Cesare e Cleopatra, GraunWV B:I:7 (Graun, Karl Heinrich)

[pierre.chepelov]

I just saw it's tagged as

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|Tags=operas ; orch ; bc

Although the full work isn't there now, shouldn't it be tagged

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|Tags=operas ; vv orch ; bc ; it

or something similar? It's quite difficult to imagine an opera without voice...

2nd question: Are we simple mortals allowed do change this kind of things? (Just to be sure)

[pml]

I don't know the work, but is it a work without chorus?

The normal tag for (Italian) operas is:

Tags=operas ; vv ch orch ; it

However the Graun work has also been given a separate bc tag for continuo. This is a bit of a mystery...

Feel free to bring these anomalies up on the Wiki at the talk page for the categorisation project.

Cheers, Philip

[KGill]

the Graun work has also been given a separate bc tag for continuo. This is a bit of a mystery...

Since I'm pretty sure this was simply a mistake on the tagger's part, I've gone ahead and retagged it as operas ; vv orch ; it (bc should not appear in the same tag as orch - IIRC that was decided in a discussion a while back). Hope that's OK with everyone.

Are we simple mortals allowed do change this kind of things?

The general rule is that only members of the tagging team can modify the tags - this is because, basically, they have all had to read a very long manual and have been vetted accordingly. Mistakes are therefore less likely than if the general public were allowed to change the tags (not to say that someone like you would mess things up; it's just a blanket preventive measure). If you're interested in joining the team, Pierre, you are of course welcome to sign up In any case, it isn't a big deal for this sort of thing to be brought up here or on the team's talk page (as Philip says).

[steltz]

"bc" can and does appear behind orch for Baroque works, which is convenient for things like Vivaldi concertos, which, strictly speaking, aren't for a plain string orchestra. Although normally, keyboard that is part of the orchestra doesn't get a separate tag, very early in the tagging project this was discussed. The decision was to include it, so I think "bc" needs to be put back into this Graun. I'll try later to find the discussions we had and post the link.

[KGill]

"bc" can and does appear behind orch for Baroque works, which is convenient for things like Vivaldi concertos, which, strictly speaking, aren't for a plain string orchestra. Although normally, keyboard that is part of the orchestra doesn't get a separate tag, very early in the tagging project this was discussed. The decision was to include it, so I think "bc" needs to be put back into this Graun. I'll try later to find the discussions we had and post the link.

Well, I remember the exact opposite - that it was decided early on not to include bc with orch - but can't find the discussion at the moment In any case, if you take a look at MW:G, you will find that 'orch bc' does indeed map to 'For orchestra' - bc is completely ignored. Also, there are many, many tags without bc used for Baroque works (such as Graupner cantatas) that were subjectively decided to have enough instruments to qualify as a full orchestra (i.e., more than a couple winds with strings and continuo - in those cases, continuo is indeed tagged for. The Vivaldi case you mentioned would be tagged as 'str bc' [plus the soloist, of course].). Though I cannot find the relevant discussion, I am completely sure that it was decided this way and has certainly been implemented like this for virtually the entire course of the project.

[steltz]

Davydov set it up to ignore the "bc" tag for the purposes of the "for orchestra" description, but the continuo is still there, in case it needs to be included later for whatever reason. That's why the mapping works they way you describe.

This didn't apply to piano parts, for instance a piano part in a symphony. It was only baroque "orchestral" music with harpsichord.

[KGill]

This didn't apply to piano parts, for instance a piano part in a symphony. It was only baroque "orchestral" music with harpsichord.

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Could you please explain a little?
Anyway, whatever the reasoning behind the ignoring of bc in the orch bc tag, there are many, many, many works tagged for orch without bc that are listed as including continuo in the ensemble. To rectify this would be a big job, as there's virtually no way to automatically separate them out from the works that 'legitimately' do not include bc. And since the behavior of the tag would be no different in keeping with the current practice, I don't see why this would give us any advantage unless we wanted to do a major redesign of the system. Another reason I can think of to include bc within an orch tag (rather than tagging separately for it) would be to avoid the creation of a whole separate set of tags that are very similar, the only difference being that one has bc and the other doesn't. Would it really give us a lot of benefit to distinguish them thus? We already lump quite a lot of different instrumental configurations into the orch tag - why not keep continuo like that as well?

[pml]

Hi,

My recollection of the discussion is somewhere close to Steltz’s, (it must be somewhere in the ten or so archived pages!) which was that the bc tag is essentially ignored at present, but should be put there if for whatever reason we decide to change things in the future to allow the tag to be “expressed”. At present it doesn’t contribute to a category such as “Scores featuring basso continuo” but this might be something that we want to alter later on, conceivably.

Cheers, Philip

[KGill]

In that case, I fear we have another fairly herculean task in front of us - correcting the thousands of pages that were tagged assuming that bc was included in orch. I must plead guilty to at least part of the incorrect tags (though I should note that Davydov and others tagged similarly, for instance in some of Graupner's cantatas), since I apparently misremembered the discussion as concluding that we didn't actually need to tag for continuo in these cases. (I found what I was looking for, I think - it's here.) Unfortunately, I have little time at the moment to do anything about this (CR and other duties are rather more pressing), but as soon as I get some more free time I will help out with correcting the necessary pages.

[pml]

Yep, Kenny, that was the discussion. Although it would have been nice not to have mis-tagged a whole lot of Baroque stuff, I think rectifying the omission is actually of lower priority than a variety of other tasks with the categorisation project (like minimising the number of untagged pages, currently 2570) – Davydov’s reply does mention that it is a standard practice of librarians not to bother identifying pieces with orchestral continuo. As far as infractions go its probably minor, and of course I threw something of a spanner into the works a little while back by suggesting our ch tags were less than adequate – so I am proposing that this should perhaps be something that we review later and implement gradually.

“sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” ...

Cheers, Philip

[steltz]

Ha, ha, ha, I searched for "harpsichord", and I searched for "keyboard orchesta", but I didn't search for "continuo". I concluded that it must have been on the forum, but that didn't seem very likely . . . .

At any rate, I agree with Philip, this is a low priority to fix, and as we go along, we may well find many of them anyway.