Should Track Titles Include Attributes (Ragas, Countries, etc.) + Carnatic/Hindustani style guidance

[pranesh-prakash]

Hello folks. Sometimes there is important information that relates to a track/release which may not be part of a track/release title. The style guide covers cases of disambiguation (remixes, version, etc.), and covers relationships (“Beatles cover”), but does not cover two cases that I’m dealing with.

Case 1: Countries (Putumayo)
The Putumayo Presents series and the Putumayo Kids Presents series put out by the Putumayo World Records label usually have the name of the country of origin of a track if an album spans multiple countries. Here’s an example.

In such cases, should country name be seen as part of the track name? If not, where can it be noted? The location fields under “recording” are for things like “engineered in”, “produced in”, etc., and not for the country of origin of the track. To be clear: the underlying work and the track may be from different countries. Putumayo generally provides the country of origin of the artists for a track, not of the work itself.

Case 2: Ragas
While the Classical Music style guide covers “keys”, it doesn’t cover “ragas” for Carnatic and Hindustani music (which are loosely akin to modes in European classical music), nor talams (type of beat) or type of work. These are important attributes for Indian classical music.

In this case, for instance, the first “track title” part of the back cover includes:
Raag Kedaram [Raga] | Kriti [Type of work] | Muthuswamy Dikshatar [Composer]
“Anandha Natana Prakasam” [Name of the song] | Mishra Chaapu Taal [Talam]

It’s clear that the composer’s name isn’t part of the track title. However, it isn’t clear whether the raga, type of work, talam, aren’t part of the track title. And the greatest prominence on the back cover is given to the raga, rather than the song title itself. Not all Indian classical music tracks are discrete written “songs”, some tracks showcase specific kinds of improvisation (which have a raga and a talam, and a type of work, but no song name).

Do people have opinions on how these should be tagged?

If someone is knowledgeable in Indian classical music, perhaps they could help formulate a style guide?

[Algwyn]

@pranesh-prakash

Case 1: Countries (Putumayo)
The Putumayo Presents series and the Putumayo Kids Presents series put out by the Putumayo World Records label usually have the name of the country of origin of a track if an album spans multiple countries. Here’s an example.

In such cases, should country name be seen as part of the track name? If not, where can it be noted?

I would say Yes for the track titles: track titles should reflect what is printed on the medium, corrected if necessary to follow the titles style guidelines.
For the recording, it depends whether the recording has been published in other releases without this country indication. By default, if no other release of the recording is known, keep the same title as the track.

@pranesh-prakash

Case 2: Ragas
While the Classical Music style guide covers “keys”, it doesn’t cover “ragas” for Carnatic and Hindustani music (which are loosely akin to modes in European classical music), nor talams (type of beat) or type of work. These are important attributes for Indian classical music.

I am unfortunately not knowledgeable in Indian music. MB is indeed designed based on western music, and lack features for other type of music.

I believe that we may draw an analogy between western key and Raga/Talam.
The key in which a work is written is not part of the title, but it is often specified in classical music to designate works, as the key indication serves to disambiguate. The use of key to designate work has been generalized even for works where such a disambiguation is not needed (e.g. Debussy).

So if raga/talam serve the same purpose in Indian music, I believe that you may specify them in titles in a similar way.

For the type of work indication, we face the issue that the list of type of works in MB is awfully limited.
My personal preference, as discussed in other topics recently, would be to use tags to indicate work types not in MB standard list.

Proposal for New Work Types for Carnatic Music

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 “tax…

Using tags enable searching for specific work type using tag filters.
From an example that I have found, it seems that work types are not systematically specified for the type of Indian music that you mentioned. So in any case, I would not include the work type in the work title.

[sibilant]

@pranesh-prakash, you may be interested to know that you can categorise the rāga and tāla at the “work” level. When creating or editing a work, open the dropdown menu under “Work Attributes”, then scroll down. There are separate options for Carnatic and Hindustani rāga/tāla, respectively. Select one, and you get a new menu with the possible values. I used that menu for years before noticing the rāga options!