I have been working on adding and/or correcting digital media for the band Talco the past few days and I want to check some title casing before I submit bad changes (again) as I am unsure.
I was adding this missing digital version of the below album:
Currently, the title of the album and track 1 is “Gran galà” but I think they should be changed to “Gran Galà”. I believe it is a fictional event or place in the world of the album (like a depressing Cirque du Soleil) and should count as a proper name.
I am basing this on the lyrics, the explanation video about the album on the band’s Youtube channel and their description of track 1 on their old website which reads “Welcome to the “Grand Gala”, a sad spectacle that will lead you through the last 30 years of shameful history of Italy, a country that never learns from its mistakes and washes its hands now once again in innocence.”
I also believe track 9 should be “Dai nomadi” (plural form of nomads in Italian) and not “Dai Nomadi” as I don’t think a group of people counts a proper name, but I am not sure as the rules specify “proper names” for capitalization and not “proper nouns”, and I am not well versed on the differences.
The description of track 9 reads “The song is about a true story: a girl came home after having her first time, fearing the reaction her father, she lied and said that she was raped by nomads. The day after a torchlight procession in the city ends with the arson of a gypsy camp. After the fire, the girl finally told the truth…”
There are arguments for both options but, taking into account the artist intent you mentioned, I could live with title case in this instance.
Based on a quick search, as I expected, this expression is capitalised very inconsistently in Italian event titles (try googling “Gran galà di apertura” or “Gran galà di chiusura” to see what I mean).
I thought you were wondering whether this was a reference to the band.
Clearly it isn’t, so it should definitely be sentence case here.
(The capitalisation standard has not been looked at in 15 years, there is definitely a lot of room for improvement there.)
Makes sense, though those event names feel more like statements than titles which might be why they don’t get capitalized. As you said in the band’s case it seems the artist’s intent is that “Gran Galà” is both the event and the important entity of the event. In the two cases that you mentioned, the gala may be the event name but is not as important as the thing/place that is having its grand opening/closing which is the important entity of the event. I am not sure if that is how it works though
When googling “nomadi”, the band comes up more than the real word and it was actually really hard to find an actual dictionary entry for it, so I am sure that is part of the reason it is mistakenly capitalized everywhere. I was beginning to think that the band just misspelled “nomade” because Google and other sources kept trying to correct me or saying “nomadi” didn’t exist.
