u/SatiesUmbrellaCloset

there are only eighteen hours to make your selection for poll 1 until it closes. be sure to chose the correct option, of which there is only One

there are two regular posters here who’ll be keenly interested in a certain option in this poll

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the first poll is still open for one more day, so please make your selection for our Lord and Savior JOHANNES BRAHMS before it’s too late

also i had to press the button on the random number generator like seven times to get a set of six numbers that hadn’t been used before. pretty soon i’m going to have to generate several rows of six columns of numbers and then pick the first one from each column that hasn’t been done before because it’s a pain in the derrière to check five numbers and then find that the sixth number is a duplicate and then i have to generate a completely new set and

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the non-pianists will be happy to know that an orchestral composer is in the lead in the last poll

i doubt that will happen this time

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reminder that polls 1 and 2 are still open for five and six days, respectively

my beloved mushroom better win this one

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i love the sound of old Mercury Records recordings, even the mono ones. there's something about it which is so intoxicating

the previous poll has a close match for second place between La Monte Young and the dreadful Italian-English capitalist who wrote sonatinas hated by piano students all over the world. the rest of you have six days left to make the correct choice (other than our Lord and Savior and King of Kings, JOHANNES BRAHMS)

henceforth the order of the options in each poll will be according to the exact random order of the numbers generated by the RNG. i alphabetized the previous poll but it felt too orderly

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this begins a series of polls with the aim of determining which composer is the favorite amongst the members of our illustrious subreddit, some of whom will surely get tired of this very soon if not immediately

i’ll use the rank numbers in my previous post about last.fm listening statistics to assign identification numbers to each composer for random selection. a screenshot of a random.org random number generator will be included in the comments to prove that i’m not rigging the choices (never mind everything i did to rig the original ranking to exclude Einaudi and whatnot because film music is yucky)

i haven’t quite figured out how i’m going to narrow things down, but i think i’m probably going to take the top two or three from each set of six and have them advance to the second round. then i’ll figure it out from there

i’ll leave each poll open for seven days because i know some people don’t check here as often

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i was bored so i sorted through like a hundred pages of https://www.last.fm/tag/classical/artists and put the actual classical composers into a spreadsheet ordered by number of listeners. composers were excluded if they only wrote film music because that's yucky, but film music composers were half-included if they wrote some absolute music

my intention is to determine which composer is the favorite of our illustrious subreddit. i shall ascertain this through a series of polls which y'all'll probably get tired of. i'm still trying to figure out how to make this work. it will probably be a daily-ish poll with six random choices from the list, and the highest-scoring choices will advance to a further round. a bracket may be in the future

anyway here's a long-ass table

Rank	Composer	Listeners
1	Ludwig van Beethoven	2,768,702
2	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	2,539,958
3	Johann Sebastian Bach	2,535,829
3½	John Williams	2,356,166
4	Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin	2,184,507
5	Claude Debussy	2,095,212
6	Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky	2,047,685
7	Antonio Vivaldi	2,024,878
8	Erik Satie	1,903,250
8⅓	Ennio Morricone	1,852,088
8⅔	Ludovico Einaudi	1,842,719
9	Johannes Brahms	1,616,734
9½	Max Richter	1,543,472
10	Franz Peter Schubert	1,495,837
11	Camille Saint-Saëns	1,486,642
12	Liszt Ferenc	1,415,024
13	Edvard Grieg	1,367,447
14	Philip Glass	1,343,499
15	Maurice Ravel	1,253,653
16	Antonín Dvořák	1,236,776
17	Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff	1,195,263
18	Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich	1,157,330
19	Felix Mendelssohn	1,109,480
20	Robert Schumann	1,086,934
21	Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev	1,012,044
22	Jean Sibelius	986,484
23	Gabriel Fauré	971,201
24	Giuseppe Verdi	965,977
25	Georges Bizet	895,541
26	Richard W*gner	869,882
27	Johann Pachelbel	859,055
27½	Nils Frahm	819,284
28	Gustav Mahler	799,538
29	Michael Nyman	783,976
30	Giacomo Puccini	698,912
31	Samuel Barber	674,341
31½	Nino Rota	669,848
32	Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky	665,332
33	Gustav Holst	664,601
34	Franz Joseph Haydn	649,218
35	George Gershwin	646,237
36	Carl Orff	638,685
37	Arvo Pärt	637,586
38	Johann Strauss Jr.	637,371
39	Richard Strauss	575,723
40	Georg Friedrich Händel	541,502
41	Henry Purcell	534,596
42	Steve Reich	511,056
43	Carl Philip Emanuel Bach	509,416
44	Léo Delibes	509,375
45	Luigi Boccherini	502,586
46	Ralph Vaughan Williams	498,388
47	Bartók Béla	493,824
48	Aleksandr Nikolayevich Scriabin	480,723
49	Bedřich Smetana	459,222
50	Niccolò Paganini	446,393
51	Domenico Scarlatti	441,435
51¼	Anonymous	432,828
51½	Karl Jenkins	432,677
52	Jules Massenet	429,145
53	Georg Philipp Telemann	420,743
54	Leonard Bernstein	416,060
55	Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov	411,540
56	Hector Berlioz	410,238
57	Christoph Willibald Gluck	407,752
57½	Zbigniew Preisner	392,339
58	Louis Thomas "Moondog" Hardin	383,095
59	Jean-Philippe Rameau	377,789
60	Jacques Offenbach	375,102
61	Arcangelo Corelli	371,578
62	Francis Poulenc	369,941
63	Ottorino Respighi	363,270
63½	Glenn Gould	358,027
64	John Adams	355,361
65	Pietro Mascagni	328,260
66	John Cage	324,500
66.6	Joshua Kyan Aalampour	318,098
67	Aaron Copland	306,605
68	Benjamin Britten	305,961
69	Anton Bruckner	299,880
70	Tomaso Albinoni	299,326
71	Edward Elgar	294,775
72	Gioachino Rossini	288,820
73	Max Bruch	286,445
74	Carl Maria von Weber	285,735
75	César Franck	281,681
76	Terry Riley	280,016
77	Hania Rani	274,141
78	Charles Gounod	273,859
79	Olivier Messiaen	269,116
80	Claudio Monteverdi	266,776
81	Wim Mertens	266,338
82	Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky	265,352
83	Scott Joplin	263,451
84	Frederick Delius	261,161
84½	Ilan Eshkeri	253,215
85	Fritz Kreisler	248,079
86	Ligeti György	247,118
86½	Gabríel Ólafs	244,669
87	John Field	234,054
88	Leoš Janáček	232,560
89	Giovanni Battista Pergolesi	227,320
90	Joaquín Rodrigo	221,110
91	François Couperin	219,178
92	William Walton	206,832
93	Wojciech Kilar	203,969
93½	Elliot Goldenthal	201,552
94	Henryk Górecki	200,943
95	Krzysztof Penderecki	198,349
96	Jean-Baptiste Lully	198,240
97	Francisco Tárrega	198,158
98	Leroy Anderson	195,456
99	Giuseppe Tartini	195,227
100	Isaac Albéniz	195,222
101	Gaetano Donizetti	194,608
101½	Alexandra Stréliski	193,833
102	Clara Schumann	186,408
103	Wendy Carlos	176,223
104	Heitor Villa-Lobos	173,996
104½	Joe Hisaishi	172,765
105	Ludwig Minkus	171,323
106	Manuel de Falla	167,857
107	Domenico Cimarosa	162,444
108	Hildegard von Bingen	161,488
109	Jordi Savall	155,790
110	Adolphe Adam	154,917
111	Aleksandr Konstantinovich Glazunov	154,309
112	Morton Feldman	154,131
113	John Dowland	152,547
114	Eric Whitacre	151,422
115	John Tavener	149,561
116	Gregorio Allegri	148,219
117	Dieterich Buxtehude	146,326
118	André Previn	144,263
119	Amy Beach	143,953
120	Julia Kent	140,085
121	Alfred Garrievich Schnittke	136,618
122	Karlheinz Stockhausen	136,207
123	Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini	135,358
124	Anton Webern	134,374
125	Marin Marais	133,602
126	Arnold Schönberg	131,709
127	Amilcare Ponchielli	127,044
128	Vittorio Monti	126,997
129	John Rutter	126,069
130	Leo Brouwer	123,014
131	Carl Nielsen	122,585
132	Alessandro Scarlatti	120,471
133	Charles Ives	119,851
134	Muzio Clementi	117,937
135	Marc-Antoine Charpentier	117,238
136	Enrique Granados	116,332
137	Federico Mompou	114,093
138	Aram Khatchaturian	113,077
139	William Byrd	109,345
140	Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina	108,702
141	Johann Strauss Sr.	107,511
142	Alban Berg	106,260
143	Paul Hindemith	105,798
144	Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber	105,650
145	Blagoje Bersa	103,115
146	Iannis Xenakis	101,441
147	Pablo de Sarasate	97,867
148	Paul Dukas	96,189
149	Fernando Sor	94,619
150	Luciano Berio	94,109
151	Ruggero Leoncavallo	92,999
152	Gerald Finzi	90,991
153	Michael Praetorius	89,287
154	Fanny Mendelssohn	87,950
155	Alessandro Marcello	87,719
156	Johann Nepomunk Hummel	87,021
157	Nadia Boulanger	84,025
158	Karol Szymanowski	83,548
159	Thomas Tallis	82,983
160	Edgard Varèse	81,770
161	Caroline Shaw	81,204
162	John Philip Sousa	80,420
163	Giya Kancheli	79,528
164	William Grant Still	78,656
165	Samuel Coleridge-Taylor	78,510
166	Francesco Geminiani	77,864
167	Erich Wolfgang Korngold	77,744
168	Manuel Ponce	77,229
169	Kurt Weill	77,144
170	Morten Lauridsen	75,361
171	Pierre Boulez	74,876
172	Florence Price	74,109
173	Antonio Salieri	73,802
174	Pauline Oliveros	73,699
175	Remo Giazotto	73,505
176	Reynaldo Hahn	72,146
177	Thomas Adès	70,094
178	Guillaume de Machaut	69,987
179	Augustín Barrios Mangoré	68,414
180	Joseph Bologne Chevalier de Saint-Georges	68,086
181	Eduardo di Capua	66,009
182	Giuseppe Torelli	64,931
183	Carlo Gesualdo	63,975
184	Jan Dismas Zelenka	63,712
185	Percy Grainger	63,004
186	Moritz Moszkowski	62,491
187	Darius Milhaud	62,274
188	Charles-Valentin Alkan	62,131
189	Girolamo Alessandro Frescobaldi	62,012
190	Johann Christian Bach	61,047
191	Guillaume Dufay	60,189
192	Lili Boulanger	59,575
192½	Peter Warlock	59,556
193	Josquin des Prez	59,343
194	Georgy Sviridov	58,861
195	Max Reger	56,712
196	Johann Michael Haydn	53,987
197	Emmanuel Chabrier	53,310
198	Giacinto Scelsi	52,577
199	Ernest Bloch	51,555
200	Pietro Locatelli	51,414
201	Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein	51,224
202	Maurice Duruflé	50,952
203	Anatoly Konstantinovich Lyadov	50,491
204	Tomás Luis de Victoria	50,448
205	Peter Sculthorpe	50,159
206	Orlando di Lasso	50,061
207	La Monte Young	49,920
208	Julius Fučík	49,550
209	William Boyce	48,763
210	Kodály Zoltán	48,630
211	Giulio Caccini	48,346
212	Frank Bridge	48,312
213	Alberto Evaristo Ginastera	48,293
214	Jacob Mühlrad	47,733
215	Yoshimatsu Takashi	47,237
216	Einojuhani Rautavaara	46,762

link to archive because i'm not gonna give the New York Times a fucking cent: https://wordlearchive.com/1872

that is all, have a nice day

the meaning is self-evident, please cast your vote

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I’ll start: Paganini is wildly overrated. He was a flashy virtuoso, but an amateur composer.