Piece Styles

[jujimufu]

I was adding a piece of mine today, and I came across the "Piece style" drop-down menu, and I thought that it's not very representative.

It needs to be clear what we mean by "Piece style" - do we mean "the period in which the piece was written"? Because the drop-down menu choices out of which we have to select are identical to the names given to the periods, according to which you can browse the archive.

Or does it actually refer to the piece's style? In which case it doesn't matter in which period the piece was written, as long as it sounds quite like the works of a particular period.

In the first case, a contemporary piece in the romantic idiom would be placed under "Modern", while in the second case under "Romantic".


The other problem I encountered was that, if the drop-down menu choices refer to the period of the piece, then maybe we have to re-classify the options. I agree with "Ancient", "Medieval", "Renaissance", "Baroque", "Classical" and "Romantic" (although clearly there are transitive works that belong to one and the other category, or even whole periods of composers which could be in either of two choices).

I do not agree with "Early 20th Century" and "Modern"

I personally feel like "Early 20th Century" should be replaced by Modern, and then we should have another category that would be either called Contemporary or Post-1945.

The only reason why I would advise against the use of "Contemporary" would be because what is "Contemporary" constantly changes, so in 20 years' time, some of today's contemporary composers will be long dead, while the "contemporary" composers of 2029 will write quite different music than we do today (probably) (maybe) (well, I don't really know).

The other problem with "Contemporary" is that, what happens when a composer is no longer "contemporary"? As with the case of Stockhausen in 2007 - would anyone NOT call Stockhausen a "Contemporary" composer simply because he's not alive anymore?

When I think of composers in terms of "Contemporaneity", I have made an arbitrary decision that if a composer has died within my lifetime, I still consider them as "contemporary" (to me, that is). Which is why the use of the word "Contemporary" has a difficult meaning in written down language: because it stays around for longer than the writer.

About Post-1945, I understand that again there is no clear-cut line after which "modernism" ceases and "post-modernism" or "experimentalism" or [put favourite late 20th- century -ism here] starts, but in most books I have read that is where the line is drawn (e.g. Paul Griffiths' "Modern Music: The Avant-Garde since 1945" etc).


Of course, this is not a perfect solution, and there are plenty of composers whose output defies blunt categorisation such as this, including Scriabin, Debussy, Beethoven and Stravinsky, just to mention a few, and there are also composers who are curious cases in their time period, such as Rachmaninov (although he would classify as "Modern", he's more closely related to the "Romantic" tradition) or contemporary composers who write in an idiom of the past (such as members of the -sad, in my opinion- Vox Saeculorum).


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In short, I am asking for a change in that feature - it should be made clear whether it refers to the time period or the composition's style, and more options should be added. I am aware that the changes I am offering above are far from perfect and generalise quite a lot, but I believe they are less crude than the already existing ones.

[Lyle Neff]

Frankly I think that the "styles" menu and field should be removed. As long as we know when the piece was composed (or at least when the composer lived), it's not necessary to state what period the piece belongs to. This also avoids the problem of a composer who straddles two adjacent eras.

A deliberate stylistic anachronism on the part of the composer for a particular piece can be mentioned in a note.

At the very least, if the field is to remain, could we change the word "style" to "era"? Otherwise it looks terribly embarrassing (as does the whole problem with "genre").

[jujimufu]

Yeah - although ditching them might cause problems in terms of the time periods that are used for browsing scores.


Is there no way the pieces could have a "date" field (i.e. date of composition) (and potentially another field for "date of publication), which not only shows up in the work page (as it already does), but is also used as a parameter to sort music? So, you would have the possibility of searching for pieces between, say, 1874 and 1902, and it would pop out all the pieces which have any dates between those numbers as their composition date. Pieces which do not have a date could have a "joker" date, and thus would appear in any searches which would show results within the composer's lifetime.

If applied to composer's pages too, this could be used to search for composers born after a certain date, died before a certain date, or who are within a range of years.

This would solve the problem of "periods" or "styles", although we would still have the ability to sort composers according to period (every link would simply be a search within the range of the commonly accepted dates for that period, which would include composers who lived within that period and died in a next one, or composers who were born in a previous period and died in the browsed period - in this way the transitional composers would also be included in both periods they belong to).

I don't know -however- how feasible this is in terms of wiki structures and stuff.

[steltz]

People do search by piece style, so I wouldn't like to see the category deleted.

The composition date will not solve the problem of style. Think of Bruch and Strauss, writing Romantic-style music well into the 20th C. Saint-Saens too. If you are searching for Romantic music, you definitely want this stuff to come up.

Is there no way the pieces could have a "date" field (i.e. date of composition) (and potentially another field for "date of publication), which not only shows up in the work page (as it already does), but is also used as a parameter to sort music?

This already works. If you search Bruch 1911 you will get his Romance and Double Concerto, amongst others. However, unless you know the date, this is definitely not as useful a search as period/style, especially if you are just browsing.

People have put contemporary music on IMSLP with a piece style of Baroque or Classical, so this does help to tell the person searching whether it is suitable.

I agree that "Contemporary" will change from time to time, and should be looked at -- one usage I've heard is for anything in the last 50 years. However, this nomenclature problem is worldwide, not just IMSLP. It has been discussed here before, with relation to words like "post-modern", etc.

I personally feel like "Early 20th Century" should be replaced by Modern, and then we should have another category that would be either called Contemporary or Post-1945.

Since the definition of "modern" is "recent times or the present", ít shouldn't be used for music written 100 years ago. "Early 20th Century" is definitely more descriptive here. Apart from that, I personally find "Early 20th C." useful. It tells me that I am probably looking at something tonal, or in the early stages of exploring boundaries of tonality. Nationality helps here as well to tell me what kind of exploration (Schoenberg vs. Debussy).

I think we shouldn't be too hasty, but I also think it's not such a big problem that we need re-programing just yet. Browsing by style names that do coincide with period names works for most pieces, and there will always be pieces that don't fit easily into any period/style.

[jujimufu]

"Modernism" in music has a very specific meaning, and it is mostly applied to compositions of the early 20th century - precisely describing all those composers who are consciously moving further away from common practice and into discovering new thigns, until in 1945 music was "written anew" with the likes of Stockhausen and Boulez (in quotes because it is not within my powers to say whether they succeeded or not; but that was their aim, their idea) (just like with the rest of the arts and the rest of the world, really, after the Wars).

I would have no objection to use these terms to describe the style of the piece of music, but in that case they shouldn't be identical to the terms used at the same time to describe the period within which the piece was written (as per http://imslp.org/wiki/Browse_by_composer_time_period ).

If a composer today writes something in the Baroque idiom (I will refrain from saying "writes a Baroque piece", because I personally believe Baroque music cannot be written anymore, but only imitations of the style of music that emerged during the Baroque time - but that's another topic altogether which we should avoid discussing here so as not to get off-topic ), where would they put their piece? "Baroque" would describe the style, but they wrote it today, not 300 years ago. If do put it as Baroque, then it will appear among the pieces in the Baroque period - which his isn't (it is a piece written in the style of the period, but after that period has come and gone).

What I am saying is - it should be made clear whether this refers to the style of the piece or the [/i]time period[/i] in which the piece was written. And if we decide it refers to style, we should a) add a lot more categories (e.g. experimental, avant-garde, neo-classical, neo-romantic, split "romantic" into early romantic, romantic, and late romantic, then post-modernism, and so on and so on), and b) we should have something else to refer to the time period in which it was composed.


Also, about the dates - I meant something much more versatile. Imagine being able to search for "piano concerto, 1850-1900", and getting back results of piano concerti written within that period. Or searching for "flute, -1764", so pieces for flute written before 1764. I don't think you can do that at the moment, and I think it would require quite a change in the internals stuff of the wiki to make it happen nicely, but I think it would improve searches a lot. Which is why I think we should consider using tags instead of categories - because tags are a much more versatile system that allows for a lot more optimisation with searching, as well as creating very strong and interweaved relationships and groups of compositions (so, looking under tags "orchestral, piano, germany" with "1850-", you would get all compositions from 1850 onwards which would be orchestral and featuring a piano, from Germany. And on these results, now, you could start looking for keywords (or limit your search further by using tags for movements, or keys, or whatever).

[steltz]

Although I understand the historical background of modernism, "Modern" doesn't necessarily imply that movement and only that movement,as it is a much more general word, on top of which there seems to be a lot of disgreement among scholars as to when Modernism ended. Some put it at 1910, others 1930 or 1940, and still others feel it is an attitude and not a period or style per se. Dahlhaus, the most narrow at 1890-1910 goes on to call 1910 "the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music." "Modernism" followed by "modern"?

I understand your differentiation of Stockhausen and Boulez, but then I've had university music history courses. I'm not sure the general public sees a huge difference. One can go into similar detail in differentiating trends in all of the larger periods and styles. If we go into fine detail from 1900, then we need to for the others as well, e.g. Galant as opposed to Baroque (for Telemann).

There were previous calls for fewer styles rather than lots, if I can find the link, I'll add it so you can read that discussion. I think the arguments for more simplicity have a lot to do with seeing that the site can be navigated easily by all, not just those with music degrees.

This subject is also connected to the recent genre discussions, but briefly, there was a good suggestion for replacing "concerto" with "concertante" in order to include pieces for soloist(s) and orchestra with titles other than "concerto", where a search could be done for "concertante piano Romantic Modern" (or whatever word is used for post-1945). My point is that, without adding a lot of other fields, these searches might be well served by an improved genre categorization, which is under discussion.

As I've said, people already put modern pieces under the baroque style if that's what they've written it in -- e.g. Sardelli. The field name is "Piece style". I take your point that he will come up with Bach in a search. On the other hand, if he puts it as modern he will come up with Prokofiev. If he was the uploader then he made his choice.

I don't think we can devise one system that will cover all grey areas.

[jujimufu]

I don't think we can devise one system that will cover all grey areas.

That's very true


I think my problem is the following:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Baroque and http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Baroque_composers . The first one says "This genre contains all works written by baroque composers." - which in my opinion should be changed to "This genre contains all works written in the Baroque style.", which would include works regardless of whether the composer lived during the Baroque era or not. But that would diminish the value of Baroque compositions written by Baroque composers - as it would imply they were writing "in a style", rather than just writing what music was contemporary to their own time, which is what they did (while Sardelli is not a Baroque composer - his music merely sounds like how the music of the Baroque composers sounded like, so it is in the Baroque style but he is not a Baroque composer himself, otherwise he'd be dead for more than 200 years now).


It should be made clear whether it refers to style or period, which is all I'm asking for..

[steltz]

Would it help to keep someone like Sardelli modern, and put "written in the Baroque style" under the misc. comment field?

[Lyle Neff]

[..] I think my problem is the following:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Baroque and http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Baroque_composers . The first one says "This genre contains all works written by baroque composers." - which in my opinion should be changed to "This genre contains all works written in the Baroque style.", [...]

This, by the way, is another situation in which the word "genre" shows its utter uselessness.