IMSLP Forums

... with their years of birth and death.

Unless I am missing something, it is very difficult to find out *when* those who have created or helped to create music lived. Information on many of the more popular composers is well known, and easily available on the Internet or in library catalogues (e.g. Library of Congress). In the latter case the composer's name is often listed with a suffix of the years of life (e.g. Stamitz, Carl, 1745-1801). Information on more obscure composers and especially arrangers and editors, who may not have published unique works, is much more difficult to find. Even for those composers and arrangers who are still living, it would be useful to catalogue them so potential contributors are not frustrated in a fruitless bid to discover when they lived. I note that there is already a useful page on IMSLP with the years of many editors. This should be expanded to a whole section of the web site. Requests by potential contributors for years of life could be put to other site visitors and members on a page similar to the contribution wish list. I'm sure many visitors to this site have such special knowledge and can contribute. The completed musician's name and year can then moved to the humongous list after discovery.
Comments?

I use Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, a fantastic resource for lesser known composers and performers. Unfortunately unless the editor was also a composer or performer tey are not likely to be listed unless they did significant work.

Not a bad idea, not a bad idea A list of composer dates can be automated, but unfortunately the same cannot be said of editors, so we will need to treat them differently...

There's not just composers, editors, and arrangers/transcribers -- the ones who work with the musical texts themselves.

There's also authors of sung texts, including translators.

I certainly can relate to the challenge of finding dates for some of the obscure characters - or even those not so obscure. For example, I only recently got the dates for an arranger named Leon Roques (1839-1923), who produced hundreds of vocal / piano arrangements of operas - including a fair number of those by Offenbach - for Parisian publishers from the late 1850s until the year he died.

Another French arranger from the same era whose dates I still haven't found is Hubert Mouton (usually credited simply as "H. Mouton"). He worked mainly for Durand and was active from the 1890s to about 1925. Like Roques, he produced literally hundreds of arrangements.

Hi there. I was just looking for Hubert Mouton and found this:

http://www.efkalmus.com/kalorchdetail.php?r=16

Even though Kalmus data isn't too reliable...

The topic is ancient and the subject has long since been better resolved: Mouton has a VIAF entry with the same information. A compilation of authority records from various national libraries, this site has been a standard source of information for IMSLP for a few years now.