Work entry for Dies Irae (plainchant)

I am entering in a release the includes Sculthorpe’s Memento Mori, and the liner notes (written by the composer) note it quotes from the plainchant Dies Irae. So I was going to, possibly in a fit of insanity*, put in an “based on” entry on it (which appears to be a correct use of it according to the documentation, as it “includes (parts of) another work”).

Surprisingly, I couldn’t find it in the database. I think I found a few recordings, all lacking an associated work. But I’d be really surprised if it wasn’t there!

So:

  1. Could someone point me to it? I tried using the advanced search syntax to search for it under anonymous, unknown, and traditional, and couldn’t find it. Alternatively, it it’s not there—I’m not sure which of those special purpose artists to put it under. (I’m leaning towards [unknown]).
  2. Calling it “based on” is weird, by the ordinary meaning of the term. But not the documentation. Am I reading the documentation wrong? In which case, maybe there should be a “quotes” or similar relationship?

* any attempt to mark every work that quotes from Dies Irae in the database would surely result in a breakdown.

1 Like

I’ve very rarely added plainchant works because I don’t know enough about the “genre” to know if everything marked as “plainchant, Dies Irae” for example is the same work, or a million different works using the Dies Irae text. Maybe others have the same issue :slight_smile:

And yeah, “based on” would be the correct relationship here (there’s been a couple requests for more specific ones but as of now that’s it)

I believe it’s not a problem with this work but in general there’s quite many chants using same texts. I once was thinking about creating works with sound clips (mp3 link on annotation) but decided to consider this little bit later. Works in general are a huge mess and my main priority is currently on more popular works.

I went ahead and added it. Not sure if a source better than Wikipedia can at least narrow down the date ranges.