Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical music/Contemporary music task force/Archive 2

New featured article suggestions
I’m thinking maybe this project should collaborate on a Featured Article. It seems we already have five FAs within our scope. Not bad! We can always use more. If you’re interested we need to choose an article. I think ideally it should be something of High or Top importance in the project, an important composer, performer, theory concept, or even composition if it’s very groundbreaking. If you would like to suggest an article please list it bellow. We can then take a straw poll. --S.dedalus (talk) 23:33, 31 December 2007 (UTC)


 * 1) Elliott Carter Probably one of the most important living composers. The article is unfortunately quit neglected. (He’s also 100 this year. Err. . .next year.) --S.dedalus (talk) 23:33, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Composer pages in dire need of work
Hi fellow project members, and thanks for all your great work. I have begun making a list of composer articles in need of improvement, as some of them are extremely incomplete. I'll begin work on these pages as soon as possible, and I strongly encourage anyone interested to take part.

Here are a few to start with:


 * Morton Feldman: needs a great deal of expansion.
 * Christian Wolff: expand
 * Cornelius Cardew: expand and create sections
 * Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: expand and create sections (information is hard to come by on Sorabji, so this might take a while)
 * Charles Wuorinen: practically non-existent.
 * Iannis Xenakis: expand and create sections
 * Vinko Globokar: expand

Please feel free to add to this list. --Wolf m corcoran (talk) 20:58, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Great idea. I hope you don’t mind, I’ve duplicated this list on the main page Open tasks under “Articles needing attention.” From this and the continuing assessment effort it looks like we’ve got a big job to do. --S.dedalus (talk) 23:40, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Let’s add Salvatore Sciarrino to that list. Wow, it’s not even really an article. --S.dedalus (talk) 05:18, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
 * It's still not an article, but I have added bibliographical materials from which a proper article can be constructed.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:34, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Great, thank you! I’m working on a works list for him. --S.dedalus (talk) 22:24, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Sound art?
Just a thought, but should we also take a look at the Sound Art page and those related to it? It seems to me that this is within our scope, and some of those articles are pretty awful. --Wolf m corcoran (talk) 14:45, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh, man! "Pretty awful" is putting it mildly! I had no idea these Augean Stables even existed, but, now that you have called attention to it, I for one certainly agree this lies within the purview of this project. I have made a modest start with some calls for sources, but a few thousand more wouldn't go amiss.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:13, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Too much overlap, too wide scope
I feel this project is too wide in scope given it's small membership, and it also has too much overlap with other projects. WP Musicians already covers all musicians. We have albums and songs projects. We have a growing number of specialist and active WikiProjects such as WP Beatles. What's left for you? Not a lot. Overlap has the particular disadvantage of causing talk page clutter to the extent that many editors just ignore WikiProject tags now or throw into banner shells and it causes articles to be listed multiple times on the WP1 worklists.

Although you're not specifically a biographical project, I think it would still be open to you to be a child project of WP Musicians and share the WPBiography template. (We even have a non-bio=yes parameter for workgroups/child projects to use on articles within their remit which are not biographical, this is used by e.g. WP British Royalty which is a child group but which has some articles in its scope which are not biographies).

Most of the musician articles are already tagged by WP Musicians. It would be trivial to add a contemporary music parameter to the template to shift some of their articles into your project, as we do with the film biographies which are shifted to that worklist from arts and ents.

Please think about it. I can't see this project getting very far on it's own tbh. --kingboyk (talk) 20:45, 20 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I was not aware that this project covered popular music ("albums and songs projects", "WP Beatles"). I am also unclear whether "all musicians" includes "composers" but, from what I read on WikiProject_Composers, I think not. For example, I do not find WP Musicians tags on the composer articles on John Luther Adams, George Antheil, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, John Chowning, Mario Davidovsky, Brian Ferneyhough, Karel Goeyvaerts, Harry Partch, Krzysztof Penderecki, Luigi Russolo, Igor Stravinsky, Kaija Saariaho, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, Ivan Vïshnegradsky, or Iannis Xenakis (though oddly Henri Pousseur, La Monte Young, and Morton Feldman are). Nor are the articles Atonality, Darmstadt School, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Electronic music, Electronic art music, Experimental music, Graphic notation, In C, Kontakte (Stockhausen), Minimalist music, Modernism (music), Neoromanticism (music), New Complexity, New Simplicity, Piano Phase, Postmodern music, Process music, Serialism,  Spectral music, Tone cluster, Twelve-tone technique, 20th century classical music or a host of others under this project  tagged by WP Musicians, for obvious reasons. I also do not see WP Musicians in the list of "related projects" here, though it probably should be. It does not seem to me that it would be appropriate at all to subsume these varied topics under a banner devoted solely to persons, and the persons here covered appear to have minimal overlap with WP Musicians. As to numbers of editors, this is a new project, and only time will tell how many editors it will attract, and what level of participation these editors will provide.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:58, 20 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi Kingboyk, thanks for voicing your concerns here.


 * Firstly, this project does not cover the Beatles or any kind of remotely mainstream popular music. It does not work on albums or songs. We focus primarily on academic music. Due to some unfortunate problems with tagging articles some of our templates can be found where they don’t belong. Please feel free to remove them where they seem to be inappropriate.


 * Our scope is large but there is actually very little overlap with other projects when you look at what we’re actually focusing on. Our specialty here is late twentieth and twenty first century music concepts, works, and people. Many of these articles do not fall under any specific project. (Interval vector for instance.) Most of the articles we work on are not being improved by projects like WikiProject Composers because they require a specialist in the field. The Salvatore Sciarrino article (an important living Italian composer) for instance has been around since January 2006 with only a handful of edits since then. WP:Composers has their hands full with the thousands of composers that lived before 1945 anyway.


 * Adding a parameter to the WP Musicians template would not be an improvement from the current state of affairs since a person would still be required to asses which articles fall within our scope. Also this project is curently primarily focusing on music theory, composers, and works. Musicians are only included within our scope when they have a significant effect on the course of new music. (The Kronos Quartet for instance.)


 * Finally this project’s membership is growing. We have been around for only four months and already are membership is larger than that of WikiProject Contemporary Art, a project with a similar structure and scope. --S.dedalus (talk) 23:54, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I concur with keeping this WikiProject open. There is a lot open for this project to handle and it needs more interested members.  Currently, I think Wikipedia is scaring away would be Wikipedians who would be interested in writing about new music.  I have found the community aggressive and unknowledgeable about the new music field.   I am not sure how much I would contribute without the safe haven of this harbor and a group that understands the field. VoxNovus (talk) 02:31, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Transclusion bot?
I’ve asked on the bot page whether a bot could place transclusions of AfD discussions for contemporary music articles on a subpage of this project. That way we wouldn’t have to sift through the logs to find AfD discussions that fall within our scope. --S.dedalus (talk) 00:15, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Request moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Deletion sorting. --S.dedalus (talk) 02:08, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Attention
I believe Eckhard Unruh to be a fictional entry. Can anyone check the "Grove" 1980 edition cited in the article to make sure? If it is fictional, the article's creator should be censured in no uncertain terms, as the article has been up for over a year. Badagnani (talk) 07:44, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

First edit here. Badagnani (talk) 07:48, 29 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I'll check next time I'm near one--they at least got the volume number right: Unruh would be in volume 19 of the old New Grove. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 17:26, 29 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I think I can spare you the trouble. You will not find Unruh in the old New Grove or any other respectable source, because they do not include entries for fictional characters in novels (in this case, a novella): How Is This Going to Continue? by James Chapman 70 pp.   ISBN 978-1-879193-17-8—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:43, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Should we keep this article, noting that it's a fictional character? It would seem that an article about the novella (or author) would be more appropriate. Badagnani (talk) 21:59, 29 January 2008 (UTC)


 * The original book is a bizarre conceptual novel by James Chapman. Here is a quote from the description on Amazon.com:


 * This unusual novel comes in the form of a musical libretto, written by a fictional composer before his death in the 1990's. After an introduction that gives us the bare outlines of his personal history, most of our knowledge of his inner life--his emotion at the death of his wife, and the way he is dealing with his own illness--comes to us from his libretto itself.


 * The libretto consists of dozens of scored quotations from outside sources (many of them invented) around the subject of death. Particular obsessions of the composer--the life and death of contralto Kathleen Ferrier, the illnesses of Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould, and composers Gustav Mahler and Alfred Schnittke, as well as Hindu poetry, German history and many other matters, provide the reader with a ghostly outline of the soul of a dying artist.


 * It could be notable, but I think it would be better if the article was moved to How Is This Going to Continue? and a section added about the book (as opposed to its protagonist). --S.dedalus (talk) 00:44, 30 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Right. The character doesn't have a life outside the novella (and fake bio someone tried to pass off as real, even going so far as to fabricate a fake Grove article)--unlike Harry Potter or Captain James T. Kirk. Badagnani (talk) 00:45, 30 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Yup, WP:HOAX. Technically it probably qualifies for deletion or even speedy deletion, but in this case it may be more constructive to move the page and let people write about the book. I’ve warned the original creator of the page by the way. --S.dedalus (talk) 00:58, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Can anyone verify how much of this article is a verbatim transcript of the book? There could be copyright infringement issues here.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:28, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * That may be difficult. If it is a copyright infringement (and the article sounds like one) then it’s not from anyplace online that I could find. I also can’t find the book at any library near me. . . --S.dedalus (talk) 01:51, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * With a "limited edition of only 50 copies" finding one in a library could be tricky. It also is only 70 pages long. OCLC does not have a single record for this ISBN. It seems to me that this affects WP:Notability.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:28, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Howard Skempton
I just finished working on some articles on him; Skempton is a pretty important Cardew pupil and it seems that his reputation has been growing steadily in the past years. Besides, someone here has already started working on Cornelius Cardew, so we'll need articles on English experimental composers at some point anyway. So I expanded Howard Skempton and created articles for two of his larger/more important works: Lento (Skempton) and Images (Skempton). If someone could help with the grammar, add categories (it'd be nice to have a category for his works, but I could never figure out how to create categories within categories, as is required with "Compositions by.."), assess, etc., I'd be most grateful. Jashiin (talk) 17:42, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Category:Compositions by Howard Skempton --S.dedalus (talk) 00:28, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Basically you create subcategories by categorizing a category. Just pretend the new category is an article and add any parent categories as needed. Those articles are looking good! Looks like Howard Skempton could use a list of compositions though. Anybody with Grove want to look him up? --S.dedalus (talk) 00:34, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Wait here's a catalog of his works. --S.dedalus (talk) 00:39, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your help! Unfortunately, the OUP catalogue is not complete (they only list what they have published, I guess), and neither are any of the other catalogues I know. I'm not sure if List of compositions by Howard Skempton would look OK with a "possibly incomplete" notice or something like it.. Or would it?
 * And thanks for the category tip, I'll try to follow your advice the next time I need a category :) Jashiin (talk) 09:21, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * If the worklist is substantially complete, and you are including it as a section of the article, just title it "Compositions" or "Works" and let it go at that. The assumption will be that it is complete by intention, and other editors who happen to know of further titles can add them. After all, as with any living composer, there is always the danger that Skempton might write another piece, the day after you have finalized an "absolutely complete" list. If you know the worklist to be very partial, then it should be titled something like "Compositions (selective list)", which can always be supplemented later (by yourself or others), until it reaches a substantially complete state, at which point the section heading can be changed. On the other hand, it sounds like you intend making a separate article (along the lines of the worklists for List of compositions by Pierre Boulez, List of compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos, or List of compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen. In this case, title the article as you propose and, if you have not finished filling it out, or you are not satisfied that it is substantially complete, put a cautionary note to that effect at the head of the list.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:12, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Oops, I guess I kind of forgot that he is still alive and the work list can't be complete anyway :) Skempton is a prolific composer, so I think a separate article is in order; I'm going to create one today and follow your advice. Thanks! Jashiin (talk) 11:44, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I've cleaned up the bibliographical stuff (some minor queries in there for you), and unsnarled one tiny punctuation problem, but couldn't find anything wrong with the grammar. I think you've done a fine job, Jashiin.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:03, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much! I couldn't find the Müller article anywhere; it was in the Grove Online article's bibliography, directly after an article published in MT, and the source was given simply as "Ibid.", so I assumed MT was where Müller published. Thanks for clearing it up.
 * As for page numbers, I'm afraid I can't give those for the two Parsons articles - because I used the online versions from JEMS (see External links), I couldn't find the originals. I'll gladly provide page numbers for Hill and Pace, just tell me if I should use the magazines' page numbers or the actual articles' page numbers? I.e., Pace's article is published on pages 9-11. To reference the first page of this article, do I use "Pace, 1." or "Pace, 9."? Jashiin (talk) 09:21, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Use "Pace 1997, 9" (that is so-called Harvard format: author date, page). It is standard bibliographical practice to list the journal's page numbers. It would be very confusing, indeed, for example, if the bibliography were to list an article as printed on pages 3–7 of a journal, and an author were then to arbitrarily renumber these pages as 1–5, and direct a reader to page 4. I'll see what I can do to track down the Parsons page numbers for you—I have personal copies of most of the later numbers of Contact, and the library here has what I think is a complete run. Inserting these page references may wreack havoc with the template you have used, which is designed for the "reference number" practice used in the sciences, rather than the footnote or intext references favoured in the humanities. Because science articles tend to be quite short (often no more than three to five pages), and the data referred to is spread through most of the article, page citations are usually foregone. It is also true that full-book citations (as opposed to short contributions to an anthology, which are treated in the same way as articles) are comparatively rare in the sciences. In the humanities, on the contrary, articles are typically twenty pages or longer, full-book citations are frequent, and citations tend to refer to a particular sentence, phrase, or diagram. As a consequence, trying to verify an assertion (for example) by vaguely waving at Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (or even just one of its six component volumes) simply will not do. I know your references are nothing like as long, but the principle is general in humanities publications for this reason. And, who knows, someone may next month publish a 600-page book on Skempton that will need to be added to the references, and the annotations need to be as uniform as possible.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:12, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for explaining these things to me! I've added page numbers for Pace and Hill. Jashiin (talk) 11:44, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Modern music
The Modern music article seems to be pretty much redundant since we already have musical modernism, 20th century music, and contemporary music. The article also seems to just be a dictionary definition. Shall I put it up for deletion? --S.dedalus (talk) 00:45, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Concur. It isn't an article at all, but defines itself by citing those other articles. By all means give other editors the opportunity to fix this, and a nomination for deletion is the best way to call their attention to the need. (My personal POV is that "Modern Music" has nothing at all to do with those things, being defined in a larger socio-cultural context, but I haven't the time nor the energy to research this sufficiently to create a proper article with verifiable sources.)—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:00, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Done Articles for deletion/Modern music. We’ll see if anyone wants to try to save this page. --S.dedalus (talk) 00:49, 2 February 2008 (UTC)


 * This should be a disambiguation page (as the term has been applied to several different genres/styles). Badagnani (talk) 00:55, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Possibly. It’s been suggested in the deletion discussion as well. Maybe there is a subtle difference between modern music and contemporary music, however if this deference is not independently notable perhaps a disambiguation is appropriate. --S.dedalus (talk) 06:30, 2 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I think it was used as a synonym for contemporary music (music displaying aspects of modernism) since the early 20th century. Badagnani (talk) 06:36, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
 * And there was I, thinking that "contemporary music" refers to the so-called postmodernism of the period after 1975, reacting against aspects of modernism of the earlier twentieth century (see the discussion page at the article Contemporary Music.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 08:49, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Newsletter?
Many Wikiprojects have specific outreach departments. WikiProject Aquarium Fishes/Outreach for instance. One of the major advantages of this is the project newsletter. WikiProject Council currently lists 18 projects that have newsletters. What do you think? Should we start one? The advantage of a, say, bimonthly newsletter is it not only reminds us of how much we’ve accomplished, but also helps our publicity and reminds members of the project. I’ll be happy to organize it if you think this is something we should try, but you folks would have to help me by giving me news and accomplishments to add. --S.dedalus (talk)


 * Support - Sounds like a great idea. If we decide to do it, I suggest we post a notice on the main page asking for content for the newsletter. If volunteers are needed, we could post something about that as well.-Wolf m corcoran (talk) 19:32, 9 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Support - We should probably first become more active in breaking up the project by what we're working on -- like an article of the week/month to work together to improve -- contacting publishers to get free photos, score excerpts, or other images; adding complete works lists for all composers -- that kind of thing. Such articles can be advertised in the newsletter, attracting editors to start working on the articles/tasks chosen. Badagnani (talk) 20:13, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Composer article
Although this article is one of our overlap areas, it's an extremely critical article to this and every other music-related projects. For some reason, it has been completely overlooked by other editors, even though it is linked to by well over a thousand articles! Someone needs to drastically improve it, and it might as well be us. -Wolf m corcoran (talk) 01:30, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Article assessment drive
You all know I hope that we are now assessing the articles within our scope. It is extremely important that we get a large percentage of our articles tagged so that we can see where our efforts would be best spent. There are still 1858 out of 2272 tagged articles that have not been assessed at all. In other words only approximately 19% of our articles have some sort of assessment. If you have a spare moment please help asses articles! It’s fast and easy. We also have a bit of a problem because the bot that tagged most of our articles was not able to tag “works” articles. (There is currently no single category into which all modern compositions can go.) This means that almost all composition articles (like Pierrot Lunaire etc.) are not tagged with. From an assessment standpoint we don’t even know they exist! If you’re going over a composers list of compositions sometime it would help a lot if you could add those tags. Thanks, --S.dedalus (talk) 01:42, 25 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for mentioning this, S.dedalus, I think this should be our priority for the next couple of months. In particular, many of the 'contemporary' contemporary musician/composer/multimedia artists (to name just a few, Steve Roden, Bill Fontana, and Laurie Anderson) have been basically ignored by the project. I'll make assessment my main priority, hope others will do the same.--Wolf m corcoran (talk) 15:09, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I have systematically tagged all of the articles on works by Pierre Boulez, which had somehow remained innocent of this project, and the remaining untagged articles for works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Karel Goeyvaerts.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:10, 5 March 2008 (UTC) Same for works by Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:01, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Council discussion on the inter-relationship of classical music projects
Congratulations to S.dedalus and Antandrus for setting up a much-needed project.

There's been a discussion about merging the mainstream (classical music) projects, including this one, on the WikiProject Council.

Some editors would like to reorganize the projects into task forces under Classical music. What do you think of this idea? I can see potential problems - I basically don't like task forces - but rather than give my own view it's probably best to just let you know about the discussion. -- Kleinzach (talk) 00:05, 17 March 2008 (UTC)


 * That would not be optimal, especially considering that many of the more contemporary artists who fall into our scope, such as Robert Ashley, Merzbow, Anthony Braxton, etc. are by no means "musicians of the European tradition." Turning this project into an arm of the Classical project would leave most of these (already neglected) contemporary artists' articles without any project focused on their improvement. Although we certainly have a great deal of overlap with, among others, the Classical, Electronic, and Jazz projects, ours is the only group specifically geared toward contemporary music/musicians. I strongly believe that we should continue as an autonomous project. --Wolf m corcoran (talk) 13:11, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * This idea - of forming task forces - has now been unanimously rejected. --Kleinzach (talk) 13:18, 26 March 2008 (UTC)