wildbill@ucbvax.ARPA (William J. Laubenheimer) (01/09/85)
After a considerable delay, caused mainly by my running out of time before
running out of town for 6 weeks, I finally found a little time to get
the statistics on the Ride of the Warhorses together at last. After some
fooling around with editing everything into a consistent format, then
sorting and awking the mess, here's what popped out:
In all of the listings below, #CIT stands for the number of times a
warhorse poll participant cited a particular work or composer, and WPs
stands for the number of Warhorse Points a particular work or composer
was credited with (remember that WPs were awarded 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1
for the first 10 places, and 1 for every lower occurrence).
First, I took a look at the composers. The winner here wasn't too
much of a shock; whether you sliced it by number of citations or by
WPs, Ludwig van Beethoven came out well ahead, with close to 2 1/2
times as many citations and points as the runner-up, Pyotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky. The rest of Classics' Top Ten composers appears below.
When ranked by Warhorse Points: When ranked by citations:
Rank WP #CIT Composer #CIT WP Composer
1. 236 37 Beethoven 37 236 Beethoven
2. 90 15 Tchaikovsky 15 90 Tchaikovsky
3. 73 11 Rossini 12 66 Bach
4. 66 12 Bach 11 73 Rossini
5. 46 7 Brahms 7 46 Brahms
6. 43 7 Wagner 7 43 Wagner
7. 42 7 Strauss, R. 7 42 Strauss, R.
8. 29 6 Ravel 7 25 Verdi
9. 27 5 Mozart 6 29 Ravel
10. 25 7 Verdi 5 Six-way tie
11. 25 5 Handel
Now, it's time for the Big One: Your Classical Hit Parade's All-Time
Warhorse Winner is:
(surprise, surprise) Beethoven's Symphony #5 in C Minor!
And here's the rest of Your Classical Hit Parade:
Rank WP #CIT Composer and Work
1. 12 102 Beethoven: Symphony #5
2. 9 59 Beethoven: Symphony #9
3. 8 58 Rossini: "William Tell" Overture
4. 7 58 Tchaikovsky: "1812" Overture
5. 8 54 Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
6. 7 42 Strauss, R.: "Also Sprach Zarathustra"
7. 8 34 Beethoven: "Moonlight" Sonata
8. 5 28 Ravel: Bolero
9. 5 24 Pachelbel: Canon in D
10. 5 24 Strauss, J.: "The Blue Danube"
Nothing much changes here if you add them up by number of citations,
instead. It's still the same ten, just in a slightly different order.
Special Johnny One-Tune awards are due to the following composers, all
of whom received multiple nominations, all for the same work:
Georges Bizet ('Carmen') (although some selected particular arias)
Aaron Copland ("Fanfare for the Common Man")
Antonin Dvorak (Symphony #9)
Felix Mendelssohn (Wedding March from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream')
M. Mouret (Rondeau from 'Sinfonies de Fanfares' [="Masterpiece Theatre"])
Modest Moussorgsky ("Pictures at an Exhibition")
M. Pachelbel (Canon in D)
Henry Purcell (Trumpet Voluntary)
Johann Strauss ("The Blue Danube")
Richard Strauss ("Also Sprach Zarathustra")
Antonio Vivaldi ("The Four Seasons")
Special Blanket Citations also go from various Warhorse voters to
John Philip Sousa ("for everything he wrote") and the Boston Pops
("for everything they have ever played").
I still have all the lists, plus most of the commentary. I also have
complete lists sorted by composer and work, as well as the continuations
of the lists above, which I will be happy to send to anybody interested
in seeing them. I hope you will have as much fun with these results as
I did collecting them (quite a bit!). Thanks to the correspondents
who supplied picks for me:
aecom!poppers, bbncca!msimpson, brl-tgr!ron, brown!do, desint!geoff,
eosp1!grant, ihuxn!rhdo1, olivej!greg, ptsfc!rjw, rabbit!jj, stolaf!densinge,
syteka!jim, ucbvax!yee, ucla-cs!dgc, umcp-cs!mangoe, vice!dang, watarts!kevyn
A subsequent message will contain the current, up-to-date list of all
works receiving at least one warhorse citation. People interested in
helping extend the list are welcome to send on any omissions.
Bill Laubenheimer
----------------------------------------UC-Berkeley Computer Science
...Killjoy went that-a-way---> ucbvax!wildbill