Franz Pazdírek’s Universal Handbook

Franz Pazdírek was a Viennese music publisher who, in the first decade of the twentieth century, compiled a ‘Universal Handbook of Music Literature’ – a composite catalogue of all sheet music then in print, worldwide. This ambitious undertaking (which, perhaps not surprisingly, was never repeated) was published over six years, and resulted in nineteen 600-page volumes listing music publications by 1,400 publishers covering every continent except Antarctica.  Continue reading →

Pick a composer, any composer

jackmac34 / Pixabay

Often in statistical analysis we need to select things at random. For example, if it is impractical to work with a complete dataset, the only option might be to use a random sample. The science of statistics tells us how to analyse a sample in order to reach conclusions about the entire dataset, and gives us ways to calculate margins of error based on the size of the sample. But I digress.

So, how might we pick a random composer? Continue reading →