Tab labels

[steltz]

I'm put this out for discussion, although we have discussed it once a while ago, and nothing really was decided.

I removed some "piano score" headers earlier today, because the pieces were for piano solo, and "piano score" usually denotes a reduction. We don't really specify instruments in these headers, e.g "clarinet score" etc., and I also thought people might think that the work was originally a vocal one, since "piano score" usually is used for that. I realize that the reductions would be level 5 headers, but only admins/librarians/moderators/taggers would really be savvy enough to pick up that difference.

However, the uploader contacted me because he was trying to get rid of the "General" label, which is vague. We did discuss this in one of the forums a long while ago but couldn't come up with a suitable "general" word, if you'll excuse the pun. The purpose of that tab is that anything in it would be a score of the original instrumentation, excluding parts which have their own tab.

I put forward "Original instrumentation", but I think people found it too long and unwieldy to use as a small tab label.

Could we find a suitable tab label that would denote a score of a work in its original instrumentation?

[Carolus]

Since this was being discussed over on the wiki, I'll mentioned the point raised there: The addition of "Piano Scores", "Violin Scores", "Guitar Scores", Organ Scores" and the like was made necessary by the update of the level-2 header from "Files" to "Scores" about 18 months ago. This immediately rendered the level-3 header "Scores" as a redundancy. So, I expect a more productive discussion would be of what term should be used to replace the present level-2. Steltz recommended "Sheet Music", which is pretty good, as the term is widely used in English for all notated music, in printed or manuscript form. The traditional definition of the term was a self-covering musical work, typically a song or a piano piece, which was anywhere from 4 to 16 pages (up to 4 folded sheets). This technical definition has pretty much fallen out of use now. Changing level-2 would once again free-up the tremendously useful "Scores" for level-3, enabling us to dispense with all the instrument-specific tabs. As it stands the present level encompasses "Parts", "Librettos" and "Books" - all of which are definitely not scores.

Feldmahler mentioned that changing the level-2 header is a fairly big deal, so if we really want to do this it should be discussed as much as possible.

[Davydov]

I'd agree that the heading "Piano Scores" in particular can be misleading, as this outside IMSLP this is commonly applied tor piano reductions of orchestral works. I'm quite happy with "Scores" at level 2 and the General" tab at level 3 (which appears by default if nothing else is there).

In any case we're at the stage where making major changes of this sort is impossible without some sort of global search and replace facility. There's just no way we can manually check and correct 62,000+ pages

[steltz]

That's true, but we can make a policy that will gradually be implemented - at least if we know what we want as an ideal, we can change things as they come up.