IMSLP Forums

Hello,

Would it be possible to add more genres?

E.g., could we have, for instance, "Cantata (secular)" and "Art song"?

I request the latter specifically because the other options are so limited as to force the use of the extremely vague "Other (secular - solo)," while German and French genres are favored with their own terms (Lieder and Chanson, respectively -- although the plural for the German seems inappropriate).

It seems to me that "Piano piece" is much too vague to be of any use -- "a piece for a specific instrument" is not even a genre.

Also, "Song collection" would be a helpful alternative to "Song cycle," given that not all collections of songs are cycles.

Thanks in advance for any information.

As requested: moved to bug forum.

Well, the answer is that Daphnis had a few weeks ago scanned and uploaded all of the LoC (Library of Congress) classification system for music. I'm planning to announce a project to implement a real classification system on IMSLP based on a digitized (and customized) version of the LoC. The current category-based classification system is broken by design, and I don't want to expand it any further.

Thanks for the suggestion though

By the way, will the classification system completely replace the current genre categories? I'm asking because we currently have several work pages placed in inexistent genre categories. If they're here to stay, we should try to clean them up.

We probably should clean them up

Well then, if anyone is wondering how to spend the evening, have a look at
http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:Wantedcategories
Ideally, this list should be empty. I'm going to fix the user categories in the near future, but I'd be glad if someone more expert than me could take care of the genre categories. (As explained in this thread, please don't randomly create new genre categories.)

Edit: There are also a few genre categories in
http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:Uncategorizedcategories
These should probably either be added to their proper supercategory or eliminated.