A soundtrack is the musical score to a movie, TV series, stage show, video game, or other medium.
Operas and ballets are both types of stage shows, right? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them with the soundtrack release group type though.
If those are soundtracks, what about oratorios? I’m guessing not?
Edit: To be clear, I’m just asking about the release group type, not the applicable part of the style guides. The specific RGs I’m thinking of seem pretty clearly in scope of the classical style guide.
Operas and ballets are types of stage shows, certainly, but a recording of the music for an opera wouldn’t be a soundtrack unless it were the actual music that was heard at the performance of the stage production. If the performance was recorded live during the stage performance, and released as the soundtrack for the performance, that would be a soundtrack. Any orchestra could record the music, even the vocals, of an opera in a studio, which wouldn’t be a soundtrack.
In a sense, it’s the performance that makes it the soundtrack. Even then, soundtrack releases are usually represented as such by statements on the cover like “Original Soundtrack,” or some variation. If the release isn’t identified as a soundtrack in some way, I probably wouldn’t mark the RG as a soundtrack.
If we use the plain meaning of the word “soundtrack”, then no, classical-style theatre (opera, ballet) releases are not soundtracks (with one exception).
“A soundtrack is a recorded audio signal accompanying and synchronised to the images of a book, drama, motion picture, radio program, television program, or video game; colloquially, a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film, video, or television presentation; or the physical area of a film that contains the synchronised recorded sound.”, says the Soundtrack article on Wikipedia.
An opera or ballet audio album is usually an audio-only recording. It is not synchronised to the images of a motion picture or television program. If it was recorded at a live theatrical performance, the visual part was a live, not recorded images.
The Style Guideline, Style/Specific_types_of_releases/Soundtrack, does not clearly define soundtrack, but it implies that a soundtrack release is the audio part “for films or TV shows”.
An exception might be when someone makes a film or TV show which is a visual and audio recording of an opera or ballet, and then releases the synchronised audio part of the recording as a “soundtrack” album. That might be treated as a soundtrack in MusicBrainz.
That, at least, is my interpretation of the Style Guidelines.
Thanks for the replies. I think I’ll probably just file this my mind as yet another weird way classical is treated differently.
Style / Specific types of releases / Theatre - MusicBrainz says “The release type should be “Soundtrack”, even for live cast recordings.” While that doesn’t apply to classical releases, doesn’t that at least somewhat imply that soundtrack should be used for the music from a theater work, whether live or not? Also, the “A soundtrack is the musical score to …” that I quoted in the original post is about the score (work), not the performance.
I interpreted that as being about when to apply the soundtrack style guide, not when to use the soundtrack RG type. Style / Specific types of releases / Theatre - MusicBrainz seems to imply that the soundtrack RG type should be used, separately from the soundtrack style guide.
I wonder if this depends on the country/culture. From a glance at the soundtracks in my collection, most of the English-language ones either said “soundtrack” on the cover or something like “… cast recording” or “[music/songs/etc.] from [show/movie/etc.]”. I don’t have many Indian movie soundtracks, but none of them said anything like that on the cover. They did all have the name of the movie as the title, and logos for film soundtrack companies though. E.g., https://musicbrainz.org/release/504e46e8-18d3-4523-bfed-45e965e4bcfc has the Yash Raj logo.
I suppose that statement could be interpreted that way, but the many discussions that have occurred in these forums would disagree. Let’s use the Star Wars soundtrack as an example. The music you hear in the movie was performed by the London Philharmonic, conducted by John Williams, and it was recorded in March of 1977.
Some other orchestra, or even the London Symphony with John Williams, could record the same music at another date/location. Only the LSO/Williams March 1977 recordings would be considered the soundtrack, because those recordings are the sounds you heard in the movie.
In the case of an opera, ballet, or oratorio with a live orchestra, if the sound were recorded live during the performance, and the recording were released on an album, that would be a soundtrack. Any other recording of the same music, not associated with a live performance, would not be.
Ok, that’s an interesting comparison. With Star Wars, the official thing that the soundtrack is to, is a movie which includes both the soundtrack work and the performance. With theater/opera/ballet/etc., the official thing that it is to, is just a work. There’s no canonical performance of those types of works. (I guess the premiere could count, but I’ve never heard of that being considered differently than other performances in the context of the music.)
So wouldn’t it make more sense to say that for a release group to be a soundtrack, it has to be the canonical music of the thing it’s a soundtrack of? That way movie soundtracks would have to have the performance from the movie, but theater soundtracks would just have to be the work.
I don’t think so. If that were the case, then every recording of the music for Rigoletto would be a soundtrack, whether or not it was a performance that accompanied a staged production. That’s completely out of the scope of what anyone thinks of as a soundtrack.
Huh. For some reason I thought that soundtrack and theater styles were mutually exclusive. But looking at them again, it looks like soundtrack style does apply to theater releases too, it’s just that theater supersedes it in some places.
That’s exactly what I would think of as a theater soundtrack. It’s a recording of the audio of a theater work, so it’s the soundtrack to that work. It’s fine if the consensus is not what I’d expect from the definitions though.