[nescioquid]

Music historians note that the creation of the "cannon" of classical music occurred when public orchestral concerts arose around the early 19th century (and often paired with the rise of the middle class). Prior, you'd need an invitation to a private concert put on by a noble.

Mostly "old" music was played at these concerts. A public concert had to at least cover its cost from ticket sales, so eliminating commissions for new works was necessary, if a big break from tradition (most music was written expecting little more than a single performance). Because the pieces that kept getting played at concerts became part of a standard orchestral repertoire, a cannon emerged which became harder to update. A commonplace that circulated when I was a music student claimed that Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (1943) was the last thing to make it into the standard orchestral repertoire.

Maybe there's a similar underlying process at play in which any commercial process naturally tends to promote a smaller "cannon" of block-buster crowd-pleasers (why would you not promote your best-selling widget?). Our own listening (now) prefers not only music we already know, but the exact performance we already have heard.

[drewzero1]

Canon? (Unless you're talking specifically about the 1812 overture. :-) )

I wonder how copyright extension has affected this phenomenon. Works taking decades longer to enter the public domain, leading to the existing public domain (old) music becoming even more solidified as classical canon? If anybody knows about this I'd love to hear more.

[FabHK]

Shostakovich is not considered "standard orchestral repertoire"?

[autarch]

His most played works are (I think) symphonies 5 and 7. The 7th was written in 1941. That said, I've seen a bunch of his later works performed too.

But this is just nitpicking. Without a good definition of "standard orchestral repertoire" and a good dataset of orchestral performances we're just making things up.

[zeroonetwothree]

9 is pretty common as well I think

[nescioquid]

It was a claim I heard numerous times as a music student, and find it to be a pretty good fence-post. I always understood it to refer to the "usual suspects" that turn up on concert programs, but it would be interesting to work out what today's standard orchestral repertoire actually is by collating and analyzing orchestral concert programs.

I'd say Shostakovitch 5 might be considered to be part of the "standard" repertoire, but that was composed in the '30s. Maybe his later symphonies turn up more frequently on programs today than does Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra - I'm skeptical but don't actually know.