Works work pretty well in my experience when setting up relationships for most stuff, but one case I’ve run into that I feel like could use some improvement is with works that are made up of individual tunes and lyrics. A hymn is often made up of two separate works, lyrics and the tune. Those lyrics can have multiple tunes and the tunes are used for multiple hymns. We don’t however have a work category for either type. The song type which fits the combined version, but the individual pieces don’t have types. Has there been any discussion in the past about adding new types for those cases? Of course that type of stuff can also be documented in disambiguations, but it seems it would be beneficial to more consistently documentation those work types.
just offering an example for others, O Little Town of Bethlehem is sung to a very different tune in the US and UK. we’ve got both versions in MusicBrainz here:
I don’t know that we need a work type for both, but at the very least new relationships might be good. I know we’ve currently got “Quotes music/lyrics from”, but to my understanding these are for short quotations, not the whole song. there’s also “Is based on”, but that seems a bit too generic sometimes. this could also cover things like Ariana Grande’s 7 rings, which is largely to the tune of My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music.
I can already see a “To the tune of” relationship, but I don’t have an idea for the lyrical version of this relationship…
The King of Love My Shepherd Is - Wikipedia is the hymn that prompted this thread, it has 4 tunes listed on Wikipedia, though only two are setup as works on MusicBrainz currently. Hymnary has even more tunes listed as published in hymnals with it The King of Love My Shepherd Is | Hymnary.org
O Little Town of Bethlehem is a good example though. There the UK version is currently linked to the US version. Linking to the version with the first tune is one way to do it, but with hymns the lyrics are the main part, not the music, so to me it seems like there should be a different work for the lyrics themselves.