Track 2 has prompted me to dig into style regarding names of works within titles:
Theme From The Fog
This looks awful. Despite being entered “as printed” there’s no way to discern the work from the title. My instinct was to do the following:
- Lowercase “from” since it logically acts like a join phrase/feature credit.
- Add quotes to reflect the guidelines for English classical.
Theme from “The Fog”
Looks better, but then I came upon this release and began to question this format even further:
The first major issue when checking the scanned tracklist is the presence of italics. Let’s look at track 2:
Overture to The Phantom of the Opera
The italic emphasis will be lost when entered. As written, quotes replace the italic emphasis to distinguish the work from the title:
Overture to “The Phantom of the Opera”
Looks fine, but track 7 applies a different formatting, where both quotes and parentheses are used to distinguish between work and title:
In the Hall of the Mountain King (from “Peer Gynt”)
These two examples initially seem similar, so you might think they’d be deserving of similar treatment, like so:
Overture to “The Phantom of the Opera”
In the Hall of the Mountain King from “Peer Gynt”
or
Overture (to “The Phantom of the Opera”)
In the Hall of the Mountain King (from “Peer Gynt”)
The main difference to me is that In the Hall of the Mountain King is specific whereas Overture is not, thus facilitating extra distinction between the work and the title via parantheses.
There are some examples in the classical guidelines that seem to support the Title from “Work” format, but also some contradictory guidelines that suggest removing the work altogether.
For the moment, if a title has a non-specific descriptor (Intro, Opening, Prologue, Theme), then I follow this format:
Theme from “Star Wars”
“Star Wars” End Credits
If the title is specific, I add parantheses:
Binary Sunset (from “Star Wars”)
Opinions? Perhaps I missed something in the guidelines, but if not I’d be curious as to everyone’s feedback. @reosarevok seems to have mentioned this before, but I felt the need to draw attention to this nitpicky detail about specific vs. generic.