IMSLP Forums

When it comes to the Time Periods, though IMSLP has borrowed the date usage and terms from Wikipedia up until the 20th century, IMSLP strangely stops doing so when it comes to the 20th Century and uses an arbitrary distinction between "Early 20th Century" (1900-1945) and "Modern" (1945-).

How about, instead of those rather crude categories, we have the following more fluid categories (based on Wikipedia's again): "Modern" (1890-1930), "20th Century" (1901-2000), "21st Century" (2001-) and "Contemporary" or "Living Composers" (composer pages without a date of death yet). Since composer pages can belong to more than one category, it makes sense to have more overlapping categories.

I feel strongly for separating living composers from dead ones - it would make it easier for living composers (and musicians) to take a look at others' work, get inspired, and get in touch with each other. It would make IMSLP a bit more of a platform for interaction, rather than just an archive, and really support that interaction between living composers.


Does this make sense? Is such a change even feasible with so many composers already under those two categories?

I have a problem with "modern" being used for something more than a century old.

I just finished marking a set of papers that highlighted this very problem, and I want to talk to our history lecturers about something like:

early 20th century (1900-1940); the cutoff of 1940 is roughly World War II, which changed many things drastically
mid-20th century (1940-1970)
later 20th century (1970-1999)
21st century (2000+)
"Contemporary" to be used only for things from the last 50 years.

This was a thought I only had last night, so it's not fully developed yet, but "modern" gets used too widely to really mean anything now.

Just my 2 cents.

Maybe it would be simpler to circumvent the arguments on labeling of periods entirely by letting users directly select a custom date range through a special page. Hypothetically, this could then free up the 'stylistic' (read: time period) descriptors on work pages to actually describe the style of each individual piece. (Maybe it would help for the latter to give it some more flexibility by supporting multiple values and introducing non-time-period-specific terms. Possibly a keyword-like setup, sort of like the tags except a bit more fluid.)

I agree that being able to select a date-range would be far more useful and meaningful, and I think it wouldn't even take too much of an effort in terms of changing the system right now.

And about tags, I also agree. It would be great to see something like that, but I guess that would take a much bigger change in the whole system? Or could it be part of the category walker?