[mb-style] potential AR: "Held chair" or something like that (was: The Held Position ARs' RFCs: Part 2: RFC-267 Manager Position, Concertmaster Position, and RFC-274 Rehearsal accompanist)

[SwissChris]

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:36 AM, Brian Schweitzer <
brian.brianschweitzer at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 5:49 PM, SwissChris <swisschris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm afraid this is something I'll have to *veto* if it's pursued. I am
>> generally skeptical about (to not say allergic to) rules and regulations
>> based on "we never have seen this, but it might occur sometimes and you
>> never know if someone might find it nice to have…" (as if the regulations on
>> MB weren't complicated enough). In this case I seriously doubt the
>> maintainability of this sort of information.
>>
>> The general problem with all "Held position…" or "Held chair…"
>> relationships is that they are due to (frequent) changes – and are thus
>> worthless (or plain wrong!) without a date. While the "top shots"
>> ("principal conductor", "choirmaster", "concertmaster" and the like) may be
>> traceable – changes in these positions are generally given some press
>> coverage, at least locally – the further down you go, the more you'll have
>> just an orchestra's website as sole source, depending on them being accurate
>> and regularly updated. These websites may give you actual positions, but I
>> can't think of a source giving you – reliably – the changes in time. With an
>> average orchestra of about 100 musicians there would be – conservatively
>> guessing – an average change of 5 to 10 positions every year. Who is going
>> to maintain the data? And even if we do find reliable and maintainable data,
>> which I doubt, who really wants to know that artist Boo held "12th chair
>> percussion" with the Berlin Philharmonics from June 1999 to August 2000.
>>
>> In any case, to avoid useless or wrong informations, we should make sure
>> to ban entries without at least one (start or end) date for *all* "Held
>> position…"-relationships.
>>
>
>
> While I agree with you about the potential issues of maintaining this data,
> etc, hence why I wanted to keep this separate from the other "held position"
> ARs, I would disagree on two specific points.
>
> First, I think there's a difference between the top chairs and all chairs;
> 1st, 2nd, 3rd chair is a bit different in meaning and "importance" as data
> vs the 15th chair of a section.  It's also frequently far easier to find the
> data for those top positions in newspapers and such.  If the data is
> available, however, I see no reason to not record any position within a
> section we know of based on available data.  This is where I think the
> eventual proposal for any such AR will need to be thorough, to make sure we
> try to limit the potential issues such as you describe.
>

As said above I'm not basically opposed to have such an AR for the "top
shots" (say for the first, eventually the first three chairs), provided we
can find reliable sources and provided that at least one date is compulsory
for every "Held position…" AR

>
> As for the second point where I would disagree, you said "who really wants
> to know that artist Boo held "12th chair percussion" with the Berlin
> Philharmonics from June 1999 to August 2000".  I would.  If I'm looking at
> an artist who interests me, it may be quite interesting to know that they
> were 10th chair in orchestra A, then 7th chair in orchestra B, 4th chair in
> orchestra C, moving into 2nd chair at orchestra D, then promoted to 1st
> chair at orchestra D.  I'd be seeing the artistic progression of an artist's
> artistic career.  Why would that not be within the scope of what might be
> expected to potentially be found at MusicBrainz?  Yes, the one specific AR
> may not mean much, but taken in aggrigate, it becomes much more useful data.
>

No doubt such an information can be interesting to have. I only don't think
MB can (and should) provide these informations, unless they are taken from
the only reliable source I can think of: the website of the artist in
question. But then why bother to duplicate available information? Why not go
directly to the website of the artist who interests you? Using other sources
(like the informations provided by the orchestras) we'll end up (at best)
with incomplete data like "were 10th chair in orchestra A from 1988 (until
today!), (…), 4th chair in orchestra C (from ???) until 1996, (…), then
promoted to 1st chair at orchestra D in 1999". How useful is this?

Chris

>
> Brian
>
> _______________________________________________
> MusicBrainz-style mailing list
> MusicBrainz-style at lists.musicbrainz.org
> http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/musicbrainz-style/attachments/20101231/6eaec19e/attachment-0001.htm