Have you ever heard of Richard Ellenberg? Or that well-known Hungarian composer Josef Gung'l? If the names don't ring a bell, don't feel bad - these now utterly obscure figures are taken from the billing of the very first concert of the London Proms season in August 1895. One of the world's most important summer classical music events for more than a century, the famous festival has celebrated the arrival of its 115th season by putting its concert archive online for the first time.
For anyone interested in changing musical tastes, the archive makes for fascinating reading. Why, one wonders, was Ambroise Thomas's syrupy comic opera Mignon so popular with London audiences before the First World War? Performed (in part) more than 170 times at the Proms, this now half-forgotten piece was hardly played at all after 1930. Meanwhile Vivaldi - one of the world's most popular composers performed today - was given just six performances before the Second World War.
While the idea of "classical music" (itself a confusing term) is partly about preserving longstanding musical tradition, it's clear that this tradition's popular works can be almost as changeable as the pop charts. An audience of a century ago would scarcely recognise half of the repertoire popular today, and not just because some of it (though surprisingly little) has been written since. So exactly how and why have audience tastes shifted so much since the Proms first concert more than a century ago? For a start, the repertoire has expanded - backwards as much as forwards. Bach and Handel have not been truly out of fashion since the early 19th century, but 100 years ago, most of their Baroque contemporaries remained largely unfamiliar to audiences. Considered arid, formulaic and rather mathematical by listeners familiar with the heightened emotions of later, romantic music, much of Baroque was the preserve of musicologists rather than concertgoers. The performed repertoire of composers such as Vivaldi and Monteverdi shrank over the centuries to a very brief list, with even the instruments their works were written for fading out of use.
Nowadays Baroque music is everywhere, with once-neglected operas staged worldwide and Baroque composers are crowd-pullers that concert hall curators know they can rely upon. The way this music sounds in performance is also radically different from the way it did 100 years ago. Gone is the tendency to perform all music as if it were Brahms or Wagner - still common on the Baroque recordings I grew up listening to - replaced by a fascination with authentic performance, with hearing these works the way they sounded at their premieres, or as close as possible.
Instead of the lush, constant vibrato of romantic music, with its huge ensembles of silky strings, leaner-sounding baroque violins are now de rigueur, as is using recorders instead of flutes and harpsichords instead of pianos. Lutes and baroque oboes are now common sights in orchestra pits, while singers - many of them Baroque specialists - sing in a sweeter, less florid way that would have been better suited to the intimate performance spaces of the era.
All this makes Baroque music sound not just more authentic (though that is, of course, a claim that is hard to verify), but more exciting - a window into a completely different palette of sounds to those from the later western repertoire. It's no wonder audiences find the gutsier, rawer sound so much more appealing. This newfound enthusiasm for the earlier parts of the repertoire hasn't stopped at the 18th century, however. Renaissance and medieval music have also lost their status as fringe curiosities and attracted major followings. This is especially true in Britain, where the variety and quality of native composers seemed to drop sharply after the 18th century, and the 16th and 17th centuries were something of a golden age. The rediscovery of composers such as the Elizabethan Thomas Tallis (not performed at the Proms until 1961) has led to the revival of a British tradition that has partially remapped the continentally dominated repertoire.
Change is not just a question of which periods of music people listen to, however. It is also about how we listen. Back when the proms were founded in the 1890s, musical recordings were still rare and extremely low fidelity. This didn't matter as much as it might, though, because so many people sang and performed music themselves in their own homes. There was still plenty of music being written that was intended partly for amateur home performance - several of the now unknown composers in the original Proms programmes were, broadly speaking, composers of parlour songs, relatively simple melodies for solo voice and piano.
This simplicity was not necessarily a handicap to creativity - Schubert's Lieder come from this tradition, and remain some of the most exquisitely beautiful songs ever written. Sadly, the family singalong tradition that helped create such works - blurring the lines between popular and classical music - has largely disappeared. While many people have a few karaoke standards up their sleeve, few of us expect our dinner guests to entertain us with a quick tinkle on the piano.
But while recorded music has meant fewer people make their own music at home, it has also freed up classical music and brought it into entirely new situations. Nowadays, far more people listen to the stuff doing the ironing or cooking than sitting in concert halls. Inevitably, this has changed the kind of music people listen to. Looking for meditation and peace after a day's work, the public is more often interested now in minimal, reflective music that creates an atmosphere rather than music that tells a story in the romantic sense.
This is not to suggest that Beethoven or Mozart are any less popular; more that they have been joined in popularity by composers whose works approach the listener in a different way. The delicate piano works of Eric Satie, for example, are hugely popular, while the spare, simple music of the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen has a following much larger than you might expect for early medieval music. Likewise, the music of contemporary composers that really sells, such as that of Henryk Górecki, has a stately, atmospheric resonance to it that fits well with contemporary tastes.
While all these figures are, of course, very different, there is a subtle kinship of mood among them. Their music fits well with people who prefer to lose themselves in reverie while listening, rather than having their attention drawn to a series of complex, ingenious variations. Critics sometimes damn this sort of stuff as shallow mood music for inattentive listeners too lazy to attend to Beethoven's intricacy, but there's no doubt its hypnotic power can promote a sense of reflection that many find uplifting.
These major shifts in the repertoire, meanwhile, point to a music scene that is still constantly examining and redefining itself. While for some, classical music carries with it an image of heavy, unbending tradition, it is in fact a dynamic, changing body of music where names are regularly forgotten and rediscovered. Its shifts are proof that nothing, not even the past, stays the same forever.