One recording arbitrarily split into multiple parts

Alright, I’m cleaning up Anthony Braxton’s discography, and I’m encountering something a lot and I’m not sure how to approach it. For many of his discs, one CD length performance is split arbitrarily “for the convenience of the listener”. So the CD might be Composition No. 350, but there’s five divisions. I initially did just named each part the name of the listed track with a corresponding Part 1, Part 2, etc. Then I created a separate work for each part, and said they were ordered parts to a work for the whole composition. You can see that here: https://musicbrainz.org/release/32a1dd62-c67c-412d-a9c4-c6f633455f87

This works fine, I guess, though having different parts would seem to indicate that there are different parts of the piece that can be performed, which is not the case. Later on, I discovered a different method used for https://musicbrainz.org/release/97505e04-9d32-41cb-bc97-6525b2651f9b

Here, the tracks are split in two, but, again arbitrarily (the liner notes are quick to point out that index points don’t indicate different pieces). Then I listed the times in an annotation. Of course, the problem with this, is that no one will be able to find the record for their CD, because it doesn’t match.

So now we come to the record I’m currently working on: https://musicbrainz.org/release/ce1f625a-5d21-488a-950e-22e92d9d18d9
The first two discs have index points that do indicate different pieces. However, the second two discs are not indexed that way. Initially this record had the pieces erroneously listed as being separated in each track. But the note about how that’s not right is on the back of the CD. So I changed it and edits are pending.

But here’s my question. This is a little bit different than the Iridium box set, because this is a medley, so assigning all of the pieces to each arbitrary part wouldn’t be appropriate. And the Santa Cruz CD really doesn’t seem like a good idea…

I was thinking, should each arbitrary track’s recording be linked to a compilation master recording, which would then link out to each individual work? We’d have an orphan recording, but it would seem the most accurate. The recording was made for the whole piece and split up later.

Thoughts?

The tracks on this release should match the CDs, even if they’re just for convenience.

Agreed, I just edited it.

As if Braxton’s catalog wasn’t confusing enough already.

For the Iridium case, would it make more sense to have each of the recordings be a “partial recording of” the single work rather than creating individual works for the arbitrary divisions?

I was thinking, should each arbitrary track’s recording be linked to a compilation master recording, which would then link out to each individual work? We’d have an orphan recording, but it would seem the most accurate.

The “orphan” recording being the compilation? That seems like a reasonable way to approach it. The full recording just happens to have been ‘edited’ into multiple parts for this release.

I think I was reluctant to use ‘partial’ recording of the work, because it wasn’t really a different recording. I might not create a relationship to a work for the edited tracks, just link them to the ‘orphan’ compilation recording and do all of the relationship work there.

Just “partial recording of” is fine - that’s what we generally do for things like this :slight_smile: See