Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical music

Two comments:

1. I am interested in expanding the Opera project. Would anyone mind if I moved the material that pertains to opera here to that one? I realize the one might argue opera is a subset of classical music, but I think that there are sufficient distinctive characteristics to make a parallel approach appropriate.

1. Regarding this exhortation:

NB. Never translate titles - it is Der Ring des Nibelungen not The Ring of the Nibelung.

The practice, up until now, has been to use English titles of operas where they common, ie, The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, but Così fan tutte and Der Freischutz. I am not necessarily taking sides on the issue, just making an observation.

--Viajero 09:03, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The Magic Flute is used on Wikipedia - yet no performance or recording or book I have ever read on Die Zauberflote has ever been refered to by the English title. It is a despisable practice. You don't watch opera in English - why refer to it in English? German opera is German opera is German opera - there is no reason, whatsoever to use an English title. --[[User:OldakQuill|Oldak Quill]] 19:11, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I would be more than happy to see operas referred to with their original titles, but I for one am not going to go through the encyclopedia changing every instance of The Marriage of Figaro to Le Nozze di Figaro and force others to do the same. You may, if you wish, but you might find you it difficult to impose your will on others. As happens frequently here (cf UK/US spelling and punctutation), if there is no concensus, then no single standard is imposed. Also, one of the things that Wikipedia's NPOV philosphy implies is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive attitude when writing articles. With that in mind, let's see, for example, what Google reveals (not that I regard it as the final arbiter of everything):

"Die Zauberflote" - 22,500 hits

"The Magic Flute" - 73,600 hits

This would suggest, at least to someone with an open mind, that the English title does in fact have wide currency in the real world. I also notice that no less an authority than the Grove Concise has this listing:

Zauberflöte, Die

See Magic Flute, The.

Finally, if even one was to decree that operas should be referred to with their original titles, where would one draw the line? I for one am more than happy to be able to refer to The Life of the Tsar as such, rather than in cyrillic or in transliteration. -- Viajero 10:29, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I have an opera dictionary (I think it's the Oxford Dictionary of Opera, but I'm not sure) that has entries for individual operas. Operas in French, German, Italian, and Spanish are listed under their original titles; operas in other languages are listed in English. So:

Die Zauberflöte, not The Magic Flute

La fille du régiment, not Daughter of the Regiment or La figlia del regimento; but

The Queen of Spades, not Пиковая дама, Pikovaya dama, or Pique dame. -- Marnen Laibow-Koser 15:20, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English), which states: "use the most commonly used English version of the name for the article." Hyacinth 20:26, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Der Ring des Nibelungen is far more commonly used than "The Ring of the Nibelung", unless it is referred to as "the Ring cycle". Another issue may be seen with Gotterdammerung (add your umlauts yourself), it cannot be appropriately translated.

But it does have a common English title -- The Twilight of the Gods. These days, I believe Götterdämmerung is more commonly used, but it wasn't always so. --Marnen Laibow-Koser 14:09, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Suggestion

This should have subcategories - e.g. european and western classical music, chinese, indian, etc. - also, the true classical period in western music is quite limited but a larger group is what people in the west are used to considering classical (Gregorian Chant is not classical in the narrower sense, nor are others more modern.).

The usual convention is to use "classical" in lowercase for the classical tradition (analogous to "jazz", "opera") as a whole and "Classical" capitalized for the stylistic period (analogous to "Baroque", "Romantic"). Thus, Bach's music is classical but not Classical. --Marnen Laibow-Koser 19:43, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This project so far only appears to have recommendations for articles on pieces of music. It should probably also include guidelines for articles on composers and theoretical concepts. BTW, speaking of theoretical concepts, if anyone wants to help me out with Hexachord, which I greatly expanded, I'd love the company. --Marnen Laibow-Koser 03:39, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikimonography - Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin

Hello,
I am trying to find people interested in making a comprehensive monography about Frederic Chopin (hopefully the most comprehensive ever written :-) ). It should be published as a CD-ROM under GFDL. If you are interested you could look at a description of the idea on User:Schopenhauer/Chopin. I already contacted some people of Mutopia Project that are interested in helping. Chopinhauer 14:40, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Sample uploading project

If I made a WikiProject Sound samples to encourage the uploading of ogg vorbis music samples, would anyone join me? I think it'd be great if we had samples of as much as possible, but it's rather tedious and time-consuming to do in bulk. If you don't know how, it's easy -- I can walk you through on a Mac and point you in the right direction on a Windows. We could even advertise a week in which we encourage Wikipedians to do just two a day for a week, or maybe just one sample for their five favorite bands/albums/whatever -- with the number of users who probably have copious sound samples, we could really move towards having a comprehensive review of music. Any takers? (I am posting this to several project pages, please respond at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Music) Tuf-Kat 22:23, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

I have always wanted to - but have never found public domain music... Remember to upload to Commons --[[User:OldakQuill|Oldak Quill]] 22:11, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Notable Recordings

I'm not really keen on the idea of a "Notable Recordings" header as suggested. This is really a subjective and POV topic. One can ask in rec.music.classical.recordings on USENET for opinions on recordings.--Sketchee 00:15, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)

Notable recordings is not the same as "recommended recordings". Notable recordings are those that have historical or cultural import. If we take Der Ring des Nibelungen - Georg Solti's recording was "notable" in that it was the first recording of the entire Ring. --[[User:OldakQuill|Oldak Quill]] 13:07, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Okay I agree with that concept then, but it should probably be clarified on the project page :) --Sketchee 21:28, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)

Of course, one could remove all POV by listing ALL recordings of a piece. --[[User:OldakQuill|Oldak Quill]] 16:29, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Music style guide?

Sick of seeing things like Symphony No. 5 italicized, I began writing a classical music title style guide. It can be seen here: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (titles)#Classical music titles. I admit, it needs further refinement and simplification, but these are the basic rules followed by most music journals. In fact, a lot of this comes from Writing About Music: A Style Sheet from The Editors of 19th-Century Music (ISBN 0520063821).

Personally, I believe every article about a specific piece should begin with that work's formal title. This will give all the necessary basic information about the piece in a compact fashion: title (generic or given), performing force, key, index number, and nickname.

However, I think the most important thing is to get rid of improper italics.

— [[User:Flamurai|flamurai^TM]] 05:26, Dec 19, 2004 (UTC)

Sounds like okay as a general idea. Make sure you cite precident on the manual of style page. --Sketchee 05:33, Dec 19, 2004 (UTC)