To further elucidate the basis of aesthetic success in classical music, data on 8992 themes were aggregated into 1935 compositions by 172 composers from the Renaissance to the present day. Aesthetic success was gauged via compositional popularity and ratings of aesthetic significance and audience accessibility, while aesthetic attributes were assessed by melodic originality and originality variation as determined by a computer content analysis of melodic structure. The results demonstrate that the probability of a work being performed and recorded is a function of aesthetic attributes and melodic content, with direct and indirect effects of artistic, biographical, and historical conditions. Aesthetic taste is thus not arbitrary but lawful, for it is grounded in the intrinsic qualities of a piece which in turn reflect the state of the composer at the time of composition.
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Dean Keith Simonton (1986) studied this question.
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