The Dudamel Succession Simulation

The sky is falling, the end draws nigh: the Gustavo Dudamel era is over in LA.

​Or at least it will be when he departs for New York in 2026. If over the past few weeks you’ve noticed distant moaning of a westerly origin, ​i​t’s likely the sound of the newly-assembled LA Phil search committee, going name by name down a whiteboard of possible successors, circling contenders, erasing pretenders. It’s a lengthy and unenviable process.

But what if we could bypass the process – or at least speed it up – and get a short list together faster?

Today we’ll do just that, using something rigged up in the Classical Dark Arts lab called the Data-driven Utility for Determining Artistic Merit and Evaluating Leadership, or D.U.D.A.M.E.L. It’s an algorithm for identifying and evaluating potential candidates for the LA Phil search committee. DUDAMEL crunches spreadsheets of data extracted from across the web and narrows the search to a manageable handful of candidates. Easy-peasy.

For inputs I polled well-placed folks in the industry, and noted the few writers brave (or foolish) enough to weigh in on the selection process. I surveyed music groups on Facebook and Reddit, as well as some surprisingly active, old-school music chat forums. I scraped lists and listicles of emerging young conductors. I also sniped the names of all the Dudamel Fellows since 2009, as well as the winners and runners-up from conducting contests like the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition, and Sir Georg Solti International Conductors’ Competition. This process yielded 129 names.

Then it was time to slop together data for each conductor. These included search results; mentions, follows and likes on social media; mentions across well-trafficked classical music sites; the entirety of each conductor’s recorded output, both audio and video; and each conductor’s relative popularity in the Los Angeles market. All that gets run through the DUDAMEL algorithm, which organizes, analyzes and weights the data before finally kicking out a list of names with a job-fitness ranking.

Bear in mind that the most important factors in a conductor search include the conductor’s rapport with the orchestra, their area(s) of expertise, their skill in handling personnel matters, as well as other considerations like audience enthusiasm. These are modelable in some sense, but not in this first version of D.U.D.A.M.E.L. We’re creating the short list. Let the committee do the rest!