User:Lekro/Classical music naming conventions

=[http://imslp.org/wiki/User:Lekro/Classical_music_naming_conventions Moved to IMSLP! I find that place more appropriate for this.]=

Note: This page is a work in progress.

After growing my collection of music over time, I have standardized the naming system that I use to sort it such that it looks cleaner, more concise, and consistent. Here is how I go about doing it. (Small parts of this may also be applicable to Wikipedia, where compositions are concerned.)

To start, let's look at an example.

Why all the redundant information? We could simply say Symphony No. 9, but think of the people who memorize things by the nickname. They'd want the New World Symphony. And then there's those people who want opus numbers or catalogue numbers, or a key. It's all there, in one place. Unfortunately, we can't cater to those people who want to say "that classical song that sounds like fire," but that's all right for me. They'll just have to go through all the tempo markings saying "...con fuoco" or "Feierlich..."

Of course, here, on Wikipedia, the form "Symphony No. 9 (Dvorak)" prevails, which is probably better for a page title, but when sorting rather large amounts of music, it is useful to have all the information in one place.

So let's split that monster up into several parts.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Part 1: Composer name
In this case, Antonín Dvořák is the composer. What we do here is chop off the first name(s) and take out all the diacritic markings from the last name, ending with Dvorak. This sounds completely different from Dvořák, but makes it easier to search. (if the composer is Dvořák rather than Dvorak, searching for Dvorak might not work.)

If the composer's last name alone isn't unique, add enough first / middle initials so that it is. For example, if Johann Sebastian Bach becomes Bach, that can be confused with Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, Johann Christian Bach, or any other person in the Bach family, so Johann Sebastian becomes J.S. Bach. There are no spaces between the initials if there are multiple, but one space between the initials and last name.