IMSLP Forums

I'm rather startled by the intense debates over everything needing to be standardized. Especially trying to convert our practices with those of major libraries. We are even converting half of our practicing to meshing with the Chicago manual of Style (which I abhor, and frankly think isn't worth a rat).

Whilst standardization is crucially important, it's simply becoming socialistic! Style guides on general information, titles, etc (!).For example,( - rant - ), why do we Americanize the words Sonata and concerto? They are both Italian words. Shouldn't that mean they should follow Italian syntax? The plural of concerto is (in Italian) concerti. But heaven forbid if someone ever wrote "2 Sonate" as oppose to "2 Sonatas".

Rule: "Use the main title of the work in the language in which it was first presented by the composer". I am certain that the Italian composers did not write "2 concertos", but rather, wrote "2 concerti".

And yet there is an exception to this rule: "If the title is the name of a standard type of work (e.g. symphony, suite, string quartet, piano trio, nocturne), then English is preferred". OK, define standard? Seems pretty ambiguous to me.

And what about the rule "If the original title is in a non-Latin alphabet (e.g. Russian or Chinese), or is well-established under an English title, then a better-known English translation or transliteration may be used:"

And yet we refer to given songs as "Lieder". I would be under impression that songs are the known word in English, not "Lieder".

Manual of Style for General Information

Syntactical Rules
1). The names of instruments should always appear in English.


Words such as "always" always bother me. What if it's an old instrument that doesn't have an English name? What if it's a new instrument that wasn't named in English?

The names of instruments don't need to be capitalized, and yet it seems that everything else is an absolute? Why the lesser standards on the capitalisation?

7). The orchestration must be provided when known, rather than simply stating "orchestra".

It should be provided, but a lot of editors (and composers!) don't notate the complete instrumentation on the first page of the score! One excellent example of this practice is works by Stravinsky. Sometimes the orchestration was so large that the full orchestration isn't located anywhere!

That releases my steam for the night. (- going off to bed ranting about the dangers of intense standardization - rant, rant, rant -)

Hi Nick,

great rant. I think your complaint is indicative of competing views on how to deal with the ramshackle nature of music history, which encompasses so many different eras, composers, styles, ... we have some people who wish to simplify by reducing the inherent complexity by standardisation, while others are strenuously opposed to homogenising everything.

Some specific points.

• I’m not enamoured of the Chicago Manual of Style either, but in particular, my argument against it is restricted to the specific types of “style” which seem to me to be fundamentally unmusical, or put in place without any consideration of music as the principal application here. Having a house style is a worthwhile end, provided it doesn’t systematically distort the representation of a significant proportion of works.
• Italian musical words like Sonata and Concerto have been imported into English as loan words, which means that English rules for forming plurals supercede the Italian rules. Like wanky pseudo-Greek (“octopodes”) or pseudo-Latin (“octopi”) plurals for the humble “octopus”, these should not be pluralised as “sonati” or “concerti”. The English plurals are “sonatas” and “concertos” (and “octopuses”).
• The corpus of German art-songs are actually well-known as Lieder as the common term in the English-speaking musical world.
• I raised the exact same objection to 7), that it can be quite arduous to compile the entire orchestration for pieces that only show the instruments playing progressively through the score (and have been shorn of prefatory pages that list the instrumentation).
• re: English names for instruments: I am surprised that Cor anglais is sufficiently obscure to demand being replaced by the English horn. What do we call the Ondes martenot, though?

Some more thoughts later. Cheers PML

Where are these "intense debates" that I've missed then? And is "socialistic" a word?

If you go into a library in the real-world, you wouldn't expect to find one set of shelves where the books are arranged by size, another with a different set of books sorted by colour, another alphabetically by publisher, etc. There has to be a coherent cataloging system so that people know where to find the items that they want to see — particularly when a lot of the works are in "foreign" languages. That's all we're trying to achieve, because if a work on IMSLP is "misfiled" and can't be located by an ordinary search, then it might as well be invisible.

Many of our features are increasingly automated, e.g. the heading "===Arrangements and Transcriptions===" automatically creates a category for "Pages with arrangements". We're also leaving the door open for automatic translation so that standardized headings and terms could automatically be translated into the users' own language.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, we look at the ways in which real-world libraries have dealt with thes issues, and what solutions we might be able to borrow from them (like standardizing generic titles such as "Sonatas" and "Concertos"). They could probably learn a thing or two from us too And is it possible that one day people searching Worldcat will find links back to those scores on IMSLP? That kind of thing will only work with careful planning and organization.

We're not asking users to worry too much about the format of their submissions, because we have a team of librarians to take care of most of these issues. If anyone's interested in helping with the cataloging then they're welcome to read up on the basic concepts, look at the ways other people do things, and come forward with suggestions for improvements.

Just have to add 2 cents here. This is all about balance. On the one hand, we don't want the rules to be so prohibitive that no one will upload things. On the other hand, one of the HUGE complaints we have had is that the site wasn't very searchable, and that lists were woefully incomplete. And, by the way, it was a very valid complaint.

If you want to search for all items that have a particular type of title (or a particular anything else), and you want the computer to actually get a complete list then you have to standardize something.

The trade off is a bit of (OK, a lot of) anal retentiveness (probably not a word, but forgive that for a moment) in exchange for complete lists. And generally improved searchability.

Specific items:

Lieder -- I can't remember the forum this came up under, but the reasoning behind keeping lieder separate was that composers of the stature of, for example, Brahms used titles like "Lieder und Gesänge". Actually, so did Mahler. This implies that they made a distinction between the two. I don't know what that distinction is, but the reasoning went that if Brahms and Mahler made a distinction, there must be one, even if a very fine one that we don't quite understand now. None of us wanted to mess with the likes of them.

Orchestration -- we had many complaints about people having to download many megabytes of material, only to find out that the orchestration wasn't what they were looking for. I used to be on dial-up, so I sympathize, and even now with a cap, I am a bit careful how much I download. Again, this is an "ease of use" issue.

As one of the librarians, I do from time to time pick a few things that don't have the orchestrations listed, download, get the instrumentation, and insert it for the ease of people who need to see this before they waste bandwidth on it. I am perfectly prepared to admit that if there is an instrument that isn't listed on page 1, I might miss it, but having most of the instrumentation there is better than having none of it there. And if someone writes to the moderation forum to say a mistake has been made, we will fix it.

I understand your pain, but other people have different pains. We will compromise between all of you, the site will be more searchable than it used to be, but people will then have new complaints. No one will ever be completely happy, but, hey, that's what we're here for!

@Lieder: The difference used to be that Lieder were strophic and Gesänge through-composed. This really only held in, say, Beethoven's day, and became less and less prominent.

The big thing is that, luckily, we have people willing to standardize, and don't need to worry about the average user having to worry about complying with our somewhat arcane rulebook.

pml wrote:
• I’m not enamoured of the Chicago Manual of Style either, but in particular, my argument against it is restricted to the specific types of “style” which seem to me to be fundamentally unmusical, or put in place without any consideration of music as the principal application here. Having a house style is a worthwhile end, provided it doesn’t systematically distort the representation of a significant proportion of works.
• Italian musical words like Sonata and Concerto have been imported into English as loan words, which means that English rules for forming plurals supercede the Italian rules. Like wanky pseudo-Greek (“octopodes”) or pseudo-Latin (“octopi”) plurals for the humble “octopus”, these should not be pluralised as “sonati” or “concerti”. The English plurals are “sonatas” and “concertos” (and “octopuses”).

1). My purpose of slandering the Chicago Manual of Style was not to say we shouldn't have a "house" manual of style. Of course we need something as a general guiding principal for IMSLP. My fear is that it's the be all and end all of formatting (!). I've noticed several forum posts where a few individulals claim we need to do something just because it's in the Chicago Manual of Style. Why? Why do we need to do something just because it's in the manual? Is it the Gospel of truth? Is it what ordains the mortals on IMSLP? From the comments I've seen on other forums, it sure seems to be! As a general aside, the Chicago Manual of Style has several other problems besides expressing musically appropriate guides. The quoting rules are noninclusive at best, and the rules for ellipses are outrageously poor.

2).I've never seen it spelled 'sonati'. Generally, I thought it was 'sonate'.

steltz wrote:Just have to add 2 cents here. This is all about balance. On the one hand, we don't want the rules to be so prohibitive that no one will upload things. On the other hand, one of the HUGE complaints we have had is that the site wasn't very searchable, and that lists were woefully incomplete. And, by the way, it was a very valid complaint.

@Steltz - I agree that this site is sometimes not searchable. I was never criticizing the hard work of the librarians, or the importance of the job (although I think some of the tags are unusual). I was not so much blaming the searchability of the site (which deserves a forum post in and of itself), but rather the intense procedures of standardization of the fields of general information (a main complaint). I do not understand how this correlates with "lists being woefully incomplete". I can, perhaps, come to an agreement about work titles though.

steltz wrote:I understand your pain, but other people have different pains. We will compromise between all of you, the site will be more searchable than it used to be, but people will then have new complaints. No one will ever be completely happy, but, hey, that's what we're here for!

Standardization is no pain for me I just got through standardizing the work pages for Chopin.

Thanks for the Chopin work!

NLewis wrote:I was not so much blaming the searchability of the site (which deserves a forum post in and of itself), but rather the intense procedures of standardization of the fields of general information (a main complaint). I do not understand how this correlates with "lists being woefully incomplete".

Prior to Davydov's creation of the tagging system, we had genres. If those didn't always work, then you could do a search by whatever general information you chose. This was one of the causes of the woefully inadequate lists, another, I suppose, being that the genre system in itself had weaknesses.

Even though those aren't really issues any more, the creation of a house style is still desirable.

@Chicago: It's useful to have at least one "authority" to fall back on—although nobody seems to care abuot MLA around here.

I find that if things are standardized, searches work better—see worldcat for what happens when this doesn't occur. ugh.
Brilliant work with Chopin!

steltz wrote:Thanks for the Chopin work!

Prior to Davydov's creation of the tagging system, we had genres. If those didn't always work, then you could do a search by whatever general information you chose. This was one of the causes of the woefully inadequate lists, another, I suppose, being that the genre system in itself had weaknesses.

OK, sorry then. The genre system was before my time, so I wasn't aware of it's problems.

perlnerd666 wrote:@Chicago: It's useful to have at least one "authority" to fall back on—although nobody seems to care abuot MLA around here.

I find that if things are standardized, searches work better—see worldcat for what happens when this doesn't occur. ugh.
Brilliant work with Chopin!

MLA is just as bad (!) . On an unrelated note (temporarily breaking rule 8a here), MLA used to say to use the ellipses (in order to indicate you are not quoting the full text) like the following: " One day I was going down the street [...]". Now, when doing the same procedure, we simply just need "One day when I was walking down the street...". My major complaint is this: How do we know if the ellipses are part of what you're quoting!? There's no disambiguation!! Just something I found amusing, since I can't fathom why they changed the rule in the new edition!


@Davydov ~ Yes, socialistic is a word.

NOTE ~ More criticism to come tonight when I have more time to rant.