IMSLP Forums

I'm starting to wonder about this one—in the case of D'Indy and D'Anglebert, they are always referred to with "D'"—shouldn't we reflect that?
This also goes for De Pablo, if he decides to put his works up here.
The Renaissance is a little trickier because of the differing conventions—the only place where the "first name" convention has really one is Josquin (although Crocker's History of Musical Style and others use it exclusively). But for more modern composers like these, can't we use these as "surnames"?

D'Indy is known as 'D'Indy' in the same way Falla is frequently known as 'de Falla'; it is not part of his last name, a fact not changed by common usage. (I suspect that the 'D' is usually spoken because it's easier to pronounce that way [at least for English speakers] - it more clearly separates the name from the surrounding words and makes the French 'I' easier on the tongue.) I should also note that nearly all references use 'Indy, Vincent d' ', and I cannot really see any good reason to break with the established convention. They can search for it we do provide the little note that prepositions are not sorted in surnames.

Please note that different countries deal with the "of" prefixes differently, some considering it part of the surname and others not. In an Afrikaans telephone book (hence presumably all Dutch?) prefixes are considered part of the surname. "De Groote", "van der Westhuizen", etc.

Gallica alphabetizes d'Indy under I, and doesn't use the prefix in the alphabetization.

So this issue is complicated, and some libraries take one decision for all of them regardless of usage in the country of origin. Others, including my university library, do it by country of origin. d'Indy is under "Indy, d' ", and de Groote is under "de Groote".

I don't know about Spanish libraries, that could probably easily be checked, but at least for d'Indy, I would leave him where he is, because that's where the French have put him.

Some names e.g. Du Phly/Duphly do not always have the same segmentation in the scores of the composer's period or in the books, dedications etc. mentionning him. Can't the name be present at both places of the index?

Yeah, that solution would be great (viz. Dufay and Desprez, but that's a little bit more complicated)