Any thoughts about organizing and adding classical music-specific typing? Typically, the work or composition is used as a primary organizing principle rather than songs, tracks, albums etc. And song has a specific connotation in classical music versus its broader meaning in popular music. The songs listed for say, composer John Adams, are not songs in the technical sense.
Having said that, I don't know of a readily available data source that could be used to populate such a scheme. I suppose Wikipedia has lists of compositions by composer.
classical music
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Lots of thoughts about this! Traditionally, the primary artist of a classical work is the composer, with the performer secondary, but this was necessitated by space on the spine of an LP or CD, and the necessity of a store shelving an album in a single place. Later, databases and music players only had an “artist” field to fill with a singular value.
Freebase definitely enables a much richer ontology, but getting it right will take a bit of thought. Please share any of your thoughts here or on the developers mailing list. We will also be getting together with some folks from MusicBrainz and other interested parties to grovel over the concepts of music representation within the next month, and you should see some interesting developments on Freebase resulting from that.-
Need to also recognize that many classical works are really sets of works (movements), for example, a Concerto typically has three movements (fast, slow, fast). "Song" has always been problematic for almost anything except American popular/folk music.
I think it is necessary to think of multiple artists associated with a particular work, rather than a primary or secondary artist. The composer is the artist who produces the composition as a concept recorded on some medium, usually paper, the performer or performers realize that conception. Each performance is a different work, this is true in most music, but is the central point in classical music. So for example, to tie both comments together, think of a performance of "The Goldberg Variations" of J.S. Bach, versus the same work performed by Daniel Barenbohm. (very different) In some circumstances, we want to think of Bach as the primary and in others either Gould or Barenbohm.
There is no question that the current ontologies for music are seriously flawed.
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Al, check out the Composition type, which can include or be part of another composition. Does this help? We can also get more detailed, making a concerto, a symphony, a sonata, all separate types, including Composition and having movements as their parts. There is also an Arrangement for distinguishing significantly different takes on the same composition.
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This is very important to have "works" with subparts. I've spent some time editing Harry Partch compositions as a practice exercise and the works still show up on the homepage as "Songs composed" and the subparts list as independent works. In order for this to work accurately for this type of music, this categorization will definitely need to be fixed. It would also seem that some relationality would be useful, as well, since when doing this work I have to re-enter a lot of information for each piece, esp. the composer name, etc. Shouldn't the database be able to pull in this info for me?
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Good point, Ron. This is directly analogous to the problem with albums and tracks; tracks aren’t directly credited if they are on an album entirely by the same artist. There’s a tension between redundant data and confusing lacunæ that we need to resolve.
It would be nice to have a way to be able to say “this property instance gets its apparent value from this other property instance by these rules, unless someone gives a (different) specific value.” However, the best way to say that—or even if there’s a good way to say that—is something we’re still figuring out.
In the meantime, I would suggest not giving composer information for sub-compositions (movements, etc.); even if we don’t figure out how to do inherited property values, it will be straightforward to automagically add composer information to all sub-compositions.
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