Classical music and tagging

Pop music is called pop music because it is popular.
Classical music is not pop music because it is not popular.

Most interfaces are designed with pop music in mind.
You can browse your collection in all kind of ways: artist, album, song, genre but often not by composer.

An artist makes a couple of songs. They are released on CD.

Artist	Album	Title
Zappa	Freak out	Song 1
		Song 2
		Song 3
		Etc.

In classical music things are in general a bit different

On a CD there are in general more than one composition e.g. 2 sonatas each which four parts

Composer	Album	Composition	Part
Schumann	String quartets by Schumann and Brahms	String quartet no.1	Allegro
			Adagio
			Menuetto
			Finale
Brahms		String quartet no.1	Allegro
			Adagio
			Menuetto
			Finale

We have one level more and no tagging schema allows for it.

There are many solutions to this problem.

The one I prefer is to split the album and use an album tag for each composition

Artist	Album	Part
Schumann	String quartet no.1	Allegro
		Adagio
		Menuetto
		Finale

Artist	Album	Part
Brahms	String quartet no.1	Allegro
		Adagio
		Menuetto
		Finale

By doing so you come a bit closer to the “pop model” and you have a nice overview of all the compositions. If needed you can put the album title in a comment tag.

In this model you use the Artist tag to store the composer. This is a recommended practice simply because a lot of media players don't support the composer tag.

My advice: get a decent player supporting the composer tag and use the artist tag for the performer.

Album

In computer audio an album don't exist. You have songs and there are tags.

How media players group songs together into an album differs.

A simple approach is an album is all the songs with the same text in the album tag.

Often media players do a bit more like an album is all the songs with the same text in the album tag and the artist tag.

In practice this means that the results depends on the player.

Für Elise
There are compositions having a name but most of the time it is a very prosaic description of the form. As each composer writes his first string quartet, you might end up with something like this

Album

String quartet no.1

Add the name of the composer in front of the work.
When browsing your albums you have all the compositions grouped together by composer.
It is also a work around in case the interface doesn't support the composer tag.

Album

Beethoven - String quartet no.1

Brahms - String quartet no.1

Schumann - String quartet no.1

Performers

You might have some overlap in your collection e.g. violin sonata no.1 played by Gideon Kremer and the same sonata played by Perlman.

If your media player uses differences in value in the artist tag you might get something like

Album

Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1

If it doesn't you get

Album

Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1

and if you expand this to song mode probably

Album	Song
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	Allegro
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	Allegro
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	Adagio
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	Adagio
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	Menuetto
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	Menuetto
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	Finale
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	Finale

You get all the first parts, then the second parts, etc.

Adding the name of the composers and the performers to the composition makes your albums media player proof.

Album

Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1 - Kremer

Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1 - Perlman

Number

In classical music the parts are often labeled using numbers.

You can do without as long as the media player sorts by track number.

But some simply sorts alphabetically so it is a good practice to use numbers.

A common practice is using roman numbers.
As long as you remain below 8, they sort well alphabetically.

III

VII

VIII

Using 'normal' numbers might also give problems if the sorting is done alphabetically.

1
10
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9