IMSLP Forums

Hi everyone. This may be a terrible idea, but do you think it might be useful to have a category walker specifically for keys? I was considering that it may be useful to able to see all the pieces we have in our collection from the perspective of key signature. Especially for the most obscure keys. What do you reckon?

Not the worst idea I've ever heard, but it would be terribly difficult to implement. You'll have noticed from your excellent cleanup work how few pieces have their keys listed in "General Information", and in fact there wasn't even a field to include this data until around a year ago, so most work page submitted before then don't show any key information. There would also be difficulties in handling collections with pieces in different tonalities, and those which start and end in different keys, but the real clincher is the rather unappealing prospect of going back through every one of the 28,000 or so works that have already been tagged

But if anyone does have an urge to find a list works in, say, E-flat minor, then they can always use the "Search" box to bring up all pages that contain that term.

I have a few observations to make:

First, is it worth doing this with templates which can simultaneously handle formatting of {{flat}} and {{sharp}} as well as categorisation? It shouldn’t be too hard to use the convention of upper case letters for major, lower case for minor, and sharps and flats denoted by # and b. (Unless we also want to implement say German, French, Italian and Spanish usage for the sake of it. Hmm maybe not... ambiguity of German B-Dur = B flat major!)

Second, there are obviously some pages where we will want to go outside the major/minor key signature paradigm, as works have been written up to the current day that are clearly in identifiable modes, rather than major and minor keys. If we can use case switching to implement the common keys, then the modes are just an extra set of cases. In particular, almost all works prior to the Baroque should be classified modally, and not as being “major” or “minor”.

Third, works in expanded tonality with multiple key centres (or starting in one key, finishing in another) can surely be handled by multiple uses of the template? If you were considering a template where E major was handled by {{key|E}}, then a work like Mahler’s 5th would have a line in the general info field that looks like:
|Key={{key|c#}}—{{key|D}}

Any works pages with greater numbers of key signatures than two should probably have that information relegated to the Misc. Comments field.

I agree 31,650 work pages is an unappealing number, but that is no reason to not think about it. Would a bot be able to deal with most cases by doing a strict search on the |Key= variable in the general info field?

Also, there may be a fair proportion of pages that either don’t get or shouldn’t have keys assigned. Publications of collections of multiple works, perhaps.

Cheers, Philip

EDITED TO ADD: I’ve implemented the first half of this – there is now a template, http://imslp.org/wiki/Template:K , which will display the appropriate key signature from the Bb/f# type shorthand. If we wish to categorise pages, then I propose making a second template {{Key}} which in addition handles the categorisation (it would be inefficient for the {{K}} template to be called from within {{Key}}).

Nice—although at some point, I and K might be added to a language template with all of the ISO abbreviations (L) &c.—and then we would have general information boxes full of single-letter templates.

Just a very rare case here -- I've seen the Weber Concertino as listed in both c minor and E{{flat}} major. It starts in the minor and ends in the major. Even Grove lists it as "c/Eb".

Is there any way to handle this sort of rarity?

Hmm… it isn’t actually that uncommon for minor key works to finish in either the tonic major or the relative major, and the Weber is an example of the latter; so there might be more than a few works that could be categorised that way.

Otherwise I’m inclined to think that works which have two key centres that aren’t related in such straightforward ways are likely to be sui generis, which would make it probably worth having these sorts of works categorised by each individual key, rather than having a category which combines both?

How many works can people think of that start in D minor and finish in D flat major? ;-)

Cheers PML

PS Two new templates for you to ponder at: Key and Mode. How many pieces are there on IMSLP that are not in the key system or the modal system? Atonal works, yes. Quarter-tone works, yes. Other tuning systems, such as 31-note ET? Folk modalities?