IMSLP Forums

How do comedy vaudevilles get tagged? This page refers:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Lost,_Strayed_or_ ... ,_Woolson)

How about "musicals", currently defined in our list as "20th-century genre of dramatic works interspersed with musical numbers" ?

Wilson's music from 1896 is a little ahead of its time, but we could tweak the description

I don't know the genre well, but unless someone has a reason why they are so radically different that they would have to have a separate tag, that should be fine.

Isn't "vaudevilles" itself already a tag?

It is indeed already a valid tag. The site is down right now but the Category:Vaudevilles page comes up in a Google search.

Then the problem is that it has not been added to the tagging definitions page:

http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Tagging

Would someone who can give a concise definition please add it? I will tag the page in the meantime. Thanks!

I'm afraid I was caught out by that too. The existing vaudeville category is a subcategory of "operettas", if that makes a difference?

Can we put an entry in under the "v"s? A year from now when I get another one, I'm going to look under "v", see nothing, and ask the same question again . . . . (I just know it!)

It's been added, but I have reservations about whether this should be a genre category, as there are so many different definitions. The Oxford Dictionary of Music, for example, has four possibilities:

(1) In late 16th cent., song with amorous words as sung in the valleys (vaux) near Vire or catches sung in the streets of towns.

(2) In 18th cent., the term came to mean a song with different verses sung in turn by different singers, and this meaning was incorporated into operatic terminology, e.g. a ‘vaudeville finale’, as in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

(3) In 19th cent., meant short comedies interspersed with popular songs, as in Fr. revues.

(4) In late 19th and 20th cents., a synonym for a variety show or mus.‐hall, particularly in USA.

If this causes problems I'd recommend breaking it down into songs, revues and musicals, but let's see how it goes.

Davydov wrote:I have reservations about whether this should be a genre category

Does this mean it was added without you being consulted? I have a problem with that for different reasons, being that you are the head of this project.

In this specific case, it would fall under either number 3 or 4, but hard to know for sure if we don't know the whole of the original and what went in between the numbers.

I think this needs a re-think, and possibly the vaudeville tag, if it stays, would probably have to be separated from operetta. Operetta has a single plot (thin as they are sometimes), and I find this too radically different from a variety show to be in the same category.

Other opinions?

steltz wrote:I think this needs a re-think, and possibly the vaudeville tag, if it stays, would probably have to be separated from operetta.

I am actually of the opposite opinion. My guess is that the vaudevilles tag was nested under operetta because the large majority of examples you will find where the composer actually designates his piece a "vaudeville" will fall under Davydov's description #3 -- French and German pieces from the late 19th century which employ a single plot but are interspersed with popular songs. The later American vaudeville tradition was not predicated on works themselves described as vaudevilles. In posting thousands upon thousands of operetta scores from the turn of the century I have never seen an early American theatre piece described by the composer as a vaudeville. Never.

My opinion would be to leave the vaudevilles tag as it was, nested under operettas and used primarily for European works which bear the subtitle, and put the American examples under "musicals" or "revues", whichever is more appropriate for any given piece (ie. plot vs. no plot, respectively).

I think the 'vaudevilles' category may have been added while I took a break from the project back in 2010, and I wouldn't want to suggest that it was added furtively in any way. But we need to be strict about the definition, and I'd go along with Massenetique on this:

My opinion would be to leave the vaudevilles tag as it was, nested under operettas and used primarily for European works which bear the subtitle, and put the American examples under "musicals" or "revues", whichever is more appropriate for any given piece (ie. plot vs. no plot, respectively).

Davydov wrote:I think the 'vaudevilles' category may have been added while I took a break from the project back in 2010, and I wouldn't want to suggest that it was added furtively in any way.

I have a distinct memory of it being an orphan tag when I was uploading opera scores from archive.org back in 2012. All of the work pages currently in the category were tagged as such in 2012 or later.

There are direct links to the vaudevilles category page from http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Operettas and http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Operettes_bouffes, both of which were last updated in October 2010, so the vaudevilles category must have existed back then.