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

Often there are more than one composition on an album e.g. 2 sonatas each which four movements.

Often there are work by different composers on an album e.g. string quartets by Schumann and Brahms.

 

Composer	Album	Composition	Movement
Schumann	String quartets by Schumann and Brahms	String quartet no.1	1 Allegro
			2 Adagio
			3 Menuetto
			4 Finale
Brahms		String quartet no.1	1 Allegro
			2 Adagio
			3 Menuetto
			4 Finale

 

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

There are many solutions to this problem.

First movement

A common one is to add the composition to the first movement.

This it what a lot of internet databases do.

 

Artist	Album	Title
Schumann	String quartets by Schumann and Brahms	String quartet no.1 - 1 Allegro
		2 Adagio
		3 Menuetto
		4 Finale
Brahms		String quartet no.1 - 1 Allegro
		2 Adagio
		3 Menuetto
		4 Finale

At least the composition is documented a bit.
If you do a search on “Schumann String Quartet” you won’t get the composition but the first movement only. This can be solved by adding the composition to each movement but I do think it a bit untidy.

Splitting

Do you care what is on an album?
I don’t. I’m interested in compositions not in a more or less arbitrary decision by a record company about what to fit on a CD given its size.
Simply split the album in individual compositions by replacing the album title.

 

Before you do, you can copy the album title to another tag e.g. comment to preserve this information. It is convenient to have the original title at hand if you want to do a manual album lookup in an online database.

 

movement

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

 

movement

Artist	Album	Movement
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.

The downside is that you get as many albums as there are compositions.
If you have all Beethoven’s piano sonatas by Wilhelm Kempff but also by Vladimir Ashkenazy you have 2 x 32 = 64 albums.

Composer and performer

In all these examples the Artist tag is used to store the composer. This is a recommended practice simply because a lot of media players don't support the composer tag. This is a bit ridiculous as anybody familiar with classical music knows, the performer is a crucial element too.

The best solution is to get a decent media player supporting the composer tag and use the artist tag for the performer.

 

Even if you have a media player supporting the composer tag, your portable probably don’t. The moment you sync to the portable you have a problem.

The title of a composition is often a simple descriptive one e.g. it is a string quartet and as the composer wrote more than one it has a number.
If you use this description as the album title you get all symphonies, all string quartets, etc. grouped in the inter face. Maybe you like the idea  but if you have to choose between 8  string quartet no. 1’s without any additional information you probably change your mind.

Album

String quartet no.1

String quartet no.1

String quartet no.1

 

I prefix all compositions with the name of the composer.

Album

Beethoven - String quartet no.1

Brahms - String quartet no.1

Schumann - String quartet no.1

Now I have them grouped by composer in the album view of the media player and I can use the artist tag for the performer.
This in general translates nicely to a portable too.
The downside is that titles might become a bit long.

 

movement

Artist	Album	Title
Melos Quartet	Schumann: String quartet no.1	Allegro
		Adagio
		Menuetto
		Finale

movement

Artist	Album	Title
Alban Berg Quartet	Brahms: String quartet no.1	Allegro
		Adagio
		Menuetto
		Finale

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 in the artist tag.

In practice this means that the results depend on the media player.

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 both the album and the artist tag you might get something like this

 

Album

Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1

Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1

 

If it uses the album tag only you get

Album

Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1

 

and if you expand this:

Album	Song
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	1 Allegro
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	1 Allegro
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	2 Adagio
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	2 Adagio
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	3 Menuetto
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	3 Menuetto
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	4 Finale
Beethoven - Violin sonata no.1	4 Finale

 

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

Adding the name of the composers and the performers to the composition makes your albums media player proof but the title might become too long to be fully displayed in the interface.

 

Album

Beethoven - Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major (Kreutzer Sonata) - Kremer

Beethoven - Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major (Kreutzer Sonata) - Perlman

Multiple values

Often you have various combinations of performers like:

Gideon Kremer
Gideon Kremer/ Martha Argerich
Gideon Kremer/ Olaf Mustone
Harnoncourt / Gideon Kremer

Martha Argerich
Martha Argerich / Harnoncourt / Gideon Kremer

etc.

This makes it hard to find all the works performed by e.g. Kremer in a sorted list.

 

Some media players support multiple values.
You enter the names separated by a semicolon.
Examples of multiple values in WMP and JRMC

Number

In classical music the movements are often labeled using numbers.

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

But some simply sorts alphabetically by title 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.

 

I

II

III

IV

IX

V

VI

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

Software

Tagging classical music is a lot of work.
Sometimes you can save yourself a lot of typing by using scripts.
Advanced taggers like MP3Tag or JRMC allow you to use formulas for bulk editing.

Multiline editing is a time saving option too.

An example of tagging classical using JRMC can be found here.