Classical questions

I have been editing a little more classical releases and I have these questions. Hopefully the answer to them can make their way to the wiki so that other editors don’t have to edit by forum convention:

  1. When do we use roman numerals and Arabic numerals for the numbering of movements?
  2. For releases that only have the family name of the composer on the front cover, do we enter their given name in the artist credit? E.g. Mahler vs Gustav Mahler. Personally I favor the former because we don’t have the guess the romanization the label was going for. But to some people that looks ugly.
  3. Why does CSG require a lower-cased “no.” even when it is not used to indicate the cardinal number. I.e. why is it “Symphony no. 5, op. 67” and not “Symphony No. 5, op. 67”? “No.” here is part of the symphony’s name, not a numbering in relation to any catalog or collection.
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AIUI

  1. Use what is in track title. Put a period after the number.
  2. As on the front cover.
  3. In my fantasy Reosarevok agonised over this and then decided that we needed standardisation and made decision.
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For the first two, as printed is the most common. I personally always do as printed on the front cover for the release artist (except for very weird edge cases). For the track artist, I really dislike giving only the surname, so I sometimes do add the first name too… but it’s certainly ok to just follow what is printed. That said, do follow what is printed on the tracklist in that case, not on the front cover (that is, if the tracklist gives the full name, it’s probably better to use that for the tracks even if the front cover has surname only).
For 3: it’s a bit weird IMO to argue that “no. 5” there is not a numbering - it’s the fifth of the symphonies. I’m sure there’s some edge case where someone has a Symphony no. 4 in C minor “No. 45” (with “No 45” being the official title) just to mess with us, but otherwise…

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For 1, what do we use for works and recording titles, which are release-independent?

Can we make this an official CSG rule, if there’s a consensus? I see a lot of inconsistencies at the moment.

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We better check if Reosarevok really means “it’s certainly ok to just follow what is printed” or whether he is talking in a context dependent way and actually meaning, “it’s certainly ok to just follow what is printed as long as you apply the relevant guidelines such as https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/English
and
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Classical/Track_Title

I was talking of the release and track artists :slight_smile: So there the language guidelines don’t usually apply that much, since it’s almost all proper nouns.

Whatever makes it clear enough. I don’t think we need to obsess with consistency to that level - if the entire work is consistent with itself, that’s pretty decent.

I personally tend to use Roman numerals, and if works are created from recordings that do not include any numbering I’ll change them to use Roman. But I won’t generally bother to change them if they already have Arabic numbers.

For recordings, I’d generally not bother to add anything that is not on the track titles.

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