My disorganised thoughts...
imslp wrote:Someone's angry ;)
Not really!
Not to address the substantive issues, but I do want to mention this. It is understandable that as musicians we are also perfectionists. However, when dealing with a database such as IMSLP we must also remember that the cost of perfection may be too high. The reason IMSLP is able to grow so large was in part because we emphasized efficiency, sometimes at the cost of imperfections. I would especially mention that systematic and robotic changes such as adding spaces after "Op." or "K." should really not be done by contributors (unless the scope of the change is small, which does not seem to be the case here), as it is an inefficient use of their time. If it becomes enough of a problem, I could, with relatively minimal effort, do a global search and replace and add the spaces.
I think the open model (with the capability to make mistakes) is the better one for IMSLP to follow, especially if one compares say Wikipedia to similar projects that have insisted on too great a degree of scrutiny and professional oversight before action can be taken.
One of the tasks we carry out here is (sometimes arbitrarily) moving page titles to deal with style issues, and I find it ironic that in the past we’ve had complaints to various contributors on account of them breaking the style guide, by following the natural inclination to include the space after a full stop (which is in line with typography) – I remember seeing an acrimonious discussion on a contributor’s page from one of the “movers” to one of the people who was steadfastly following the space after full stop rule.
Also a slight substantive defence. The original reasoning behind using K1 was that all numbers that exist in K1 exist in K6 (and points to the same piece), whereas the reverse is not true. In other words, K1 is the lowest common denominator of all Kochel versions, and hence, even if musicologically not entirely accurate, may be practically more useful (K6 numbers are theoretically supposed be in brackets in the title anyway). However, I am not a musicologist, hence I will defer the decision to people who actually know something about the Kochel catalogue.
The intention was good, since the initial Köchel remains good for many of the works (Mozart’s own written catalogue of his works, started in Vienna, meant that many of the later work numbers are well-substantiated and have never required amendment). Conversely though, not all Mozart works have an assignment in KV^1 – a small number of works only entered the catalogue as of the 2nd or 3rd edition; yet these are tacitly included in the page titles even though they do not derive from KV^1. Admittedly, if Neal Zaslaw ever gets around to publishing the New Köchel (ninth edition!), this would involve minimal change to IMSLP’s page naming, since in his basic plan the works which are no longer chronologically sorted gain an asterisk, and the confusing scheme of extra catalogue numbers is done away with (or so I’m told). The main issue is that because the later catalogue numbers supplant the earlier ones, libraries and publishers that are aware of the more recent numbers often use the 3rd or 6th edition numbers
only, which confuses searching for these works.
On Davydov’s talk page I noticed a case of a work in Chopin’s œuvre where the omission of a key signature in a page title had in part delayed the recognition of a mistaken assignment of the work number. This has often been a fault of IMSLP titles, especially for large collections of works with similar titles (Mozart and Haydn are cases in point). I think the argument that the (often arbitrary) numbers assigned by a publisher, or the catalogue number are the best identifiers for these sorts of works, are weak, when numbers are far from being the most memorable feature of a musical work.
I’ve just noticed two concert overtures by Berlioz have had their titles changed to remove the fact that they are independent overtures, which seems particularly odd: the works were explicitly titled as being concert overtures by the composer without reference to having also composed a theatrical work, say incidental music to the play King Lear, or an operatic version of the novel Waverley by Walter Scott, say. Now, perhaps under the scheme cited above a work such as the King Lear Overture might be referred to as “Roi Lear, overture, orchestra, C major (Berlioz, Hector, 1803–1869)”. In actual fact, the work is now referred to in Holoman’s catalogue and the New Berlioz Edition as “Grande ouverture du roi Lear”, so shouldn’t the library be keeping up with the times and amending its titles to follow the most recent scholarship? But they don’t, presumably because the task is so enormous to update their catalogues to keep up with the latest research, which means that titles inherited from libraries are prone to following the path of least resistance. The short titles are also confusing since the assumption might be that when looking at a work with the title like “King Lear”, that the overture is merely an introduction to a more substantial work – when in fact it consists only of the overture, and there is no evidence to suggest the composer intended to provide anything more.
Finally, I did google the AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition) and was amused to notice that according to Wikipedia, “Despite the claim to be 'Anglo-American', the first edition of AACR was published in 1967 in somewhat distinct North American and British texts. The second edition of 1978 unified the two sets of rules (adopting the British spelling 'catalog
uing') and brought them in line with the International Standard Bibliographic Description.”
So, even they agreed that it’s “cataloguing”, in the end. :-P
EDITED TO ADD:
I was unfair above to criticise libraries for “following the path of least resistance”. However, I would reiterate there is something
drastically wrong with a Uniform title which takes a composer’s work title such as “Grande ouverture de Waverley” and reduces it to “Waverley” by completely discarding half of the information inherent in the title – which describes not merely the work’s content (i.e. program music based on a literary source) but also the form (specifically, a concert overture). PML
But without any automatic way of carrying out a global search and replace on IMSLP, we need to target our volunteers' energies where the problems are most serious...
