After a small conversation on Twitter I thought it could be nice to improve the way we store information about music education, since that’s definitely underrepresented online. For now I’ve added the option to specify what instrument or subject an artist taught another or taught at an educational institution (I’ve added a few possible non-instrument subjects based on what the music uni here in Estonia teaches, but I’d be happy to get more suggestions of what subjects we should have).
I was thinking about whether we could have a specific tab for educational institution places dedicated to teachers and students. Are there any other improvements you could think of?
Things like singing, tapdancing etc. is still pretty much relevant for MB, but when we start going into “miming” and “acting” it starts veering too far away from mb’s core point I think. (it’s musicbrainz not performance brainz)
On the flip side if we do allow things that are “performance (with music)” that will expand MusicBrainz’ role (and that’s fine with me, we already do have photographers for example)
But that should require a wider community discussion imho.
Another thing I thought about is that we could specify at what level someone studied where (so, bachelor studies, master studies, postgraduate, etc). I think this is a fairly international scale that would be reasonable enough to have as a small set of attributes, but what do others think?
Oh it would absolutely be optional! The student relationships (especially artist-artist, but probably also artist-place) can also be used for much more informal (but still “serious”) education, and a lot of those won’t really fit into a standard. Say “learned the piano with his mother” or “studied the folk music of the area with traditional musician X”.
I’m just thinking of how to properly model something like “graduated from the Eastman School with a bachelor’s degree and a performer’s certificate in viola in 1939, and a master’s degree in 1948”. It could be one rel (ended in 1948), or two (one ending 39, one 48 - that’s what I have now) or two, but specifying one is a bachelor’s and one is a master’s degree. I feel that last one would be much more clear.
Added three options (“Bachelor’s degree”, “Doctoral degree”, “Master’s degree”) under a “level of studies” attribute to the artist-place “studied at” relationship. While clearly not complete, these levels apply nowadays to most of Europe and a fair amount of other countries. We will probably want to eventually expand them for earlier historical needs and for other current systems - but I don’t know enough about those at the moment, so hopefully people will request them as needed
Edit: this is a separate attribute and as such not mandatory at all for the relationship - if these don’t apply, just use the relationship normally and request a level if you think it should be added.
I would also find this a very interesting data subject, was happy to discover this feature is already implemented!
I see ‘early music’ is one of the possible subjects for an education, though ‘classical music’ (as a more generic subject, thus including also classical, romantic, modernist/post-modernist music) is not an option to choose from; don’t know if this is/was a deliberate choice?
Also: Institutes like BRIT School (UK), Rockacademie Tilburg (Netherlands), PXL Music (Belgium) (and probably many more) offer ‘Pop Music’ at a bachelor and/or master’s degree level.
To conclude, the Conservatory of Ghent offers a bachelor & master’s degree education for ‘music production’ (though I’m not certain this is a subject available in many other institutes or countries).
I’m happy to look at adding other subjects, for sure Could you add STYLE tickets for any you feel are needed in Jira?
At least a few other schools also teach music production (such as this one) so it seems like it might make sense to add it too
With “classical music”, I was expecting that most people don’t study it so generally, but study either an instrument, or a specific kind of it, but I might very well be wrong… I studied languages myself, and know very little details about music education. Happy to be corrected.
The student relationships (especially artist-artist, but probably also artist-place) can also be used for much more informal (but still “serious”) education, and a lot of those won’t really fit into a standard. Say “learned the piano with his mother” or “studied the folk music of the area with traditional musician X”.