Proposal for New Work Types for Carnatic Music

In Carnatic music, different kinds of works exist: Gitam, Suladi, Svarajati, Jatisvaram, Varnam, Kirtanam, Kriti, Pada, Javali, Tillana, Pallavi (Niraval, Kalpana svaras), and Tanam. Just as “Aria”, etc., are provided as kinds of works, these should also be provided as kinds of works.

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Types of works list is barely a skeleton of what would be needed, even for occidental classical music. There was actually a recent post on this subject.

I guess that the issue is that if we tried to develop a complete list of types of works, for all music genres, we would end up with thousands of them. So not only would we need the complete list, but also a way to structure it so that it is useable by editors.

This is a huge work, especially given that to my knowledge there is no existing “taxonomy” of music works types.

In the meantime, I believe that we may use tags to indicate work types in a way which is simple and effective.

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While @Algwyn is right that adding all the needed work lists is complicated now, I’d be thankful if you could add a STYLE ticket to our ticket tracker with these works and link for when we have a better way :slight_smile:

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From what I have gathered from other discussions on the topic of classical music classification, I’m afraid that a structured list of work types is not the right approach.
Especially since composers like to flaunt boundaries, and create works which defy traditional genre, form, etc.

We should rather work on enhancement of the tags system, which provide a more flexible framework. But we should enhance it to have “work types” managed as “genres”.

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Hello folks. I haven’t really been contributing to MusicBrainz for the past many months. I took a look at the MetaBrainz blog, but couldn’t find if there had been any change to the tags system in relation to work types. Has there?