[mb-style] Setting Classical Release Artists to Performers

[Frederic Da Vitoria]

On Feb 12, 2008 9:34 PM, Aaron Cooper <cooperaa at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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.
>

Bad point. If I want to maintain the Bach discography because I am more
interested in this than in Gould's, this is my choice. Both should be
EQUALLY possible.


> 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.


Or that this not so well-known flautist played a tiny part in this Ravel
orchestral works box set. Where will be the limit? What is written on the
release. I have this one in my hands: "KARAJAN BEETHOVEN". Where should I
put it? BPO? Wrong, it is the Philarmonia, but this is written in tiny
print. What would be the benefits?


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.


Ouch, this is getting complicated. I definitely suggest you forget this "who
released the cd" argument. At least the "composer" way was simple: you use
the composer period


-- 
Frederic Da Vitoria
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