Janine’s blog

The question: Are there any standards for referencing classical music, in the same way that there are standard referencing systems for print materials (Harvard, APA etc)?

Background: As part of my iTunes activity, I have uploaded all of my classical music collection. Early in the exercise, I noticed that there was a great lack of consistency in how the track information was formatted. I decided that as far as the composer field was concerned, I would like pristine consistency, so I settled on

<last name>comma<first names>space open bracket<year of birth>hyphen<year of death>close bracket

For example:

Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827)    

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756 - 1791)

This convention then ensures that if I sort by composer, all of the Beethoven tracks will be together and I can easily gather them up (or a subset of them) in a playlist if I wish. I cannot automatically count them in iTunes but that is another story for another posting.

When it comes to the title field, the situation is far more complex:

For example, the well know piano piece “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven could be titled in any of the following ways

• Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor “Quasi una fantasia”, Op. 27, No. 2, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Sonata_No._14_(Beethoven)
• Sonata in C sharp minor, op. 27, nr. 2 “The Moonlight Sonata”  http://www.all-about-beethoven.com/moonsonata.html
• Piano Sonata no. 14, c sharp minor - Op. 27 no 2 http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/onestopbeethoven/a/moonlightsonata.htm

Why does it matter? So that you can do analytical things with the infomation. I have been experimenting with importing my iTunes information into an Excel spreadsheet for further manipulation. Unless the syntax of the title field has some predictability, it is not possible to query within it e.g. if I wanted to analyse my classical collection by symphony, concerto or other form. Perhaps the title field holds too much information and should be split up into subfields in order to auto-generate a syntactically correct reference? For this to be do-able, there needs to be an unambiguous way of referencing the pieces.

The plot really thickens when you also consider the orchestra, soloist, conductor etc. Presumably if a standard exists it will cover all of this.

Investigation:

FIRST: An advanced Google search revealed two potentially useful leads:

1. A reference to there being at least four standards. 
   

    http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/lion_elk/

   “Print lists of selected Music or Recordings in four ’standard’ formats - a MUST for insurance. “

   This refers to the fact that they list their stuff in a standard formatbut does not elaborate on what those formats ARE.

2.   RWC Music Database

http://staff.aist.go.jp/m.goto/RWC-MDB/#intro The RWC Music Database is the world’s first large-scale music database compiled specifically for research purposes. Shared databases are common in other fields of academic research and have frequently made significant contributions to progress in those areas. The field of music information processing, however, has lacked a common database of musical pieces or a large-scale corpus of musical instrument sounds. 

This is interesting in its own right but does not exactly address my question. However, knowing that there is an academic area called “music information processing” will no doubt lead me to the experts in the field.

Second: Ask the local experts - ABC Classic FM
I sent a query through the ABC Classic FM website. I received a lovely reply from Graham Abbot who hosts Keys to music. Graham basically confirmed my findings to date by saying that there are no fixed standards. He also confirmed some conventions e.g. Mozart cataloguing interchangeably uses the K or KV nomenclature with a European preference for the KV reference. It appears that the whole field is somewhat ad hoc.

Next strategy - can anyone help? I am now putting the question to my colleagues through some online teacher email lists in search of musicologists while I work out how to access the “music information processing” experts. Meanwhile, any asisstance would be appreciated.