereffid's results. That's exactly what I'm doing. If you don't mind, it's up to me what issues I choose to raise. Perhaps unlike some here, I do have some experience in applied statistics, and I find the subject of interest in the context of classical music polls.

Moreover, I do not feel part of the "in-crowd" here, and have no wish to join it, and therefore I do not feel compelled to pay lip service to a bunch of polls that in my opinion are of questionable value.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Martin D, I do not have the energy to re-read all of your carefully composed but exhaustive critiques of others' polling methodologies or goals. In the interest, therefore, of both brevity and accuracy, could you outline your ideal poll methodology and goal? You clearly know a lot more than I do about polls and polling and I'd like to read about your alternate approach, perhaps as a brief synopsis. Woodduck raised, also, an interesting point about the intensity with which a composer is "liked". His example contrasted Dvorak and Wagner; mine would contrast Dvorak and Brahms, and many interesting conversations could result. Could an intensity of appreciation metric be worked into the ideal poll?


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> Given that when 102 people offered an opinion on Beethoven, 94 said they liked him, and when 138 offered an opinion, 129 said they liked him, I certainly would not expect 129 people out of 212 to say they liked him. It would probably be in the region of 90%, like the previous results, so that would be about 190 people I suppose, give or take a handful (more likely "take" because composers seem more likely to go down a bit with more voters).


I have dealt with this issue in my reply to "mmsbls"above. Basically, what I'm saying is that you are relying on very optimistc assumptions about the vote pattern of those who did not vote. The point is that none of us knows for sure how the missing voters would have voted, and there's no point making up favourable stories trying to pretend that things are better than one might be the case.



Nereffid said:


> Yet again I repeat my question: what percentage of people should like Wagner? And I repeat my comment: stop worrying about the ranks.
> ...
> 
> Yet again I repeat my request: point me to a source that you trust and let me compare the results.


I recognise the tactic: keep on repeating an irrelevant issue to try to make my comments seem as though I'm trying to dodge something vital.

I strongly suspect you know very well what seem to be the main previous T-C composer polls. There have been quite a few polls, but several didn't ask for a large number of favourites. The main relevant ones seem to be: (i) the 25 composer poll started by RBrittain n 2011; (ii) the 50 composer poll started by Turangalla in 2012; (iii) the 100 composer poll started by Bulldog in 2014.

Each of these generated a list of 100 top composers. I have only looked at the top 50, since the results seem to be very uncertain beyond that. The 50 composer poll followed a different approach to polls (i) and (iii), but all essentially all asked voters to identify their favourite composers in rank order. The weighting systems varied between the polls.

If you take the top 50 composers resulting from these polls, there is obviously some variability in the individual ranks of various composers between the polls, but on the whole the results are significantly correlated with other. They are better correlated with each other, than any one of them is against your top 50 results.

If you take the average rank for each composer from these polls and compare them with yours there are some sizeable discrepancies. The biggest ones are for Dvorak, Sibelius, Saint-Saens, Rachmaninoff who are much higher placed in your polls than in the average of the 3 above. Brahms, Haydn, Handel and Wagner are placed much lower in yours.

Since you have asked specifically about Wagner, his average rank in the three polls was 7, compared with your 30. I would suggest that 7 is a far more plausible figure.

Again, I know that your stated aim is not to generate a list of composers ranked by preference. But that seems to be the interpretation that you have occasionally placed on the work, and it's the way some people will interpret them. In any case I thought you were going to produce an analysis of which voters voted for different mixes of composers. So far as I know, you haven't done it. Your detailed table set out on your website is very obscure, and I can't make much sense of it. Without this further analysis, I can't see much point in having done all this work over the past 6-7 months; obviously apart from the "fun" factor, that is.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Strange Magic said:


> Martin D, I do not have the energy to re-read all of your carefully composed but exhaustive critiques of others' polling methodologies or goals. In the interest, therefore, of both brevity and accuracy, could you outline your ideal poll methodology and goal? You clearly know a lot more than I do about polls and polling and I'd like to read about your alternate approach, perhaps as a brief synopsis. Woodduck raised, also, an interesting point about the intensity with which a composer is "liked". His example contrasted Dvorak and Wagner; mine would contrast Dvorak and Brahms, and many interesting conversations could result. Could an intensity of appreciation metric be worked into the ideal poll?


That'll cost you!

Seriously, please have another go at re-reading what I've said. It's very simple. In essence:

- I have no objection to "like" based polls, but I would expect a better definition of "like" for people to work to. As an example, "mmsbls" gave a reasonable one in the thread he started last September.

- Nor do I care for extended polling over such a long period. It creates many uncertainties about voters who don't vote in all the polls.

- I don't believe that "like" polls achieve much if anything that a favourites type of poll can't achieve. The latter make people think harder and you may expect a better quality response on average.

- Some of the previous T-C polls are not bad, but I think that the best idea has been raised by Art Rock who has proposed a favourites poll with voters limited to a fixed number of votes. However he has decided not to pursue it.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Martin D said:


> That'll cost you!
> 
> Seriously, please have another go at re-reading what I've said. It's very simple. In essence:
> 
> ...


Surely, Sir, you could accommodate us (or just me) a little more generously. Your above has an I don't care for, an I don't believe, a Some are not bad, and an I have no objection. I was hoping the same space and energy could be put into a concise outline of a well-crafted Martin D poll. I will not go back and re-read your posts--it will be my loss of course, but you possibly could gain here also by complying with my request.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Strange Magic said:


> Surely, Sir, you could accommodate us (or just me) a little more generously. Your above has an I don't care for, an I don't believe, a Some are not bad, and an I have no objection. I was hoping the same space and energy could be put into a concise outline of a well-crafted Martin D poll. I will not go back and re-read your posts--it will be my loss of course, but you possibly could gain here also by complying with my request.


I have already offered some comments on Nereffid's polls, and have responded to several queries on the points that were raised by various people who evidently think these polls are great fun and possibly provide useful indicators of TC composer preferences. The substance of my comments is hardly "rocket science", and I'm afraid that if you can't be troubled to read the relevant posts that's your lookout. It's not incumbent on me to offer an alternative procedure.

However, trying to be helpful, and to repeat what I said earlier, if I was interested merely in identifying composers who are "liked" I would adopt a definition of "like", and I suggested that the one used by "mmsbls" in his poll last year might be suitable. I would try to carry out the poll in one go, rather than spin it out over 6-7 months with umpteen constituent parts that involve the problem of piecing them all together at the end of the process with attendant risks of achieving comparability across polls given the varying participation rates.

Also, as I said earlier, I think that a favourites poll is more interesting as it focuses peoples' minds better on what they really do like. Such a poll wouldn't necessarily tell a different story from what might be obtained from a "likes" based poll.

There have been several favourites-based polls in the past. I mentioned some of more significant ones. Personally, I couldn't be bothered to organise yet another such poll as I think the previous ones tell a fairly consistent story, sufficient for my purposes at least. However, if I was to do so I would prefer to set an upper and a lower limit to the number of composers people may select, and would suggest a points total that each voter allocates amongst their chosen composers. In fact, the same or similar procedure could be used for a "like" based system as well.

In no poll would I allow things to drift on for 6-7 months, and then attempt to piece together a whole bunch of disparate sub-polls at the end of the day to try to make sense of the overall picture. Remember that each of Nereffids's 43 polls involved a selection of composers of his choosing. If different selections had been made the voting could have been different, possibly materially so. Nor would I jump in at the end of the process and try to garner further votes because I didn't like the way the results to date were going, or because some of the vote totals had been disappointing. Both of these are very bad practice.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Martin D said:


> This reply doesn't answer the question I put to you. I asked you whether the present results reported by Nereffid enable you find out how many people seem to like all of the present set of top 10 composers. This was the question you posed in the thread you started on 26 September 2016: _"Do you enjoy all the "top" composers?"_.
> 
> The reason I ask is that I can't work out from the the so-called detailed table of results that Nereffid has put up on his website any useful information at all, let alone the percentage of voters who like a combination of different composers. I had been hoping to see a cross-tabulation of votes by each voter for each composer, but it's not given.
> 
> Given this, I wondered whether you had been able somehow to glean any information on the percentage of voters who said they like all top 10 composers. Without such ability to examine this kind of information, I can't see much value in the approach.


The .csv table gives the votes of each voter for each composer. With that information it's relatively easy to "redo" the poll question I asked in my earlier poll. I selected all voters who voted in the 10 polls that included the 10 composers from my thread. I then determined the percentage of those voters who said they liked all of the 10 composers. The result is 28%. The current result from my poll is 45%. 98 people voted in all 10 of Nereffid's polls and 121 have voted in my poll. I don't know how much overlap there is in specific members voting in both polls.



Martin D said:


> Those who did not vote in all of the polls could theoretically fall into one or more of several categories. I agree that it is pessimistic to assume that they would all fall into the category of not liking that composer. However, I would say that it is optimistic to assert, as you do, that they are likely to fall solely or predominantly into the category you assume, i.e. if they had voted they would replicate the pattern of votes of those who did vote.
> 
> The truth is probably somewhere in the middle ground, but the problem is that the exact position will probably vary across the various composers, and we have no information to guide us on identifying of these positions. Therefore there is a big margin of uncertainty on this aspect alone, over and above the other types of uncertainty inherent in any poll of this nature.


We actually have some data that sheds some light on this issue. First each poll does have an "don't know or don't like" option, and every poll had at least one member select that option. Some polls had over 10 people (roughly 10% or more) select that option. So we know that just because a member does not find any composer they like will not result in members not voting.

Also given that the polls were run and then people were asked to vote in more polls, we have a partial test of whether those who did not vote at first could have biased the results.



Nereffid said:


> For the 602 composers, after adding 30-48 voters to each poll, the median change in score was -0.76%. 57 composers saw their vote drop by more than 4%, while only 14 composers saw it rise by more than 4%.


So adding those who did not originally vote seems to make relatively little difference. I don't feel like calculating whether the changes are what one would expect given the statistical error, but they seem quite reasonable to me.

My general assumption would be that selecting a large number of TC members would result in a representative sample. I don't think there are good reasons to believe there are significant biases in the present selection. And given that there is some evidence to show such bias does not exist, I will happily continue to assume the polling results are reasonable estimates of TC member's stated likes.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Martin D said:


> I strongly suspect you know very well what seem to be the main previous T-C composer polls. There have been quite a few polls, but several didn't ask for a large number of favourites. The main relevant ones seem to be: (i) the 25 composer poll started by RBrittain n 2011; (ii) the 50 composer poll started by Turangalla in 2012; (iii) the 100 composer poll started by Bulldog in 2014.
> 
> Each of these generated a list of 100 top composers. I have only looked at the top 50, since the results seem to be very uncertain beyond that. The 50 composer poll followed a different approach to polls (i) and (iii), but all essentially all asked voters to identify their favourite composers in rank order. The weighting systems varied between the polls.
> 
> If you take the top 50 composers resulting from these polls, there is obviously some variability in the individual ranks of various composers between the polls, but on the whole the results are significantly correlated with other. They are better correlated with each other, than any one of them is against your top 50 results.


OK, thank you. I knew the first 2 polls but had forgotten about Bulldog's one. I honestly didn't think you were referring to any TC polls because you'd previously said about Turangalila's one 


> The 50 composer poll is still a mystery to me. There was some kind of iterative voting procedure. I'd be inclined to forget all that nonsense.


and about Bulldog's you said it used


> a highly questionable weighting system, and illustrates the kind of polling stupidities that have been heaped on unsuspecting members here over the years


I notice, too, that Bulldog's poll was critiqued in much detail by a long-departed (??) member who noted (for example) that Mozart only came in 4th and Wagner was "a bit too low".

But anyway.
I'll defer to your knowledge of statistics, so can I ask you to couch in easy-for-anyone-to-understand numbers what the correlations between the various lists are?


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## gardibolt (May 22, 2015)

I'm not sure what "value" Martin is expecting to find in an aggregation of unscientific polls about what self-selecting people "like" in the first place. It's not meant to be any kind of rigorous examination who's best or even who are the favorites of the group. It's just an interesting examination of who is "liked" by the members of the group. I did find it awfully interesting that the percentages just don't change much even when you increase the number of responses by 50%. That seems to indicate that people who frequent this site have some commonality, though they're certainly not homogenous. 

And yes, who are these people who don't like Beethoven!


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

While I did profusely thank Nereffid for the work in creating the detailed file on member votes _before he actually did it_, I should also thank him for actually creating the file. So Nereffid, thank you for what must have been a time consuming and boring task of collecting the data and providing it to us in a useful format.

I have started to play with the data as my post above shows. There are interesting questions one can ask and answer using that file. I have wondered about correlations between people's likes of various composers (e.g. if someone likes Bach, are they significantly more likely to like composer X than Y?).


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

mmsbls said:


> While I did profusely thank Nereffid for the work in creating the detailed file on member votes _before he actually did it_, I should also thank him for actually creating the file. So Nereffid, thank you for what must have been a time consuming and boring task of collecting the data and providing it to us in a useful format.
> 
> I have started to play with the data as my post above shows. There are interesting questions one can ask and answer using that file. I have wondered about correlations between people's likes of various composers (e.g. if someone likes Bach, are they significantly more likely to like composer X than Y?).


I've been working on a "heat map" for all 602 composers to see what proportion of people who like X also like Y but it's taking a lot of time because I have to run 602 calculations and, you know, I have other things going on in my life. Actually I'm delighted to have gotten it down to 602 because it _was_ going to be 362,404...

When I've got that done, I'll make it available - unless someone wants to perfect it before me 

In the meantime I can tempt you with titbits like:
Gesualdo seems to be the favourite pre-Vivaldi composer of people who like modernists such as Stockhausen and Xenakis.
And, astonishingly, Leoncavallo fans are also Mascagni fans! And vice versa!

And also I've got a thing that does a 3-way comparison of specified composers.
I'm intrigued to learn that people who like Bach are as likely to like Ligeti as they are to like Telemann (or perhaps that should be, are no more likely to like Telemann than they are to like Ligeti). That raises some interesting questions.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

To the question of how those who didn't vote in some of the polls would have voted if they had, I can say that in my case I initially skipped over some of them when the composers I saw listed interested me less. I did go back at the end and vote in those previously omitted polls, but others may have done differently. Clearly there's a significant margin of uncertainty with respect to how the rankings relate to consistency of participation.

I would also reiterate my own uncertainty about my own "liking" for a composer - i.e., what it meant to me at the moment of decision to "like" someone, and to check or not check the box in front of his/her name. In some cases I would certainly have made different choices on different days, or even after a few more moments of consideration.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

I agree. Most of the time when asked to vote or list my "favorite" choices of whatever...I qualify my choices with, "In real time"... to indicate my preferences may and do change considerably over time.

Why, I just may withdraw my offer made yesterday to pay folks to cart away my Bruckner Symphonies, Liszt Piano Works and Schubert String Quartets. I'm a classical music listening chameleon.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

gardibolt said:


> I'm not sure what "value" Martin is expecting to find in an aggregation of unscientific polls about what self-selecting people "like" in the first place. It's not meant to be any kind of rigorous examination who's best or even who are the favorites of the group. It's just an interesting examination of who is "liked" by the members of the group. I did find it awfully interesting that the percentages just don't change much even when you increase the number of responses by 50%. That seems to indicate that people who frequent this site have some commonality, though they're certainly not homogenous.


Well yes but I have already pointed out in a previous thread that none of these polls has any scientific value because of the self-selecting nature of the participants. I was prepared to side-step that awkwardness for the sake of trying to find something positive to say about the exercise once the results were set out, but I'm struggling to find anything that recommends it, apart from providing amusement for people who like filling up composer questionnaires.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> To the question of how those who didn't vote in some of the polls would have voted if they had, I can say that in my case I initially skipped over some of them when the composers I saw listed interested me less. I did go back at the end and vote in those previously omitted polls, but others may have done differently. Clearly there's a significant margin of uncertainty with respect to how the rankings relate to consistency of participation.
> 
> I would also reiterate my own uncertainty about my own "liking" for a composer - i.e., what it meant to me at the moment of decision to "like" someone, and to check or not check the box in front of his/her name. In some cases I would certainly have made different choices on different days, or even after a few more moments of consideration.


This confirms my suspicion that some members may have skipped polls which offered little to interest them, rather than tick the "not liked" box. In your case you say you went back later to complete polls that you missed initially, but others may not have done so, and hence there could be a mish-mash of results distorting the overall results in unknown ways.

My guess would be that low turnout polls give inflated percentages for the favourite composer(s) in those polls, because the "not liked" scores are under-recorded. As I noted previously, it isn't desirable to prompt people to vote, as it could could well distort the results even further.

If it were possible, it would be interesting to see a poll listing the top 100 composers from these 43 polls asking members who voted previously to indicate which ones they like, but perhaps limiting the number of "likes" to a maximum of 50. Sadly it's not possible to do because of the constraints imposed by the software, but if it was possible I suspect that there could be a few sizeable changes in the relative positions (I won't use the word "ranks" because it seems to annoy some people).


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## musicrom (Dec 29, 2013)

Martin D said:


> Well yes but I have already pointed out in a previous thread that none of these polls has any scientific value because of the self-selecting nature of the participants. I was prepared to side-step that awkwardness for the sake of trying to find something positive to say about the exercise once the results were set out, but I'm struggling to find anything that recommends it, apart from providing amusement for people who like filling up composer questionnaires.


There seems to be some sort of disconnect between us. What exactly do you think the results of these polls are claiming? What makes these results less scientific than the other polls?

I don't think it was you, but earlier, someone was complaining saying that ArtMusic's polls by letter were more satisfactory (the ones that say stuff like "Vivaldi (of course!)" and have vastly different number of voters per poll).

Anyways, these polls are not attempting to measure the best composers, rather the most-liked composers. A lot of people might like Camille Saint-Saens, but not necessarily have him in their top 10 list. This might reflect the disparity between these results and those of previous polls. Another factor is that the population of TC has changed pretty significantly over the past years, preference-wise. As to your suggestion of having it all done in one go, in theory that might be good, but in practice you'd probably only have like 20 people willing to go through a list of 602 composers and click on every single one they'd like. Plus, that's not even possible to do on TC, unless you just ask people to list every composer they like and tabulate the results, which once again, nobody would do. I think it would be a faulty assumption to assume that those that didn't vote on certain polls don't like any of the composers; it seems more rational to assume a similar percentage would occur among the non-voters. Finally, defining what a "like" is would be a futile effort. We all know what it means to like a composer; there's no need to overthink it.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> OK, thank you. I knew the first 2 polls but had forgotten about Bulldog's one. I honestly didn't think you were referring to any TC polls because you'd previously said about Turangalila's one
> 
> ....
> 
> I'll defer to your knowledge of statistics, so can I ask you to couch in easy-for-anyone-to-understand numbers what the correlations between the various lists are?


I'm sure you know how to workout correlation coefficients, and I'll leave that for you.

The only thing you might want to contemplate is whether to use Pearson or Spearman correlation coefficients. I used both and they tell much the same story.

Purely on a technical matter I would note is that in calculating the average result from the 3 polls I took the integer value: int((average(x1,x2,x3) +.5).

The correlations between each pair of 2 from the 3 polls are higher than the correlation between your results and each of these, whether using Pearson or Spearman. All results are significant at the 5% level, but in the case of your results vis-à-vis each of the others the significance test is only just met in the case of Spearman.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

mmsbls said:


> The .csv table gives the votes of each voter for each composer. With that information it's relatively easy to "redo" the poll question I asked in my earlier poll. I selected all voters who voted in the 10 polls that included the 10 composers from my thread. I then determined the percentage of those voters who said they liked all of the 10 composers. The result is 28%. The current result from my poll is 45%. 98 people voted in all 10 of Nereffid's polls and 121 have voted in my poll. I don't know how much overlap there is in specific members voting in both polls.


Thanks. I'm afraid that I wasn't able to deduce this information from the csv file I downloaded. I tried to play around with it but it didn't seem to have the information set out in a user-friendly manner.

Anyway, you have found that 28% of all voters liked the top 10 composers. I presume you mean 28% of the 221 voters in total? This compares with 45% in your poll, which involved a different mix of top composers. I'm not surprised by either result.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Regarding poll positions, can anyone say with complete authority that the creator of Le Nozze di Figaro is inferior to the composer of the Well-Tempered Clavier or the composer of the Missa Solemnis, and deserves to be 3-4 poll positions lower on the totem poll?

Measuring popularity is one thing; so Beethoven's music is more popular on TC than Bach's, whose music is more popular on TC than Mozart's

Quantifying the extreme genius that these three possess is much more illusive.

I wish I knew the formula.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

hpowders said:


> Regarding poll positions, can anyone say with complete authority that the creator of Le Nozze di Figaro is inferior to the composer of the Well-Tempered Clavier or the composer of the Missa Solemnis, and deserves to be 3-4 poll positions lower on the totem poll?
> 
> Measuring popularity is one thing; so Beethoven's music is more popular on TC than Bach's, whose music is more popular on TC than Mozart's
> 
> ...


No one can or should quantify extreme genius. There's no formula, much less any poll, that could do it. Where a composer falls on this Nereffidian totem pole has nothing to do with genius. You may sleep soundly knowing that no extreme genius has been harmed. At the very worst, Wagner is slightly miffed at coming in below Saint-Saens, but he has Cosima to dry his feet with her hair.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> No one can or should quantify extreme genius. There's no formula, much less any poll, that could do it. Where a composer falls on this Nereffidian totem pole has nothing to do with genius. You may sleep soundly knowing that no extreme genius has been harmed. At the very worst, Wagner is slightly miffed at coming in below Saint-Saens, but he has Cosima to dry his feet with her hair.


 Wagner probably would have taken it well, since no opinion mattered more than his own, but poor Bruckner may have had a nervous breakdown as a result of his idol's disappointing standing.

Brahms would have simply had a beer or three over at Joachim's Haus.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Martin D said:


> Thanks. I'm afraid that I wasn't able to deduce this information from the csv file I downloaded. I tried to play around with it but it didn't seem to have the information set out in a user-friendly manner.
> 
> Anyway, you have found that 28% of all voters liked the top 10 composers. I presume you mean 28% of the 221 voters in total? This compares with 45% in your poll, which involved a different mix of top composers. I'm not surprised by either result.


Well, I thought the file was fairly easy to use.

I found that _of the voters who voted in all of the 10 composers polls that included the 10 composers I used in my poll_ 27 of those 98 people liked all 10 composers. The mix of composers was the same.

When I first joined TC, I would have thought that number would be as high or higher than 80-90%. I'm still modestly surprised that fewer than ~50% of classical music lovers like all of those composers, but I've read enough comments from TC members to view that number as somewhat expected.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Martin D said:


> Thanks. I'm afraid that I wasn't able to deduce this information from the csv file I downloaded. I tried to play around with it but it didn't seem to have the information set out in a user-friendly manner.






Martin D said:


> Anyway, you have found that 28% of all voters liked the top 10 composers. I presume you mean 28% of the 221 voters in total? This compares with 45% in your poll, which involved a different mix of top composers. I'm not surprised by either result.


He obviously means 28% of the 98 voters who voted in the 10 relevant polls. And he obviously is referring to the same 10 composers in both cases.

cf also this post for anyone to misinterpret as they see fit.

_edit to add: mmsbls got there before me!_


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

musicrom said:


> There seems to be some sort of disconnect between us. What exactly do you think the results of these polls are claiming? What makes these results less scientific than the other polls?
> 
> I don't think it was you, but earlier, someone was complaining saying that ArtMusic's polls by letter were more satisfactory (the ones that say stuff like "Vivaldi (of course!)" and have vastly different number of voters per poll).
> 
> Anyways, these polls are not attempting to measure the best composers, rather the most-liked composers. A lot of people might like Camille Saint-Saens, but not necessarily have him in their top 10 list. This might reflect the disparity between these results and those of previous polls. Another factor is that the population of TC has changed pretty significantly over the past years, preference-wise. As to your suggestion of having it all done in one go, in theory that might be good, but in practice you'd probably only have like 20 people willing to go through a list of 602 composers and click on every single one they'd like. Plus, that's not even possible to do on TC, unless you just ask people to list every composer they like and tabulate the results, which once again, nobody would do. I think it would be a faulty assumption to assume that those that didn't vote on certain polls don't like any of the composers; it seems more rational to assume a similar percentage would occur among the non-voters. Finally, defining what a "like" is would be a futile effort. We all know what it means to like a composer; there's no need to overthink it.


I'm afraid that I disagree with all of this.

You ask me what exactly I think the results of these polls are claiming. I understand that the aim is to find out which composers TC members like. I don't think these "like" polls are a sensible way of doing the job. Merely asking people to list the composers they like will almost certainly create uncertainty in the minds of some voters who will want to know where to draw the line. "mmsbls" recognised this in his poll of last September, so he set out a definition. Nereffid's complete lack of definition is unsatisfactory. One simply doesn't know what criteria people are using. Costless decisions about "likes" are not likely to be reliable ones, as there is nothing lost in making bad decisions.

Arranging so many polls over such along period of time and including so many obscure choices is clearly not an efficient procedure. Some people dropped out early for reasons that are unclear, and it's not valid to assume that if they had continued to vote they would have done so in the same way as those who continued to vote. That may or may not be the case.

I wouldn't have included anything like so many composers as 602. Many of them are little more than a bunch of third-raters. The choice of composers in each poll may have affected the results. This choice was not fully random but was partly engineered by Nereffid. It seemed a bit odd to me that increasingly less popular composers (as the lead composer) were selected as the polls proceeded, as if it was anticipated that the number of voters would thus drop and thereby give a boost in rating for the lower rated composers.

In my opinion a better way of doing of establishing voters' preferences is to ask them to list their favourite composers within the constraint of a minimum and maximum number. This avoids the awkward problem of defining what is meant by "like". The voters apply whatever definition suits them, subject to contraints in order to make the choices rational and efficient. The maximum number could be quite high (a number to be decided, but 50 might be a satisfactory compromise), so I don't know where you get the idea that it would limited 10, which I agree is too low, and would not permit proper expression of "liked" composers.

By implication, each of the selected composers will be liked, albeit to varying degrees by each voter. If there are any composers who are liked but who fall outside the maximum number permitted, that's tough for the voter but it's in the wider best interests of the polling procedure in order to keep it manageable. Most likely any such composers falling outside the limit would probably not be much liked in comparison with all the previous ones, so the missing accuracy wouldn't be that high.

I fully recognisee the problem of self-selection, which I accept could be large, thus rendering the results subject to bias, but there's no way around it without deciding which members are invited to allow to vote and this would obviously cause problems that are insuperable. One has to try to limit this bugbear, or nothing would be done.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Is it worth pointing out that over 200 people voted in the polls, but that the majority of the interest in the results, judging by responses in this thread, comes from one person who didn't vote at all?

Perhaps for most people the fun simply came from looking at an apparently random list of composers and thinking about which ones they liked. 
If that's all the polls ever achieved, it would have been worth doing them.
The fact that dozens of people were nice enough to vote in the polls they missed when I asked them to is especially gratifying, and again, if that was the end of it, it was worth doing.
The fact that there's a bit of interest in what the results show, and practically everybody is taking it in the spirit intended, is gratifying too.

No amount of haranguing about methodology or inefficiency will change that.

:cheers: to the community!


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Nereffid said:


> Is it worth pointing out that over 200 people voted in the polls, but that the majority of the interest in the results, judging by responses in this thread, comes from one person who didn't vote at all?
> 
> Perhaps for most people the fun simply came from looking at an apparently random list of composers and thinking about which ones they liked.
> If that's all the polls ever achieved, it would have been worth doing them.
> ...


They were definitely worth doing! I enjoyed participating in the polls and miss their absence now!

Great job, Nereffid! :tiphat:


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

Nereffid said:


> I notice, too, that Bulldog's poll was critiqued in much detail by a long-departed (??) member who noted (for example) that Mozart only came in 4th and Wagner was "a bit too low".


I remember that poll. The member was most critical of the fact that Mozart polled a little lower than Schubert. He even suggested that I rigged the poll to achieve that result. The funny thing is that I prefer Mozart to Schubert.

Anyways, seems to me that statistical nerds get ridiculously caught up in the mechanics of an enjoyable exercise.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Bulldog said:


> Anyways, seems to me that statistical nerds get ridiculously caught up in the mechanics of an enjoyable exercise.


What a laugh, especially from someone who set up a poll seeking members' top 100 composers, all of which had to be listed in rank order before their list was accepted. Anything that fell short of full compliance with these rules was rejected. I can't think of anything much more ridiculous than that, in the context of polling procedure.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> Is it worth pointing out that over 200 people voted in the polls, but that the majority of the interest in the results, judging by responses in this thread, comes from one person who didn't vote at all?
> 
> Perhaps for most people the fun simply came from looking at an apparently random list of composers and thinking about which ones they liked.
> If that's all the polls ever achieved, it would have been worth doing them.
> ...


I didn't vote because I suspected that if I did so you might come back at me and suggest that if I have any criticism of the methodology I shouldn't have participated in the polls.

It's perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned if you consider that your aim has been achieved sufficiently if some 200 people enjoyed participating in polls of this nature, with little else to show for it.

It's when you imply that your procedures are capable of producing results that are comparable with, if not better than, more traditional ways of measuring members' preferences that I begin to have qualms.

Even though I haven't found much support from the cliquey atmosphere here, I know that my comments about methodology are correct, and that no serious pollster agency would give your approach any house room at all, as it's far too suspect in so many respects. Nothing like a perfect procedure can be devised on forums such as this, but there are better procedures if the aim is to assess preferences rather than just provide fun.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Martin D said:


> It's when you imply that your procedures are capable of producing results that are comparable with, if not better than, more traditional ways of measuring members' preferences that I begin to have qualms.


I have never said or even implied that my polling system would produce results _better than_ other methods.



> Even though I haven't found much support from the cliquey atmosphere here, I know that my comments about methodology are correct, and that no serious pollster agency would give your approach any house room at all, as it's far too suspect in so many respects. Nothing like a perfect procedure can be devised on forums such as this, but there are better procedures if the aim is to assess preferences rather than just provide fun.


"cliquey atmosphere"... oh Lordy.
"serious pollster agency"... good grief! Please, please understand that I don't care, and it looks like nobody else does either, because that was never what this exercise was about.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Martin D said:


> Even though I haven't found much support from the cliquey atmosphere here, I know that my comments about methodology are correct, and that no serious pollster agency would give your approach any house room at all, as it's far too suspect in so many respects. Nothing like a perfect procedure can be devised on forums such as this, but there are better procedures if the aim is to assess preferences rather than just provide fun.


I don't understand most of your comments. You criticize the polls as being too suspect for a serious pollster agency and say "none of these polls has any scientific value." This is a music forum. Do you honestly believe that anyone views polls here as being up to the standards of scientific journals or polling agencies such as Gallop or the Pew Research Center? Just because they are not at those standards doesn't mean they are not useful or interesting.

You have consistently criticized these polls for exhibiting oddities. As an example, you mentioned that Mozart and Wagner are too low. Statistically Mozart is consistent with being the most liked composer at the 90% confidence level. So how is he too low? Personally. I thought Wagner might be somewhat less liked than the polls showed. I think many of us feel he is a composer that people would collectively rank higher than they collectively like (i.e. when he is liked, he is very highly liked). But I trust this polling more than my personal estimate.

You have suggested other polling procedures for determining preferences. These polls are not about preferences; they are focused on understanding the percentage of people who _like_ various composers. It seems as though you don't appreciate the difference. Dvorak is apparently liked "higher" than he would be ranked (although possibly not statistically significant). As far as I can tell, your procedures would not produce results for Tartini, Henze, Beach, or Arne. Your procedures would not answer the question, "Which composer is liked by a higher percentage of TC members - Stockhausen or Lalo?" Speaking of that question, I'm surprised that they are liked roughly the same. I would have assumed that Lalo was liked significantly higher than Stockhausen. But again, I trust the results of these polls more than my guess.

Anyway, these polls are not highly scientific, but nonetheless, they are both interesting and useful.


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## Martin D (Dec 13, 2016)

mmsbls said:


> I don't understand most of your comments. You criticize the polls as being too suspect for a serious pollster agency and say "none of these polls has any scientific value." This is a music forum. Do you honestly believe that anyone views polls here as being up to the standards of scientific journals or polling agencies such as Gallop or the Pew Research Center? Just because they are not at those standards doesn't mean they are not useful or interesting.
> 
> You have consistently criticized these polls for exhibiting oddities. As an example, you mentioned that Mozart and Wagner are too low. Statistically Mozart is consistent with being the most liked composer at the 90% confidence level. So how is he too low? Personally. I thought Wagner might be somewhat less liked than the polls showed. I think many of us feel he is a composer that people would collectively rank higher than they collectively like (i.e. when he is liked, he is very highly liked). But I trust this polling more than my personal estimate.
> 
> ...


I don't understand your comments either. Dealing with each of them in turn:

1. I am not criticising these polls because they fail to reach the standards of scientific journals. They clearly get nowhere near that kind of sophistication, and I have never suggested that this is possible with any kind of forum poll. What I have tried to suggest is that these particular polls fall well short of the quality that can be achieved in a forum poll if proper care and attention is paid to the setting up, execution and analysis. I thought I had made this point clear, and I am surprised that you do not appear not to have understood this basic point.

2. I think you are wrong in your view that there is a fundamental difference between polls aiming to measure preferences and those measuring percentages who like various composers. This point keeps coming up and I have explained several times that polls based on "likes", especially where no definition of the term has been offered and people are free to select anyone they fancy even if only vaguely, are worthless since there is no choice involved. Voters can just grab at anything that might take their fancy, which is in opposition to the real world where choices normally have to be made. A favourites based approach can be interpreted as "likes" if one wishes, in that all of the composers listed as favourites are deemed to be "liked". I accept that a fairly large number of composers may be required to do proper justice, but that's not impossible to achieve sensibly in a favourites type of poll. Ultimately, there's no difference, so I think you and one or two others who have made a similar comment are barking up the wrong tree, in not having thought it through properly.

3. I have also made several times the point that a favourites based approach can easily be used to calculate answers to questions of the type you pose like "Which composer is liked by a higher percentage of TC members - composer X or composer Y". It is dead simple to do. All that is required is a cross-tabulation of voters by composers, and this would be an integral part of the totting up process, so it's not difficult. One then simply looks up what percentage voted for X and what percentage for Y. I really cannot understand why you keep coming back to this point.

I wonder whether you are perhaps being completely fair in your comments as you definitely seem to be laying in to me quite a bit, when there are obvious deficiencies in the pile of polls that you were partly instrumental in setting up. I rather get the impression that you are grossly exaggerating my position in order to ridicule me.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Martin D said:


> 1. I am not criticising these polls because they fail to reach the standards of scientific journals. They clearly get nowhere near that kind of sophistication, and I have never suggested that this is possible with any kind of forum poll. What I have tried to suggest is that these particular polls fall well short of the quality that can be achieved in a forum poll if proper care and attention is paid to the setting up, execution and analysis.


I assumed that when you say the polls are "too suspect for a serious pollster agency" and "none of these polls has any scientific value" you meant something different from "the polls could be much better." I clearly misunderstood your meaning.



Martin D said:


> 2. I think you are wrong in your view that there is a fundamental difference between polls aiming to measure preferences and those measuring percentages who like various composers.


I don't think we'll make progress on this issue. I think there is a difference between me saying I prefer composer A to composer B because 1) I like A more than B and 2) I like A and don't like B. I also think your criticism about Wagner's rank might confuse me about your view on this issue. I don't think Wagner's rank in best/favorite composer polls should necessarily be well correlated with his "rank" in these "like" polls. I thought you did.



Martin D said:


> 3. I have also made several times the point that a favourites based approach can easily be used to calculate answers to questions of the type you pose like "Which composer is liked by a higher percentage of TC members - composer X or composer Y".


I guess I would say the same things as I said about #2.



Martin D said:


> I wonder whether you are perhaps being completely fair in your comments as you definitely seem to be laying in to me quite a bit, when there are obvious deficiencies in the pile of polls that you were partly instrumental in setting up. I rather get the impression that you are grossly exaggerating my position in order to ridicule me.


I'm sorry if you feel I'm ridiculing you. I felt I was responding to the criticisms you have made of the various polls. If you feel I'm grossly exaggerating your position, I clearly have seriously misunderstood most of what you've tried to say here. I guess it's not worth more time or effort on our parts to understand each other. Sometimes that happens. I'll just have fun learning from the data.

I hope you enjoy the forum.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

Martin D said:


> What a laugh, especially from someone who set up a poll seeking members' top 100 composers, all of which had to be listed in rank order before their list was accepted. Anything that fell short of full compliance with these rules was rejected. I can't think of anything much more ridiculous than that, in the context of polling procedure.


I thought my poll was fine for its intended purpose. Anyways, my poll - my rules.

Instead of consistently complaining from the sidelines, get into the game. Do your own poll and impress all of us with its purity.


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## mathisdermaler (Mar 29, 2017)

Palestrina 40%? damn! I would have guessed at least 60.

Edit: HINDEMITH 50? Wow. These people need to let Mathis into their lives.


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## Sloe (May 9, 2014)

mathisdermaler said:


> Palestrina 40%? damn! I would have guessed at least 60.
> 
> Edit: HINDEMITH 50? Wow. These people need to let Mathis into their lives.


For Palestrina not everyone likes early music and Hindemith is really not the most heard composer.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

65 composers received over 50% likes, and these were predominately Romantic and Modern. Only 3 Baroque and earlier composers received over 70% likes (Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel), Four were over 60% (add D. Scarlatti) and 7 were over 50% (Rameau. Monteverdi, and Purcell). 

The Classical era had 3 at roughly 80% or better, and 4 over 50% (CPE Bach).


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## mathisdermaler (Mar 29, 2017)

For Hindemith I would think people wouldn't answer if they didnt know his music. I know a lot of people dislike Renaissance music, it just disappoints me.


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