Vienna's New Year's Concerts: Same Procedure as Every Year?

The Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert is a global New Year’s tradition, reaching tens of millions of viewers in nearly 100 countries through its annual live broadcast. Its unique blend of consistency and evolution makes it a compelling subject for musicology: deeply tied to the Vienna Philharmonic’s identity yet shaped by its evolving membership; guided by legendary conductors who once held their roles for decades but now change annually; and balancing a repertoire of beloved classics — such as Johann Strauss II’s _An der schönen blauen Donau_ (_Blue Danube Waltz_) and Johann Strauss I’s _Radetzkymarsch_ (_Radetzky March_) — with fresh selections each year. These qualities — repetition and transformation — create a rich dataset for analysing performance trends, stylistic shifts, and the orchestra’s distinctive musical fingerprint over time.

We have developed software tools to help us study large music collections with many recorded interpretations of the same piece, using automatic alignment algorithms to connect the different renditions to one-another on a sub-note-level granularity. This means that we can listen to a piece as performed in one recording, and seamlessly switch playback across to other recordings in our collection, immediately achieving a sense of similarities and differences. We can also set markers at particular points of interest, and zoom in on how these are performed in each rendition. Finally, through so-called audio-to-score alignment, we are able to jump to specific instants of the music by selecting them within a computer-encoded music score. 

Our tools are open-source and available to the public, allowing other scholars and enthusiasts to put their own collections "under the microscope" in this way. For the first time, we are also providing access to our extensive library of New Year's Concert recordings (alongside a large collection of recordings of relevant pieces performed by other notable orchestras) through a special exhibition at Vienna's House of Strauss museum. To prepare for this new exhibit, we are conducting a series of user studies to ensure the tools are fun and easy to use by a broad audience of music lovers. Come join us on a musical journey through time, and find out for yourself why the New Year's Concerts are not just "the same procedure every year!"

This exhibit is being created as a part of a Science Communication project funded by the FWF – Austrian Science Fund as a follow-up to FWF Signature Sound Vienna.

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