While we're discussing what guidelines for tracks to use, let me toss out one other possiblity, something I know I've seen at least a few dozen times... What about misidentified works? Not typos, not simply "correct work but not enough to really ID it", but true misidentifications?
Just an example, I forget the exact work of which disc it is, but there's one disc of the Philips Complete Mozart set which has 19 tracks. Each track is a minuet and/or minuet & trio. It's already kind of a confused work, as there's piano and orchestral versions of 12 of the minuet & trios, 3 are varyingly considered to be separate minuets (depending on if you're looking at K1, K2, K3, K6, or NMA) or trios to other minuets which that work's set. K1 - K3 had 12 minuets and didn't list some of them (outside of the notes). K6 listed those 12, plus added numbers to 7 more combinations (taking the others out of the notes), specifying one combination. The NMA went with a different set of combinations, and lists that work as having 20 minuets / minuets & trios. Today, any recording (it's rarely recorded) uses the NMA numbers. The Brilliant classics recording uses the NMA numbers. Every other modern recording uses the NMA numbers. Yet the Philips disc numbers only 19 works - yet the 19 they number don't correspond to *any* other catalog; not the 19 in K6, nor the 12 in K1-K3. Philips essentially mixed up the minuet numbers, moved a trio from one minuet to a different minuet, then renumbered the whole thing - and worse, they do it without any indication that they're using anything other than standard work numberings. So, if you have "Minuet & Trio No. 17 in D major, K999" on the CD, it's not actually No. 17 according to any catalog. We can link it to the correct listing in the work list, but should we also correct the work numbering in the track list, to indicate the correct work number? This is somewhat a complex example, I know - on the Mozart forums, just this mixup tends to be often brought up as people are confused trying to figure just what works are actually in what order on that CD. A clearer example would be, say, a CD liner listing Mozart's Requiem in D major as K. 262, instead of K. 626, or labeling Symphony 30 as the "Jupiter" symphony. Where do we draw the line and leave it as it is, vs considering it either a typo or erronious data? If it's a typo, I think we'd all agree to fix it on the track listing. If it's plain erronious data, though, do we fix it, or leave the link to the correct work to be the 'proper' work identification? (It's not just this work, either - There's at least one other disc in that same Philips set, one of the Theater music discs, which also misidentifies the work numbers and keys for all of the movements within the work; and it's not just within that set that I've seen with purely erronious data on a liner). Also, related, but different: How about mis-identified composers on labels - especially for older releases? This I see often with Anh / WoO works, where it was once thought to be a Bach / W.A. Mozart / Beethoven / etc work, but later is 'determined' to be a spurious work; if the liner says it was W.A. Mozart, but later research decided that it was actually Leopold Mozart, or whoever (see WAM's symphony #s 2 and 3 for good examples of this), do we stick with the principle of recording the liner as closely as possible, and assign WAM as the artist, leaving the composer AR and the work list link to "fix" the data, or do we ignore the liner and assign the correct composer as the artist? (I just entered a Vivaldi release last night, actually, which had just this, for RV Anh 23, assigning it to Vivaldi, even though the correct composer was Giovanni Maria Ruggieri). Brian _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list [email protected] http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
