"No." after colon in English classical titles [STYLE-2648]

MusicBrainz Style
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I just realized the English classical guidelines are quite confusing for this situation, so I thought I’d start a quick discussion so we can amend them one way or the other and add an example.

Style / Classical / Language / English - MusicBrainz says “Opus and number should always be lower-cased and abbreviated: op. and no. There should be a space before the number.”

This seems fairly clear, but it was originally intended, IIRC, specifically for constructions like “op. 27 no. 3” and “Symphony no. 5”, hence the examples. There’s no clear indication of what to do for a situation like “Five Songs: No. 1. A Song”, and I’ve seen people do it both ways, with an uppercased or lowercased “no.”

My general expectation is that this is a second part of the title, and “No. 1” opens it and it would make sense to uppercase it, in the same way we’d uppercase “A Song” - and that the people who lowercase it here might be just trying to follow the “always lowercase” guideline. But I’m also not a native speaker, and others might have different opinions and just feel lowercase is better. What do people think?

The same question I guess applies to the much rarer cases where a release is titled something like “String Quartets: Op. 1 / Op. 2” (where I’d think “Op.” acts as the effective full title and would be better uppercased).

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I’ve often been using lowercase versions for everything, mainly because it’s a little bit faster. I’m often just copy-pasting the whole track list to a text editor and replacing Minor, Op., -Flat, etc.

With your explanations, it would make more sense to use uppercased versions for both of the given examples.

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I agree, upper case after a colon seems correct for the reasons you give - with lower case retained for the other, perhaps more common constructions.

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I just did a Google search, and found that the major English style guides say to always capitalize the first word following a colon in title case.

In sentence case, most of them say to only capitalize the first word after a colon if it begins a complete sentence.

I would say title case applies here, so I think “no.” or “op.” should be capitalized if they follow a colon.

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I have no strong preference toward any of these options as long as they are consistent, but capitalizing Op. and No. after a colon or a slash conforms to common English grammar rules. Will there be a bot job to convert “op.” and “no.” that have been entered lowercase?

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Thanks! I made the change: Style/Classical/Language/English: Difference between revisions - MusicBrainz Wiki

If you think the wording is not great, feel free to propose improvements!

I’m not planning to do so right now (I don’t have a proper bot setup at the moment) but I’d be fine with someone doing this if they want. There’s probably very little “op.” in this case (although I did add one I did find as an example), but a fair amount of “no.” after colons.

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