Book of carefully-edited songs, with CD: what Works?

[Heurtebise]

@derobert

Sometimes a piece is performed before being widely published, and the composer decides that wasn’t what he wanted, and does his best to eradicate the 1st version (for example, Tchaikovsky’s 2nd—which BTW, I put works in for, and some of those only have one recording). With some composers (e.g., Bruckner) there are numerous versions of each work.

IMHO, this has nothing to do with the issue here. Tchaikovsky revised his symphony, so we have a new version, which is different from a new edition. I agree with the opinion that works are abstract entities, Beethoven’s 9th is Beethoven’s 9th no matter wether the performers used a 19th century edition or the latest Bärenreiter one.

A critical edition of a work is just that, I really don’t think we should have dozens of different works for each work.

@Jim_DeLaHunt

The scores have both the original Italian lyrics and a translation of lyrics into English. But the accompanying CD has instrumental-only performances. The translator of the lyrics gets a credit in the book. Should they get credit in MusicBrainz, even if we can’t hear their work? If so, how?

I don’t think so. A new work would be appropriate in this case, though.

About https://musicbrainz.org/work/f27cdd94-7f3e-4833-a575-768b47e52f3b: Perhaps I don’t realize how many changes John Glenn Paton did, but if he just edited the score using the arranger relationship is wrong IMO.

Having lots of details about scores, editions etc. is great, but I don’t think MB is the good places for that. In an ideal world, we could link a recording to an edition in BookBrainz to say that the performers used a particular edition.

@ListMyCDs.com

When service is more ready we could consider adding printed score releases to BookBrainz. I believe it would be the best place to list different editions.

I fully agree, this would be awesome.

@Jim_DeLaHunt

Since a Work entity can correspond to an unknown set of different editions of published music scores from different publishers, in what circumstances is a Publisher relationship between Work and Label meaningful?

My understanding is that this relationship is meant for Non-PD works which have only one publisher (it’s very common for CDs to list the publisher of Non-PD music).