[mb-style] Setting Classical Release Artists to Performers

[Aaron Cooper]

On 12-Feb-08, at 11:28 AM, Frederic Da Vitoria wrote:
> I was foll of work these last weeks, do I am late commenting here,  
> sorry.

Welcome to the discussion!  :)

> On Feb 4, 2008 4:53 AM, Aaron Cooper <cooperaa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think this this is an independent issue. I'm relatively new here,
> > but my
> > understanding is that the (Orchestra feat. conductor: X, piano: Y)
> > notation
> > arose out of time when there was no AR capability in the database,  
> the
> > taggers were less good at moving data from the database into tags,
> > and many
> > players couldn't read tags and used only what were in the
> > ReleaseArtist,
> > ReleaseTitle, and TrackTitle fields.  All three limitations have
> > eased. I
> > don't see that changing ReleaseArtist is a precondition for removing
> > this
> > notation.
>
> There is still desire to have the performer information in the release
> title so people can search releases for performers.
>
> I agree. I think the browsing the database would be made much harder  
> without at least some performer info.

I'm not proposing we drop performer info from release titles with this  
proposal, but I did mention it as something we could pursue if this  
proposal was put into effect.  Sorry for not making that clear.

> > Aaron Cooper-3 wrote:
> >>
> >>> 4. Our composer pages will be less crowded
> >>
> >
> > Yes, but our Soloist and Conductor pages will become more crowded,
> > won't
> > they?  And in an ideal world, the MB.org and a database full of ARs
> > will
> > have lengthy results for many artists, regardless of the value of  
> the
> > ReleaseArtist field. If pages being "crowded" is a problem, perhaps
> > a better
> > solution is to redesign the search results page to deal with lots of
> > results. We could add more useful list orderings, subheadings,
> > refinement of
> > search results, summaries of results, etc.
>
>
> Composer pages will shrink (yay) and performer pages will grow, yes.
> But that's the point.  Performers put out CDs like regular pop
> artists, they just don't write the material (in most cases).
>
> I think I've said it before, but it will be a lot more manageable to
> maintain discographies of 15 of your favourite performers than
> maintain the discography of every Bach CD ever recorded ever in
> history - ever.
>
> This is because you are reasoning in Composer VERSUS Performer. You  
> still are a slave to the old mp3 ARTIST field. All are important,  
> the composer and the performer and the recording engineer and the  
> place it was recorded, and even the date it was recorded (BTW, this  
> IMO would be almost more important than the performer, there is so  
> much difference between a 1930 performance and a 1980  
> performance...) Is there something preventing you from recovering  
> the discographies from the ARs?

This proposal is about the Release Artist field (which is different to  
the Track Artist field).  To my knowledge, use of the Release Artist  
field is fairly new (at least in iTunes).  Separating Release- and  
Track-artists in MusicBrainz isn't even that old.  Performance ARs,  
like composition ARs, are very important and we should definitely be  
adding them but I don't think these are substitutes for Release and  
Track Artists.  We can say James Hetfield performed guitar on Master  
of Puppets in the form of an AR all we want but this doesn't tell us  
that the song was on a Metallica album.  Likewise, we can say  
Beethoven composed a sonata and Gould performed it, but this doesn't  
tell us whether the track appears on an album with 15 other  
performances by Gould or 15 other performances by the London  
Philharmonic.

[snip]

> > 3. The database has a ReleaseArtist field that needs some value.
> > Between
> > composer, conductor, orchestra, soloists, chorus directors,
> > arrangers, and
> > all the other artists who contribute to what appears in the audio
> > signal in
> > a track, for Classical Music and across the range of users and use
> > cases, I
> > think the most important single role is composer.  If you have to
> > pick one,
> > I'd pick the composer.
>
> I wouldn't, that's why I'm proposing this.  Bach had absolutely
> *nothing* to do with releasing his music in 2006. There were a group
> of performers who wanted to play them, so they released recordings.
> We've come up with an objective/systematic way to determine who the
> most important performer is.  I think it's logical to assume that
> whoever performs on all tracks was probably the primary performer with
> other featured performers filling in the gaps (you can't play a piano
> concerto on your new CD without an orchestra).
>
> Nothing to do? If he hadn't composed it in the first place, the  
> release would be full of silence. The inheritors of recent composers  
> (Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Barber...) probably still get  
> something each time a CD of their ancestor is sold. The fact that  
> Bach or Mozart died so long ago that they can't control what is done  
> with their music has only legal and commercial consequences, not  
> artistic. So if we want to use this kind of considerations, please  
> use a contemporary composer. When a CD from a living composer is  
> released, does the composer have something to do with it?

If a contemporary composer wrote the music for inclusion on an album  
of theirs, then it makes sense for them to be the release artist.  But  
old composers and probably many contemporary composers did not write  
music for 80-minute CDs.  It's different when a performer takes the  
compositions and puts them together on an album.  They are "releasing"  
material that may be by one or many composers.

This isn't a crazy idea–we do it for releases where the tracks have  
different composers (rather than filing under VA).  I think this  
proposal is just an extension of our current guideline to designate  
performers as Release Artists in cases where the tracks have only one  
composer (assuming the composer did not release the material himself).

-Aaron