Errare humanum est
A friend of mine and one of our power users, had for the longest time a separate tag for the catalog number or the opus of a composition, at first this choice appeared to me going overboard in the documentation of one’s music collection. I was even a tad sarcastic about it (see previous blog):
“This approach does not offer definitive advantages, unless one has photographic memory, it is very hard to select a piece this way: Now I want to hear Ludwig van’s Opus 3 sub-opus 2…”
But I was wrong (I did make amend with him too)…….and here is why:
Like Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere’s The Bourgeois Gentleman who had “been speaking prose all his life, and didn’t even know it!”, since you have been digitizing your music you have entered in the mysterious world of data modelling like any of the database management IT guys on the planet.
Indeed we are trying to model a complex world with recordings, composers, instruments, performers etc… (worse case, being the transcriptions where the author is not really the author, nor sometimes the instruments) and with fewer tools than the DB designer, our tags are only a one line text in most players. MusiCHI player being an exception.
Primary key
In data modelling, there is a sacred principle called “The primary key” it is piece (or a combination) of information that uniquely defines an object.
For example, you are defined by a social security number, a unique number that is given to each person. In an invoice, the combination of “order number with a part number” defines an item ordered.
You are by now, asking yourself, what is the connection with digital music? What defines a uniquely a composition in most case? It is the catalog number or the opus for a lot of composers, at least.
Mozart, Piano Concerto No.15 K. 450 in B flat major
Brahms, Symphony No. 4 Opus 98 in E minor
Schubert is one of the special case, he has both
Schubert, Impromptus D. 899 Opus. 90, use either the catalog number or a combination D. 899-Opus. 90, Opus alone does not cut it, because you have plenty of Op. Posth. which does not point uniquely to one piece, as it should.
Some modern composers do not have an opus sometimes, nor a catalog, a lot of Stravinsky’s for example: “Trois mouvements de Petrouchka”. In this case, use the name, or if not descriptive enough, use a combination of the name, the tonality, and the year or a number.
Couperin Louis, Suite in C Major would be enough IF Monsieur Louis had composed only one of those. But as you guessed already, he came up with quite a few in C. So Couperin Louis, Suite in C Major (16??) or Couperin Louis, Suite in C Major No. 2 or you do not assign an “Opus/Cat no.” at all because it does not add anything and it looks too much like the complete composition text.
Why bother?
a) being able to select all the recording of one same composition
Indeed you are not expected to remember Opus 3 sub-opus 2, but with a two way click you can select all recordings of one work.
If I select Beethoven as a Composer, Concerto as a Genre and finally Piano as an instrument, the resulting list will be:
Now if you click Opus 19 in the metadata column “Opus/Cat.
Then we are left with what we want: Only the recordings of the Piano concertos No. 2.
b) The chamber music or transcription problem
IMHO it makes sense to write the instruments first in a chamber music work. Hence, the famous Schubert, Cello & Piano Sonata D821 “Arpeggione” in A minor should be formatted as such. I selected Schubert as a Composer and Chamber music>duet as a Genre but look at the picture below:
There is a viola version and even a flute & piano duet. To add assault to injury there is an orchestral version of that piece too. But by selecting D821 and the composer, you can catch them all.
Also, there are compositions which have been written first for 2 pianos and then orchestrated, and they carry the same reference. These type of works do fall in the same case.
c) You can be more careless on how you format/write you composition field.
If you had one entry written “Concerto for Piano…” mixed with some written “Piano Concerto…” You will find them distributed in a totally different region of the composition list, having the Opus tag allows you to select them no matter how it is written.
Conclusion
Any decent player (like MusiCHi’s) will allow you to create and populate custom fields. Besides now, we have new feature in MusiCHI Clean, any part of a composition (for example Opus or Catalog number) returned by the reference database can be written straight back to a custom field, so there is no extra work involved; Click here to see a nice example on how it works. My friend was right, any classical music library should have that tag present.
MusiCHI Suite 