The classical music world has a lot of conversations about what we do.

Is there enough music by living composers or female composers? Do we in the United States give American composers their due? Do orchestras play too many of the warhorses that have name recognition with their audience and overlook some great music either by lesser known composers or seldom-heard works that are deeper in a well known composer’s catalogue?

Often what’s missing from these discussions is data. Last year we tried to offer up some of those numbers to make those conversations more meaningful by collecting and categorizing all of the music that 22 of the largest American symphony orchestras were playing in the 2014-2015 classical season. This year, we hope to do the same with a bit of a twist.

This season we collected programming data for both major American symphonies as well as smaller regional orchestras — 89 in total — to give a more holistic view of symphonic repertoire in the United States.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing several infographics that give a 10,000-foot view of the music being played this season as well as some deeper stories on numbers that popped up, but below are some initial numbers and observations.

Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms make up a little more than 18% of all music performed. That means that one out of over 5 1/2 pieces an orchestra performs will be by one of those composers.

Piano is featured as a soloist in almost 30% of all concerts, followed closely by violin at 22%.

A little over 9% of the music played this season was written in the year 2000 or later.

Music by living composers makes up about 12% of everything played this season. There is a 30% chance that any of the concerts represented in the data will have at least one piece by a living composer on its program.

Women composers make up less than 2% of all of the music performed. When only looking at works performed by living composers, female composers account for 14% of the repertoire.

All female composers in the data are also living composers

Methodology