Familiarity, not quality, drives which classical works get performed and canonized.

Evidence

The programmes shrink, and the shrinking process not only removes the moderately good, but the accepted classics themselves undergo a selection that has nothing to do with quality. In America, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony is among the rarities. This selection reproduces itself in a fatal circle: the most familiar is the most successful and is therefore played again and again and made still more familiar. The choice of the standard works is itself in terms of their ‘effectiveness’ for programmatic fascination, in terms of the categories of success as determined by light music or permitted by the star conductors. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 77

Categorization

• DEFINE: Exemplifies Adorno’s mechanism of standardization-of-canon: selection by ‘effectiveness’ rather than quality, in a self-reinforcing loop.
• XREF: The ‘most familiar is most successful’ fatal circle is the same feedback loop as modern algorithmic recommendation amplifiation.
• SEED: Angle: run this fatal circle against Spotify/algorithmic-era canon formation — which ‘Beethoven Fourths’ does streaming bury today?