On Aug 23, 2004, at 12:50 AM, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote:
Here's another weird convention that I just learned about, apparently directly descended from the original Real Book practices. You know that it is common for libraries to omit the first article in a title for cataloguing purposes, like "A Foggy Day" is listed under F, not A.
I know from when I worked in a library during high school, that there used to be a set of relatively standard conventions in library catologuing, of which ignoring a initial definite or indefinite article was one. Treating author names beginning with "Mc" as if they began with "Mac" was another. I know that over the years I have seen an increasing number of instances where these older customs are no longer observed. While rhe "real book" may not observe the older customs, I am not prepared to accept that this is either the source, or the first instance, of the change.
I believe that the abandonment of these older customs is related to the computer, and intitial development of on-line catalogs on mainframe computers, and has something in common with the "y2k" non-phenomenon of several years ago. Memory for data storages, and for holding the part of a program which was active was so expensive that keeping programs as compact as possible was a significant design consideration. In an effort to keep code and data as compact as possible things that seem trivial to implement today, such as the algorithms to implement ignoring an initial definite or indefinite article were not included, and by the time computer memory was cheap enough to allow implementation of these older customs, there was a significant database full of records under the new scheme.
Thus, in my view, the Real Book is an instance of this change, not the source.
Not a bad try, and you may be correct in the computer world, but the original Real Book dates from before computer cataloguing was common (ca. 1972), as does the ordering scheme of arrangements in the McGill Performance Materials library jazz section. The Perf. Mat. library only got online LAST YEAR - before that it was strictly card-catalogue. To the best of my knowledge, no online catalogue exists even now of the contents of the original Real Book.
In my opinion, the Real Book's pseudo-alphabetic arrangement came about through ignorance of cataloging practice. It was, after all, transcribed and compiled by a few young jazz musicians. There are inconsistencies in their decisions, as Darcy notes in his response about iTunes, that "A Foggy Day" is under A, while "The Duke" is under D, which is consistent between the Real Book and whoever wrote the title for iTunes, but not consistent with most libraries, which either ignore leading articles (most non-jazz libraries) or incorporate them (most jazz libraries.) (I should note here that iTunes will incorporate the title as typed, without making any dispensation for leading articles. Yet the few bytes of program code it would take to implement that feature are not present!)
Does anyone know of a pre-1972 catalogue that is consistent with the Real Book method? If so, I will gladly cede the point.
If I seem a little sensitive toward the original Real Book's overwhelming influence (not to be confused with the superlative New Real Book, published by Sher Music) it's just that I spent most of the last 20 years saying things like "That's the Real Book chord, not Jobim's chord" and "Are you playing the Real Book bridge, or Monk's own bridge?" or "'Blue in Green' is a ten-bar phrase, not a nine-bar one; the fifth bar is supposed to last two bars".
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