User talk:Jerome Kohl/Archive 13

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You're welcome

I realized when you thanked me for moving Time-point that you are not an admin. I believe that, if you would like, you should be (Wikipedia:Requests for adminship & Nominate). What do you think? Hyacinth (talk) 16:52, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

You know, I had just been thinking about this over the holidays. Thank you for suggesting that I apply. I presume that I may count on your support.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:55, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Definitely. Please, keep me updated so I may vote & support. Hyacinth (talk) 22:24, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Much appreciated. I am reading the guidelines, which are a bit intimidating (probably not without good reason!). I will keep you posted.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:54, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

The guidelines seem vague and overly long. Having read Wikipedia:Requests for adminship the only concrete thing I've learned is that you must have an account (which you do) and be trusted. I find you trustworthy, but the guideline does not define trust. Hyacinth (talk) 09:13, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

I have prepared a statement in support of your adminship (which I could post to your talk page or email you first) to go along, if you wish, with your answers to the questions:

1. What administrative work do you intend to take part in?
2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?
3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or have other users caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

Hyacinth (talk) 13:36, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Hyacinth. It is that first question that I really need to think about. Perhaps that is why I have not up to this point seriously considered Adminship: I'm not sure what administrative work I am especially interested in. I shan't take too much time over this, though at the moment there are significant non-Wikipedia demands on my time.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:21, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Carmina Burana

I just read the article on Carmina Burana and made a few minor edits. I had a question about a phrase in the lead/lede and posted it on the article's Talk page. It is not exactly a musical question, but I thought you might know the answer. If you have time, would you take a look at it? Thank you.CorinneSD (talk) 01:05, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, I think that must have been the very last article on Wikipedia that was not on my watchlist! There are some problems there, to be sure, so your concern is not misplaced. Answers may take a little longer to find.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:47, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Carl Orff

I have just started reading the article on Carl Orff, and I have two questions, both regarding the section "Early Life":

1) In the fourth paragraph in this section, we find the following sentence:

"Many of his youthful works were songs, often settings of German poetry."

I was puzzled by the phrase "often settings of German poetry". Is this correct? I had never heard songs that were "settings of" something. Aren't musical works more often "set to" passages in literary works? If I'm wrong, I will learn something new.

Upon reading the rest of the article, I found the following sentence in the fourth paragraph in the section "Musical work":

"About his Antigonae (1949), Orff said specifically that it was not an opera but rather a Vertonung, a "musical setting", of the ancient tragedy."

This seems to say that a work of music can be called "a setting" of a literary work. I guess that answers my question, to a certain extent, although I still don't know what that means, exactly.CorinneSD (talk) 22:56, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

2) In the fifth paragraph, we read the following sentence:

"In 1911-1912, Orff wrote Zarathustra, Op. 14, an unfinished large work for baritone voice, three male choruses and orchestra, based on a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel of the same title."

There is a link at "same title" to the article Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The link is, of course, all right, but what I wonder is why someone would say that the musical work by Orff called "Zarathustra" is based on a novel of the same title, when the title of the novel is "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". I think it is stretching it say that the two works have the same title. What do you think?CorinneSD (talk) 21:44, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

First, it is perfectly correct to speak of "setting words to music", and conversely songs are often described as "settings of poetry". There is therefore nothing wrong with the passages you cite. The second example obviously has a mistake in it, since there is no novel by Nietzsche titled simply Zarathustra. Unless, of course, the mistake is with the title of Orff's composition, which should probably be cross-checked. I must admit that I am not very well acquainted with Orff's music. Apart from the Carmina Burana, I have scarcely heard anything at all (the Catulli Carmina is the only exception I can think of, but I can't recall what it sounded like the single time I heard it).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:45, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

I found the following in a biographical sketch of Orff on schottmusic.com (I have no way to know whether it is the type of source that can be used on WP):

"Right from the beginning, Orff concentrated exclusively on textually related music. His aim was to combine theatre, music, dance and acting to form a single unified whole in which the rhythmical organisation of language frequently provided the compositional framework. Orff composed his first choral work (“Also sprach Zarathustra”, based on Nietzsche) and an early opera strongly influenced by Debussy entitled Gisei, das Opfer, which was completed in 1913."

This seems to show that the mention of Orff's work in the article Carl Orff as simply "Zarathustra" is incorrect. I could correct it, but I know neither whether I need to look elsewhere for a reliable source nor how to add a reference.CorinneSD (talk) 23:28, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

That source should be sufficient, though I can always have a look at the biographical entry in New Grove. Oh, look! There it is, under "Vocal", it gives "Zarathustra, Bar, male vv, orch, 1911–12", so I guess it is not titled identically with Nietzshe's novel, according to New Grove. I would say under these circumstances that an adjustment to the article is in order.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:49, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I changed the sentence, but I wanted to ask something about the title of Neitzsche's novel. I had always heard the title as "Thus Spake Zarathustra", but the article on WP is "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". I made a link with a pipe so that it goes to that article but the title with "Spake" appears. But then I realized there were two references there, [2] and [3], and I don't know what they have listed as the title. Is it all right that I put the title of the novel that way, or should it just be "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"?CorinneSD (talk) 15:52, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Keeping in mind that Nietszche did not title his novel in English (though he was unusually adept in that language, and deeply interested in English philosophers in an age when they were not widely respected or understood on the continent), there are of course several ways of rendering the German title, Also sprach Zarathustra. It is cast in a somewhat archaic style, and earlier English translators sought to reflect this by using the antiquated verb form "spake". More recent fashion in translation is not to go quite to such an extreme (which I personally feel does exceed the effect of Nietszche's German), hence the different versions. My advice would be to use the form found on the Wikipedia article, unless it is in reference to a particular edition or in a direct quotation that uses another form.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:43, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Carl Orff - The 1920s

In the section "The 1920s" in the article Carl Orff, I came across the following sentence:

"The passionately declaimed opera of Monteverdi's era was almost unknown in the 1920s, however, and Orff's production met with reactions ranging from incomprehension to ridicule."

Since I was not sure of the meaning of "declaimed", I looked it up in Wiktionary. I found three different definitions. I assume the first definition is the one meant here. However, it sounds like Monteverdi's opera was declaimed in Monteverdi's time, but I'm not sure. From the second half of the sentence, it also sounds like Orff's "Orpheus" was declaimed in the 1920s. My question is, which opera was "passionately declaimed", and when. Do we have two different operas, both disliked by their audiences? (Also, m-a-y-b-e another word could be used instead of "declaimed".)CorinneSD (talk) 21:59, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

The reference is probably to the early Baroque operatic solo style called "monody" (the second meaning of the word, as presented in the lined article). Although this applies to Monteverdi, he was scarcely the only composer of that time to use it. The idea was to follow the natural rhythms and contours of the text, as if it were being spoken. The result must indeed have been strange to listeners in the early 20th century, at least if they were told they were listening to opera. Change the genre to "melodrama" (in the late-19th century German sense of the word) and it might have fared better. I don't think a particular opera is meant by the citation, but rather a general style of vocal writing. I haven't looked up the passage in question. Is it perhaps referring to a production of L'incoronazione di Poppea? (I vaguely recall that Orff made an arrangement of it at one point.)—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:56, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. In the sentence from the article that I quoted above, "Orff's production" refers to Orff's opera "Orpheus", which is his version of Monteverdi's opera "L'Orfeo". My question was about the first phrase of the sentence: "the passionately declaimed opera of Monteverdi's era", which I found to be a bit ambiguous. First, does that mean Monteverdi's opera "L'Orfeo" was "declaimed", or disliked, by his audiences? Also (and I didn't notice this before) why does it say "of Monteverdi's era" instead of simply "by Monteverdi" or "Monteverdi's [opera]"? – CorinneSD (talk) 21:34, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I think you need to look up the word "declaimed" in a dictionary. It basically means "spoken aloud", not "disliked". Perhaps you are confusing it with another word, such as "decried"? The style of the monody would gradually give way by the middle Baroque to a separation between the "declaimed" (ametrical, or "prose rhythm") style of the recitative and the "arioso" (metrical) style of the aria. Early baroque opera, to modern ears accustomed to the alternation of recitative and aria, tends to sound like "all recitative", and therefore very "dry". It doubtless refers to "Monteverdi's era" because this style was not particular to Monteverdi (nor to just one of Monteverdi's operas), but rather to opera in general at that time.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:45, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the description of the two types of opera; that explains the phrase "opera of Monteverdi's era"; I understand now that it meant opera in general, not the specific Monteverdi opera that had just been mentioned. However, as I mentioned above, I did look up "declaim" in a dictionary. Here are the three definitions for "declaim" in Wiktionary:

1. To object to something vociferously; to rail against in speech.
2. To recite, e.g., poetry, in a theatrical way; to speak for rhetorical display; to speak pompously, noisily, or theatrically; to make an empty speech; to rehearse trite arguments in debate; to rant.
3. To speak rhetorically; to make a formal speech or oration; specifically, to recite a speech, poem, etc., in public as a rhetorical exercise; to practice public speaking.

Now, after reading your description of the recitative-type opera of Monteverdi's era, I can see that the pertinent definition is the second one, not the first one. – CorinneSD (talk) 23:05, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, I'll be hornswoggled! That first sense is one I have never come across—I stand corrected. It may be that the phrase can be edited so as to avoid this possible misunderstanding. This style is often referred to as "declamatory style", though the word "passionate" here works more gracefully with "declamation" than with "declamatory". See what you can come up with to help clarify the intended sense.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:54, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I will work on it, but before I do, I want to show you the sentence I quoted above with the sentence that appears before it in the article:

"Orff's German version, Orpheus, was staged under Orff's direction in 1925 in Mannheim, using some of the instruments that had been used in the original 1607 performance. The passionately declaimed opera of Monteverdi's era was almost unknown in the 1920s, however, and Orff's production met with reactions ranging from incomprehension to ridicule."

It would help me to know whether Orff's version of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo was largely recitative and similar in style to opera in Monteverdi's time and whether you think that was the reason "Orff's production met with reactions ranging from incomprehension to ridicule". It can't be just the use of a few old-style instruments. From reading the rest of the article, it is clear that some of Orff's works were different, creative, almost experimental, using elements of theater and dance, but I don't know if his "Orpheus" was like that, and, even if it was, whether that was the reason for the negative reactions.CorinneSD (talk) 15:43, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm afraid I have no idea what Orff did with Monteverdi's material but, if he stuck basically to what Monteverdi wrote (and that seems to be the implication), then it would seem reasonable to suppose that the audience was reacting more to Monteverdi than to Orff. In 1925, that would not surprise me in the slightest. I suppose that, for his original works, Orff must have drawn on Monteverdi as a model, amongst other things. He was scarcely the only composer in those days to take inspiration from earlier music. Hindemith and Stravinsky both famously drew on earlier music, which was being rediscovered by the then-new discipline of historical musicology (and Webern was one of those musicologists, before he turned away from the academy to focus his attention on composition), and the shock of the old often exceeded the shock of the new.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:19, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Carl Orff - After World War II

In the section "After World War II" in the article Carl Orff, I could see no particular order for the works listed. They are not in chronological or in alphabetical order. Wouldn't the best order be chronological?CorinneSD (talk) 22:12, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

The four works named there are in chronological order now. Perhaps you have already fixed this problem?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:03, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I see that now. I don't know what I saw before. Sorry.CorinneSD (talk) 21:36, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Carl Orff - Musical work

In the first paragraph in the section "Musical work" in the article on Carl Orff, we read the following sentence:

"While "modern" in some of his compositional techniques, Orff was able to capture the spirit of the medieval period in this trilogy, with infectious rhythms and simple harmonies."

I wonder whether the quotation marks around the word "modern" are necessary. I know from reading a bit later in the article that Orff made an effort to use techniques in such a way that it would be difficult to tell in which period the music was written, but isn't the truth that he did use some modern compositional techniques? I'll certainly defer to your knowledge here, though.

I made a few edits throughout the article to improve clarity and the flow of sentences. Would you mind looking at them to be sure I didn't change something incorrectly? I particularly struggled over the last sentence in the second or third paragraph in this same section, about a union of words and music. (Look at the "before" and "after".) If you have any suggestions for improvement, I'd be happy to hear or see them. Thank you.CorinneSD (talk) 22:45, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

It all looks good to me, though I do see why you are concerned about that passage concerning words and music. It is not clear to me how a composer can avoid musical techniques of his own time, in order to achieve a "timeless" effect. If you use musical techniques of the past, then you achieve an effect of a past time, which is no more "timeless" than the present. Perhaps this is meant to say that he mixed together various conflicting historical techniques? This is beginning to sound like a reliable source is needed.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:32, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Langgaard's Music of the Spheres

Hello Mr. Kohl, I don't know if you are familiar with the Music of the Spheres by the Danish composer Rued Langgaard, but in case your are not I would like to bring it to your attention. It's quite an extraordinary work, in some cases on the cutting edge or maybe even ahead of its time. I have created an article about it. So far it's just a stub so please excuse any errors and the incompleteness of the article. I fully intend on expanding it further, but I would also like others to take part, if there is any interest. As you are one the most prominent contributors to the articles on 20th-century classical music I thought it would be appropriate to let you know about this work. --Danmuz (talk) 15:52, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for calling my attention to your newly created article. I'm afraid that Langgaard is only a name to me, but I shall take this opportunity to learn more about him.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:03, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome. I hope you will find something of interest. His output was very mixed, sometimes extremely conservative and backward-looking, other times ahead of its time. The Music of the Spheres belongs to the latter with his use of "pre-Ligeti" stasis-like clusters, etc. (as Ligeti himself acknowledged) --Danmuz (talk) 15:59, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

The Ligeti connection alone is enough to pique my interest. It does make one wonder how well Langaard's composition was known in mid-1950s Europe, since this kind of texture is decidedly "in the air" by that time (Xenakis's "clouds", Stockhausen's "swarms"). It would be interesting to know whether Ligeti had already come upon the idea through his work with Stockhausen at WDR, and later found confirmation when he heard Langaard's piece, or if it worked the other way around, and Langaard was in some way a source for or at least an influence on the whole lot of them. Debussy's Jeux of course is acknowledged by Stockhausen as an inspiration (together with natural phenomena like swarms of bees and shoals of fish), and it is also possible that Langaard got the idea from Debussy's music. Tracing influences can be a tricky business. Thanks again for bringing my attention to Langaard.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:32, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Ligeti

Watch the scene and make sure I have the correct piece. It is hauntingly beautiful. It starts at about 55 seconds. I hope it makes it into the film, and is not just for the trailer. Write me back. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 06:33, 8 January 2014 (UTC) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBwsUD7jYCI

It is not up to you or me to verify whether or not Ligeti's composition is used there. It requires a reliable source.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:45, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

The trailer itself is the reference, a primary source, which we use with caution. A secondary source would determine whether it is notable. That is why I asked you to confirm it. Should I assume you are agreeing it is in fact what I have stated, or are you disagreeing, and saying I have mis-identified it the piece? That is what I was asking you to do.

OK, so I have listened/watched. If you think that is Atmosphères from about 0:55 to about 1:05, then you are sadly mistaken. Atmosphères is an orchestral composition, and the music in the trailer at that point is largely choral. Those vocal sounds are similar to parts of Ligeti's Lux aeterna, or possibly passages from his Requiem. However, that is as far as I would venture to say. The texture is easily imitated by those wishing to avoid paying royalties or risking copyright infringement. The resemblance could be accidental, purposeful, or an actual excerpt, but with little snippets like that, overlaid with electronic music and sound effects, it is impossible to say. This is why a secondary source is needed: not to determine notability, but to document what the Sound Editor actually spliced in at that point.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:46, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, my mistake Lux Aeterna ... --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 04:45, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

A prime example of why reliable sources are required on Wikipedia. An expert could tell you whether what he/she hears on a film soundtrack is such-and-such a piece of music, but all editors here (including experts) are totally anonymous, at least in theory. I am not particularly expert on Ligeti but even if I were, you would want me to commit to such an opinion in print (or online in electrons) in a reliable source before you would want to invoke my name.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:36, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Chavez

Thanks for all your work on that Chavez list (which I copied from Spanish Wikipedia). I note you're using the Parker book. The list of works in that book is not as good, nor accurate, nor complete as the Halffter book (which I think is the true source of this list). I also added a few items from NYPL's catalog (they hold his manuscripts). -- kosboot (talk) 14:19, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

You are welcome. I believe that the list on Spanish Wikipedia was in turn taken from a Carlos Chávez website (no longer accessible) that had bilingual French/English (or was it French/Spanish?) pages. This might explain the odd sprinkling of English words amongst the Spanish ("piano and orquesta", etc.). I must apologize for teasing you about the scoring of the Sonata and Concerto for four horns. The Spanish word for trumpet is "trompeta", while the word for horn is "trompa". This usage dates back to the 17th century, when the two instruments were not clearly differentiated, and not only in Spanish. Somebody obviously got careless when partially translating the work list. I shall correct this and take down the "citation needed" flags. I do not know the Halffter book. Would you be so kind as to add it in a "Further reading" section in the Chávez article? I am aware of some shortcomings in Parker's book, as well as in his New Grove article based on it. Of course, it was published back in 1983, and a lot of research has been carried out since then (not least by Parker himself). I have García Morillo's biography also, though that dates back even further. For the music up to 1958, however, it is an excellent source, and avoids the linguistic self-consciousness sometimes evident in Parker. I also have the Compositores de las Américas series, but the work list there is even further out of date, though sometimes useful as a cross-check against the more up-to-date lists, and occasionally provides details not easily available elsewhere. I hadn't thought of consulting the NYPL catalog, but should have done. I think LoC holds some of his manuscripts also (or should do), unless they were transferred to NYPL at some point.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:08, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Tone row licenses

Would you consider depictions of tone rows in notation or in audio form as owned by the creator of the depiction, fair use, public domain as ineligible for copyright, or what? Hyacinth (talk) 20:46, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Are you getting static from the Copyright Police on Wikimedia Commons again? I am no lawyer, but I don't see how a tone row can be copyrighted, any more than a common chord progression can be (say, I–IV–V–I). I should think that the principle of "common material" would come into play: the basis for the rejection of a claim of copyright infringement against Vangelis in a famous case involving Chariots of Fire and a Greek television soap-opera called City of Violets—the judge effectively said that neither score contained anything original, despite manifest similarities between the two. Audio presentation of a tone row also seems to me quite a different thing from performing an actual composition, with rhythms, orchestration, pitch registers, etc. As an example, I might mention the "wedge" row, which has been used by any number of composers over the years, without (as far as I am aware) ever being the subject of copyright infringement lawsuits from, say, the estate of Alban Berg against Luigi Nono. For that matter, I do not believe that Nono either sought or obtained permission to use the row from Schoenberg's Op. 41 in his Variazioni canoniche. However, as I have already said, I am not a lawyer, and have no experience as an expert witness in copyright cases, either.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:31, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

I think courts/judges would differ on where the boundary lies between common-property patterns that are either already ubiquitous technically or lack distinctive elaboration that would comprise their "art" (the second would be at issue here). The "distinctiveness" argument seems hard to argue for a raw tone row without musical context. Tony (talk) 00:36, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

I had gotten notices for local files including File:Berg's Lyric Suite Mov. I tone row B-P.mid, which I had listed either as fair-use or as PD because of date. However, based on this discussion I have created Template:PD-tone row. Hyacinth (talk) 04:19, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

This sounds so eminently sensible that it is bound to provoke trouble from the petty-minded and unreasonable.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:24, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

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Béla Bartók

Hi Jerome, I would like to know why you reverted my recent changes on Bartók page. If I recollect rightly, good manners should call for a notice to the editor before undoing his work. Waiting to hear about your reasons, your lack of tact calls now for a second reversion. Cheers. Carlotm (talk) 04:55, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Dear Carlotm: As I explained in my edit summary, your edit violated a rather firm guideline at WP:CITEVAR. I presume from the tone of your message that you have not yet read that guideline. As far as I am aware, it is not customary on Wikipedia to consult an editor prior to making such a correction.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:12, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

"good manners should call for a notice to the editor before undoing his work."—that's taking out the "bold" from WP:BB. Toccata quarta (talk) 08:01, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your input, Toccata, but I do not find that quotation at the source you cite. While the sentiment is sound, I find it ironic that I have recently modeled my edit summaries on the ones you yourself use: including links to the relevant guidelines, in order to save time. I suppose in each case you have previously placed a notice on the editor's Talk page, warning them of what you are about to do. This is admirable politeness, but I'm afraid if I did this myself, I would scarcely have time left to edit anything at all. If it had been a matter of disputed substance, I would have made an exception, but when it is a question of clear violation of formatting guidelines (of which in this case Carlotm was obviously not aware), it seems to me that an edit-summary notice should be sufficient. Please tell me if I am out of line with preferred editorial practice on Wikipedia here; my experience so far indicates otherwise.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:54, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm afraid I misunderstood you to be citing WP:BB, when in fact you were citing Carlotm's message, above. This puts an entirely different light on things. My apologies, and I withdraw my testier remarks, while standing by the rest.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:53, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Suddenly a guideline becomes firm; you decide that? I thought everything has to be taken and given cum grano salis. Are not “common sense” and “occasional exceptions” allowed anymore in Wikipedia? How dare you quash another's work, quite long and nasty, not even looking into it. Oh yes, you have no time. So, please, take some time instead and tell me in the specific if what I did did improve the page, because that should be your first obligation. Don't you agree that parenthetical referencing is painful and difficult to use on long and complex pages? Going down and up the page again and again looking for the full explanations. Oh my god, I breached a WP:CITEVAR guideline. Oh my god.

In reality, the two citation styles are quite close, the only difference being that some medium specific advantage was added, that's the hyperlink beauty, allowing one's fast movement around long pages without losing the thread of his mind. Isn't that fabulous? I am pretty sure that the main editor of the page will totally agree with me. Isn't good that some jobbers are doing the dirty work? So, even tough nothing changed in the substance of the page, there was an improvement in its readability. Or not? Your rude and reckless behavior can be quite dangerous, the danger being that everything in Wikipedia is kept frozen to death, that “reverting drives away editors”.

Please, take a look at WP:ROWN. I know, an ideologist like you will pinpoint right away that's not the law. Still ….:

• “you should avoid reverting edits other than vandalism most of the time”
• “a reversion is appropriate when the reverter believes that the edit makes the article clearly worse and there is no element of the edit that is an improvement”
• “Wikipedia does not have a bias toward the status quo. …....In fact, Wikipedia has a bias toward change, as a means of maximizing quality by maximizing participation.”
• “Reversion is not a proper tool for punishing an editor.”

I still call for you to revert your reversion. Otherwise I'll do myself.

Another question. I noticed lately that you are following me like a shadow in my small editorial operations. It is quite stressful to find your changes within minutes of my changes. Nobody likes stalkers and I am not an exception. So please take three steps back from me, oops, three days, at least three hours, and make sure that, by correcting my errors, for which I tank you much, you don't incur in your own errors. Try to be helpful.Carlotm (talk) 23:04, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

For what it is worth (and it does not sound like you are actually very interested in hearing my explanation), you are of course entirely free to revert my edit. I shall then revert your edit, you will revert mine, and so on. This is called an "edit war", and is one of the most fruitless exercises possible on Wikipedia. It is for this reason that it is strictly forbidden, and avoiding it is the reason for implementing WP:CITEVAR. This was the result of many months—even years—of debate concerning a standard reference format for Wikipedia. One underlying principle here is that of civility. Accusations of bad faith, bias, or punishing other editors (as you seem to be doing here) are difficult to reconcile with the notion of civility. I suggest you re-read what you just wrote, and ask yourself if you are really trying to carry on a productive discussion here, or are you instead trying to provoke me.

As to your other question, I have only noticed a single other edit of yours, which involved a much more minor reconfiguration of references in the article on Edgard Varèse. I corrected this following a standard used in English-language publications of which you are evidently unaware (the original publication is cited when accessible, and reprints are given generally as a courtesy to readers who may find them easier to access). It is hardly the "big deal" you seem to feel it is. I am sorry if I have offended you, but I can assure you this is in no way "stalking". If you will care to check my own edit history, you will discover the subjects and specific articles I am most concerned with. These are heavily weighted toward music articles, particularly those involving 20th-century European composers. It is hardly surprising that Bartók and Varèse are both on my watchlist. If you believe I am in some way violating the code of behaviour expected of editors on Wikipedia, then there are mechanisms for formally voicing your displeasure and requesting the intercession of higher authorities. That is your right and your privilege. However, I believe you will be disappointed in the result.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:37, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Exactly after 21 min of my changes you posted yours. Considering 10-15 min for reading the page and writing down your novelties, it means that after only few minutes of my posting you were on Edgard Varèse page. Just by chance? Please. Don't hide your hand after the stone was thrown. There is some irony in all this. The staunch defender of the law, is the one that breach it at will. I am quite sure, stalking is not in the Wikipedia etiquette. About the specifics, try to assume that maybe there are reasons why usage has not been followed. In fact, with your changes, the reader will be amazed not to find the right quote in the given linked Google page, which is much easier to reach than a journal printed in 1966. And that's because the page numbers are not the same. But these are minutiae you don't care for. Facilitating the reader and giving him a fruitful reading experience seems not to be on your screen.

On the main topic, which pertain exactly the same question, I am very glad you dressed up with sheep clothes. Still your wolf teeth are shining when you write “or are you instead trying to provoke me”. My dear mister Jerome, you were the provoker here and I gave you already a clear explanation of my opinion about all this. To which you can only suggest that we have to wage war. I may misinterpret Wikipedia guidelines, and the ubiquitous text box saying that “guideline is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply”. Imagine this scenario.

Dear Carlotm, I am glad you contributed to Béla Bartók page, and I tank you for that. However you breached the WP:CITEVAR guideline. If for me, I would revert your work, but, maybe, that's too harsh, given the time you certainly spent on it. So I'd like to reach some consensus and ask for more input from others. Sure Jerome - I would have replied - I only pray you, in case of a revert, let me handle it. I'd like to save the restored links as well as the new ones. It will be easier for me to do that.

This, I think, is civility. Anyway, don't worry, far for my mind to wage war to anybody.

As a last resort, I'll post a message on the Béla Bartók discussion page in hope of exciting some reaction from other editors. If it fails, I quit. It's sad to admit such a behavioral failure, but I cannot accept the reckless and hostile doings of yours. Carlotm (talk) 23:05, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

To Carlotm: I just read your comment here, and then the exchange of comments before it. I am not by any means an expert in music, so I cannot judge the merits of either of your views. However, I can express my opinion on the tone of your comment. I am amazed at the tone of your comment. First of all, if you read Jerome Kohl's User page, you will see that not only has he made thousands of edits on Wikipedia over quite a few years, he has a Ph.D. (that is, a doctorate) in music and is a published author in his field. Also, in the few exchanges I have had with him on various articles, he has not only been invariably polite but also generous in explaining the reasons for his edits and his decisions about others' edits and material in articles. He is extremely knowledgeable about many topics, particularly those related to music, and he writes very well. He is also thoughtful and not dogmatic in his replies. I also believe he is open-minded. We are lucky to have someone of his caliber and someone so pleasant and generous as he is to help with editing on Wikipedia. He absolutely deserves everyone's respect.

Regarding your feeling that Jerome Kohl might be stalking you and too closely monitoring the same articles you are working on, you need to think about it in a different way: there may be ten, twenty, a hundred editors watching the same articles you are. Every time a change is made to an article, it appears on their watchlist. If they are interested, they take a look at the changes that have just been made. As Jerome explained, just because he made an edit to an article just after you had made one does not mean that he is stalking you. It just means that he is interested in, and watching, the same article and happens to be working on WP at the same time you are.

If someone reverts an edit, it is customary to provide an edit summary briefly to explain the edit. If you don't agree with it, rather than revert, start a discussion on the article's Talk page. Three things might happen:

1) By providing reasons and/or citing additional sources, you may succeed in persuading the other editor(s) that you are right;

2) the other editor may succeed in persuading you that he or she is right; or

3) through discussion, you may reach a consensus that involves further changes and compromises.

I think you should step back, re-read what has already been written, reconsider your own reactions, and adopt a new attitude. Try to discuss ideas and possible changes to articles in a courteous manner and in a spirit of collaboration. Your ideas and contributions are certainly welcome, and you will see that your ideas will be respected if you show respect toward others. I also urge you to be open to learning something new from other editors such as Jerome Kohl.CorinneSD (talk) 00:20, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the eloquent testimonial, CorinneSD. I am humbled by your comments, and only hope I can live up to your generous opinion. I hope this makes an impression on Carlotm, so that a productive discussion may follow over on Talk:Béla Bartók.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:38, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Was not ironic.

Was not ironic, mostly lost. Here I am with a good pic that can be fine somewhere, an no idea where. Just thought this is a great pic with geat feeling in it, maybe you know a better place for it? Hafspajen (talk) 21:38, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Das Hofkonzert. Rudolf Alfred Höger (1877-1930)

The irony that I see in that painting is two-fold. On the one hand, the term "Romanticism" was first applied to music by E. T. A. Hoffmann, with particular reference to the later works of Haydn, as well as the music of Mozart and Beethoven. By this measure, the subject of the painting is only just a little too early, since the costumes and furniture appear at first glance to be more Louis XV than anything else. On the other, the painter is not a Romantic artist, having not even been born until 1877, a good decade after even the most generous art historians regard that period to have ended. A third aspect, however, is that the artist is obviously indulging in nostalgia for a distant past (that is to say, from a time before even his grandfather can have provided a first-hand account) which is one of the leading traits of 19th-century Romanticism in literature, painting, and even music (in the Cecilian Movement, for example)—though of course this trait is also found more recently, for example in certain later manifestations of musical historicism such as those espoused by the Delian Society.

The problem that I see with placing it where you did is primarily that it represents musical practice from a time earlier than is usually considered part of the Romantic era. This is liable to confuse the reader, who may be led to suppose that Romantic music begins with Telemann, Handel, and Bach. If properly explained by surrounding text, the nostalgia for a past that never existed might well suit the article on musical historicism. The Cecilian Movement, on the other hand, regarded Bach and Mozart as far too modern, and wished to push music history back to the time of Palestrina or earlier, though Höger is contemporary with the second and third generations of that movement, which was German in origin.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:18, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Quite so. Can you find a better place for it, please? Hafspajen (talk) 23:13, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

I have already suggested the possibility of adding it to the Musical historicism article, though that would require some explanatory text. The best place for it, of course, would be in an article on the artist himself, but there is no such article at present. I know nothing at all about him, so this would be best done by an art historian with a specialty in late-19th/early-20th century Austrian art. Perhaps the article on the German wikipedia could be translated for the purpose?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:19, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

I think we might need a translator, yes. Gerda Arendt, maybe. She can make that to a DYK, too. I like the athmosphere, people before they didn't had TV, CD, radio - just had to get together and play music if they wanted to listen to it. It was a different world. This picture shows a different world, a forgotten world when people seaked the companionship of the others; this way. Hafspajen (talk) 00:13, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

If that is all that attracted you to this picture, then there are plenty more for you to enjoy, many of them painted by artists of the period depicted, and so are a much truer representation. For example this, or this or even this (though the last one was painted by an artist who cannot have known the subject personally). What strikes me about this picture by Höger now is how inauthentic it appears. The artist must have based its details on older paintings he had seen in museums, much as historicist composers base their music on old scores, without being able to work from direct experience of the period in which the events took place. As a result, there is an uneasy feeling about just where and when this scene might be (Vienna? Paris? Berlin? 1714? 1743? 1786?). This has a fascination all its own, of course, and a work of art created according to these methods is not necessarily to be condemned simply because it did not originate in the period being represented. Painters of many periods, for example, have depicted Biblical scenes without ever having witnessed them at first hand, and a composer of the stature of Bruckner (for example) may be counted on to create superb music, even when imitating masters of an earlier age, as he did in many of his sacred works. The evident nostalgia, however, for a time not actually in the artist's experience is not unlike trying to paint an imagined remote future Utopia, when "things will have gotten better". It is, in short, a denial of the artist's own time—a wish to escape from it by retreating into fantasy. This makes me curious to learn a little more about Höger: is this painting characteristic of his output, or is it exceptional in his catalogue? What were his models? Was it perhaps commissioned to the taste of a patron? Was it a student exercise, or a mature work? Was he a solitary figure, or one amongst many artists of his time with these interests?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:56, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Lovely pictures above. And. How clever of you to notice that nostalgia. Rudolf Alfred Höger indeed lived 1877-1930, that is one explanatiom why it is so hard to place. Yes, it does raise a lot of questions. Rudolf-Alfred-Hoeger Hoeger Motifs de:Rudolf Alfred Höger, - past-auction-resultsHafspajen (talk) 16:45, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Weird coincidence

I can't believe you edit conflicted with me at exactly that moment, on exactly that detail -- made me laugh out loud -- the date for Dufay is precisely known but there is other uncertainty. Cheers, Antandrus (talk) 01:31, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, I can hardly believe that I finally got there ahead of you for once! I can't tell you how many times (on Dufay as well as other articles with similar issues) I have tried to correct such a detail, only to be greeted by "EDIT CONFLICT" and discover you had already made the correction I was trying to make. I feel so smug that I beat you to it at last. Wikipedia ought to have a special edit function to enable an editor to say "Snap!" in such circumstances!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:07, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Baroque Music

Monsieur Kohl,

I have absolutely no problem with your reverting me on the *barocque* orthography, but do have a problem in being put in the *possible vandal* category! What brings me here now is that, after your revert, I put a hidden note by the word *barocque*, asking that a more precise reference be given the quote by adding a page number to it. This daring action brought the immediate wrath of a Bot upon my head with, again, the suspicion of vandalism. At this point, I do not know if I should be angry or amused, and opt for the latter... anger can come later if it becomes impossible to touch an article without becoming a suspect. Please read below the note I left at ClueBot's discussion page. Best regards, --Blue Indigo (talk) 22:31, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

I do not understand why ClueBot reverted my last comment at Baroque Music article: my comment was a hidden question & a suggestion very politely addressed & signed, concerning the source of the word *baroque* spelled *barocque* in a 1734 text:

"Is the quote "c'est du *barocque* found in the 2001 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians? If so, then the page number is needed (Blue Indigo)"

I do not see how my using the correct orthography, then the following day adding a hidden comment after being reverted can be considered acts of vandalism!

Also, please note that I did not revert the correction brought by Jerome Kohl, but only added that hidden comment.

Should you take the time to look at the various changes/corrections etc. I have brought to articles for the little time I have been on Wikipedia (English & French), I do not think you will find much vandalism or even many mistakes.

--Blue Indigo (talk) 22:31, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Cher Monsieur Indigo: How bizarre! I suppose this is another of the strange events to which one eventually becomes used on Wikipedia. They are usually produced by "bots" (as in this case) which, lacking human guidance, make judgments based on mathematical algorithms. I have occasionally experienced similar things myself. A polite note on the bot controller's page usually produces an apology, and general laughter all round. As for the request for a page number from New Grove, although it can be provided, it is not usual to cite page numbers from dictionary and encyclopedia articles, since these are rarely more than three or four pages long, and are located alphabetically within their volumes. For what it is worth, the context of the passage (taken from the Grove Online version, which lacks page numbers entirely) reads:

This occurs in a satirical letter prompted by the première of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie in Paris in October 1733, printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734 (‘Lettre de M*** à Mlle*** sur l’origine de la musique’, pp.868–70). The anonymous author covertly implied that what was new in the opera was ‘du barocque’ and complained that the music lacked coherent melody, was unsparing in dissonances, constantly changed key and metre, and speedily ran through every compositional device.

Ideally, I think the page reference from the Mercure de France would be more useful, but we are rightly cautioned not to cite sources at second hand, and I have not checked to see whether a facsimile or modern edition of the Mercure is available. Besides, the actual word "barocque" cannot physically occur on more than two of the three mentioned pages. Let me have a look and see whether the bot also treats me as a vandal, when I restore your perfectly valid editorial comment!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:07, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Cher Monsieur Kohl - Breathing a sigh of relief learning that my so-called vandalism was not the result of judgment by a human being, but that of a (ro)bot - although the idea of being supervised & wrongly-labeled by brainless non-beings sounds dangerous for the future of human rights...

A quick search for the year 1734 brought me here: Book digitized by Google from the library of the University of Michigan and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb: https://archive.org/details/mercuredefrance04unkngoog. Unfortunately, not May, but June 1734 came up, so I could not find the exact quote. When I have more time, I will try Gallica bibliothèque numérique de la BNF. However, by now, I am certain that we can all live without that detail.

Thank you for your courteous response.

--Blue Indigo (talk) 13:10, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

It was my pleasure entirely. It is not often one is offered an opportunity like that (see below)! Please let me know if you succeed in finding online access to that issue of Mercure de France. I should like to read the entire diatribe against Rameau which, to judge from the New Grove citations, sounds as if it must be very funny indeed.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:48, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Out-botting the bot

Your latest edit summary was pretty funny. What a pity bots have no sense of humour. :-) Contact Basemetal here 00:20, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Oh, I don't know—there are some rather funny bots around, I think. (Besides, I believe I have had cause before to communicate with ClueBot NG's remote operator, who seems aware that a machine can sometimes prove to be almost as imperfect as a human being! In any case, thanks for letting me know you got a chuckle from my edit summary.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:26, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Monsieur, You've got 2 chuckles! As long as humans have wit, machines will not win. Thank you. --Blue Indigo (talk) 16:43, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Paul Dukas family background

Paul Dukas family background

Please stop deleting information on the family background of Paul Dukas and the origin of this Byzantine Greek family name, it throws light on who he is and on his diverse musical influences. Greek and Balkan/Ottoman Jewry is part of the rich heritage of Paul Dukas. When editing Wikipedia articles none of us should even unwittingly succumb to the preferences of extremist francophile snobs or closet anti-Semites who prefer to conceal or downplay the Jewish family histories of people like Paul Dukas who have contributed immensely to European culture and thought. A Gounaris (talk) 11:42, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

If you will kindly provide a reliable source that suggests there may be a connection between Paul Dukas and this Byzantine Greek family (instead of saying just the opposite: that there has never been any research along those lines), then I will cheerfully refrain from reverting your edits. I think it is an interesting line of inquiry, but Wikipedia is not a forum for original research. For what it is worth, I am no francophile (though neither am I francophobe), nor am I an anti-Semite, closet or otherwise. I will thank you to retract these entirely unfounded and offensive accusations against my person and character.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:25, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

What do you think of this?

What do you think of the following: "Greek and foreign historians agree that the ecclesiastical tones and in general the whole system of Byzantine music is closely related to the ancient Greek system"?

It is found in the lead of Byzantine music and it's been there since November 10 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Byzantine_music&direction=next&oldid=170566496).

As far as I know it is nonsense, but I thought I'd check with you.

Contact Basemetal here 14:43, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, I am neither a Greek nor a foreign historian, so I cannot speak from personal experience. I think that musicologists and music-theory historians are very skeptical on this subject. Although there are points of similarity (tetrachordal construction, for example), there are also stark differences. The theoretical and practical presence of tonal centers, organization into a system of eight modes (echoi) with plagal/authentic pairs, and lack of a system of transposition levels (not to mention the comparative rigidity of modal types in practice) are all traits of the Byzantine system not present in Ancient Greek music. However, if there is a reliable source saying that all historians agree on this point, then I have no quibble with that claim. In the absence of such a source, I would tag that sentence with a {{Cn}} flag, and see if anyone can come up with support for it. Of course, simply removing the word "closely" would probably resolve the entire problem (a bit like "mostly harmless" in the revised edition of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy?).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:40, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

And it should be "are closely related," not "is closely related": "...the ecclesiastical tones and...the whole system....are closely related to...." – CorinneSD (talk) 01:08, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Pedant! ;-)—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:10, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Hey, for grammar nerds, this is our bread and butter. We have to compete with content nerds: "tetrachordal construction...transposition levels...." CorinneSD (talk) 01:31, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

By the way, have you seen this? [1] It works in Google Chrome; gives only a description in Internet Explorer. CorinneSD (talk) 01:35, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

I haven't seen that before. I think I've still got Internet Explorer 5.1 on my machine (the last version before it was abandoned in 2001), and Google Chrome is not available yet for my operating system (OS-X 10.4), though we live in hope. Safari produces an image of changing bubbles, with titles of Wikipedia articles in them. Scrolling down, I find a description (perhaps the one you mention for IE). I gather it is intended to produce beeps or something, every time an edit is made to an Wikipedia article. Someone deserves a round of applause for devising such a useful thing.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:36, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, the beeps you mentioned are not beeps. They are delicate chimes in different tones, one per bubble, that evoke images of a medieval cloister, a Zen temple, and futuristic music. It's not very useful, but it is mesmerizing. CorinneSD (talk) 19:39, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for the inaccurate term, which was based solely on what I had read. I do not ordinarily have the sound activated on my computer, since the output is too soft to hear properly, unless I plug in an external amplifier. Something tells me (from the context of cloisters and temples) that when you use the word "futuristic" you mean something more like new age than futurism. There really are very few things as funny as looking at old predictions of what the future will be—though the occasional accurate forecast can be chilling.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:32, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

(Back to Byzantium)

The webpage given as a source does not seem to amount to much.

When you say "there are points of similarity (tetrachordal construction, for example)", are those genetic, inherited similarities, due to Byzantine music being a continuation of ancient Greek music, as the lead of the article I mentioned also implies in another sentence?

Or do they happen to share similarities formally (if that's the right word), like for example Arabic music which also features tetrachordal construction, without anyone implying, as far as I know, that there is any relation of descent between ancient Greek music and Arabic music?

I'm asking this because I'm trying to figure out if we're dealing with a nationalist agenda that doesn't care about scholarship or with a person that's genuinely interested in scholarship, but is in good faith contributing what they honestly believe are valid alternative opinions.

As far as I have read, and of course I have read very little about any of this, Byzantine music descends from a Syriac tradition that has nothing to do with classical ancient Greek music, that Byzantine music is not a continuation of ancient Greek music, that there was a clear discontinuity.

Have I been misled? What is the scholarly opinion on this matter?

Contact Basemetal here 11:57, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

It sounds to me as if you are much better-informed on the subject than I am. Unfortunately, the Byzantine segment was skipped when I took History of Music Theory back in grad school, and I never did catch up on this. There is one evidently very well-informed editor, User:Platonykiss, who has contributed an enormous amount of information to the octoechos article. You might ask his opinion, which would certainly be worth a great deal more than my own. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the practice of music and its theory are two very different things. If (as seems plausible) Ancient music of the Eastern Mediterranean basin (and even further afield) shared many stylistic traits, and furthermore was very diverse over time and even at the same time within one ethnic group (which we know to be true from several ancient writers, including Plato), then it is likely that the actual basis of scales, rhythms, and melodic types was part of a common heritage, and/or a product of mutual cross influence. The job of the theorist is ordinarily to try to make order out of the diversity of experience. While theory may in turn shape subsequent musical practice, it does not put a patent on how musicians may create their art. It is therefore not beyond the bounds of reason to suppose that music of the Greek, Persian, Syriac, and other traditions shared a great deal, so that for example when Arabic music theorists beginning in the 8th or 9th century discovered and translated Ancient Greek sources, they found many similarities with—but also many important differences from—what they perceived in the music of their own time. There is nothing mysterious in this, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that something in the long history of Ancient Greek musical practice might have trickled down into the Arabic music of a later millennium, even if other sources were more immediate and of a significantly different nature. Byzantine music, of course, is geographically and temporally more proximate to the Ancient Greeks, and so the hypothesis may be considered stronger, without however incorporating any claim of direct lineage.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:32, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for these clarifications. I will ask Platonykiss what he thinks of that contribution and of the value of the reference provided. Maybe I was influenced by "A history of Byzantine music and hymnography". I remember when discussing the Hymn to the Holy Trinity, Wellesz, who took the view that work was in the lineage of Byzantine music rather than ancient Greek tradition, despite it being notated in the ancient Greek so-called vocal notation, was stressing heavily its differences with the few relics of genuine ancient Greek music that have come down to us, and more generally the differences between the two musical cultures, Byzantine and ancient Greek. Since that book is more than 50 years old I thought I would update my opinions by asking professionals here. If find it very hard to navigate the topic and to assess what's current scholarly consensus. I don't think there's been a general overview since 1960 and Wellesz's must really be outdated by now. Not to mention assessing the value of the available discography. There seems to also be a lot of "noise" out there surrounding these questions. Thanks again. Cheers. And please, more humorous edit summaries:-) Contact Basemetal here 22:17, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Apologies

	Apologies
	Understood. You're right, these are unfounded speculations on Paul Dukas' family origins and so probably shouldnt be edited into this article. Apologies if I gave the impression I was accusing you of being a francophile snob or closet anti-semite, you obviously arent - I should have chosen my words more carefully. All the best A Gounaris (talk) 12:27, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Your very gracious apology is accepted. I should like to repeat: if you are able to find a reliable source for a possible link between Paul Dukas and this Byzantine ancestral line, then please feel free to re-establish the claim on Dukas's biographical article.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:55, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Goliard

I noticed that an editor added a large amount of material to the article on Goliard. While it seems generally well-written, and there is a reference, I wonder whether too much was taken from one source, whether there are enough specific references for all that material, and whether any of it was original writing. I know you are much better able to judge these things than I am. – CorinneSD (talk) 20:24, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

I briefly examined that article when you called my attention earlier to the article on the Carmina Burana, but I shall take a closer look now. Sometimes a single source has nearly all of the best information in it, and so there may be nothing wrong it relying heavily upon it, even though Wikipedia guidelines warn against this.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:36, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Marcello

Hello Jerome, could you take a look at Benedetto Marcello. I added a link pointing to a disambiguation page Flautino (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver), but I have no idea what kind of instrument was used. You probably can fix this. Kind regards, Taksen (talk) 05:06, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

No prob. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Flautino can mean any of several small recorders, but New Grove identifies it in this case as a soprano.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:28, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Manfred Bukofzer does not have any detail on the operas by Veracini. I am not surprised because he was accused of a German bias. (Music in the Baroque era, p. 234-5.) By the way I used to work for quite a few years with the mother of Kathinka Pasveer and heard stories from her when Light was performed in the Scala. I met Kathinka (and Stockhausen) once in Berlin where she performed one of his works. I don't remember any title. One work was with a saxophone, and Stockhausen, controlled the electronics. I was invited by a member of Calefax. May be you like to check their website [2]. They have a lot of success here. Taksen (talk) 06:08, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Quite apart from any German bias, Bukofzer's book was published more than sixty years ago, at a time when Veracini was scarcely known outside of some very rarified Italian circles. Newman's landmark books on the history of the sonata were probably what first brought Veracini to the attention of the English-speaking world in particular, and the musicological community in general, but these were not written or published until long after Bukofzer's book. And to be fair, Bukofzer devotes almost all of his chapters about the early history of baroque opera to Italy. One thing about German musicologists is that, as soon as they are finished defending the honour of German music, they catch the first train to Italy to enjoy the sunshine—and, in order to justify this as a business expense, they put in some hours in the archives of Italian libraries. You won't find them doing this much for, say, Polish or Norwegian music. Thanks for the anecdote about Stockhausen and Kathinka. The saxophone work was probably the arrangement of Amour, though it could have been the excerpt from Der Jahreslauf titled simply Saxophone. Of course, I do not imagine for a moment that Kathinka performed this!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:55, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

I worked on the article, fixed some of your comments, but then discovered you and someone else changed the text, so I saved my work in the sandbox. Take a look. I added some pictures and details on the coronation, the wedding of the crown prince, on the jump, on the Stainer violins. I am tired; it is bed time here.Taksen (talk) 22:45, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

I believe that all of this information is found (in a succinct form) in Hill's 1979 biography. (For example, I recall the story about Charles VI's coronation, but what I remember is that it was a violin concerto, not a concerto grosso that was performed. I am still working on this.) One of the websites which you cited proved to be a cut-and-paste copy of another website, which is turn was a cut-and-paste copy of Hill, word-for-word, right down to idiosyncratic typographical details. That earlier website was taken down, possibly because of this copyright violation, but an archive copy still exists. It is very important under these circumstances to cite the original source, attributing the information to its actual author, rather than to some anonymous entity. This is a constant danger when relying on websites (which are not all reliable sources, and may dishonestly or inaccurately portray both themselves as authors and the subjects about which they write), and the only remedy is to investigate all sources thoroughly. Hill is still the most respected source in English, though it has been a long time since his research was done, and so it must be consulted as the starting point.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:31, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for February 3

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The Paul Dukas' muddle: c'est la faute à Maurice Ravel !

Monsieur,

Could not miss the Paul Dukas argumentation on his name & origin, and thought this may interest you

http://books.google.fr/books?id=ojx988i_tasC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

The book's title: Paul Dukas, authors: Perret & Ragot, publisher: Fayard, 2007

Please go to chapter I, Origines familiales & premières années (1865-1875); first paragraph, first sentence and on. There you will find Maurice Ravel's quip about Dukas' ancestry, followed by the history of the "recensement" of Jews in France from end of 18th century, plus the fact that Jews had to choose a surname, and how Paul Dukas' great-grandfather changed his to Dukas, but not that of his infant son who had been declared at birth under the name of Dockes.

Allusions of Paul Dukas' being a descendant of Byzantine-Greek aristocrats could well be a result of Ravel's joke.

Cordially, --Blue Indigo (talk) 15:15, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Very interesting. Unfortunately, GoogleBooks does not offer a preview, so I shall have to locate a copy of this book in a library.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:58, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

The Paul Dukas' muddle: c'est la faute à Maurice Ravel !

The Paul Dukas' muddle: c'est la faute à Maurice Ravel !

Ah no! I contributed edits on Paul Dukas' family background and suggested - without any references or evidence to back it up - that his father Jules Dukas may have had a Greek Jew descendant originally from Ottoman-era Greek Macedonia. I thought Ottoman-Greek Jews might have adopted the name Dukas/Doukas under the INFLUENCE of their Greek-speaking Christian Orthodox neighbours. This MIGHT explain why there were and still are other Jewish families in Britain, France and Austria-Hungary who bear the name Doukas/Dukas, since many Jews from Ottoman-era Greek Macedonia are known to have immigrated to these countries. But this idea is really only an interesting line of inquiry and not historical fact. It is important to emphasize that even among most of those Greek-speaking Christian Orthodox families from Epirus, Greek Macedonia and elsewhere in northern Greece - where the late Byzantine Doukai and Komneno-Doukai were most active - who have Doukas/Dukas as a surname (or additional surname) VERY FEW of these will even claim descent from the Byzantine-era noble family. Most of those especially northern Greek families who have the name Doukas/Dukas in the final or middle position do so simply because an earlier ancestor probably adopted it for prestige reasons. Modern Greece has not maintained a living aristocratic tradition, not just because the end of the 1967-74 military dictatorship led to the deposition of the Greek monarchy (which in any case was not indigenous to Greece) but because Byzantine Greek aristocrats in the Ottoman period tended to marry into the Ottoman ruling family or the noble families of Christian Orthodox Russia and elsewhere in Europe. Hope this helps those interested in the name Dukas/Doukas. Thanks. A Gounaris (talk) 12:55, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

February 2014

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Flying Editman

Sorry for the template removal...I mistakenly thought it was for the supernatural phenomena and not the opera! I was in the process of redirecting all opera links to the opera and not the legend. Sorry again :) Gareth E Kegg (talk) 17:12, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

No problem! It seemed so odd that the template retained the link to the article, even after the template was no longer there. Now I understand what was going on.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:17, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Time point

You're welcome! Hyacinth (talk) 00:44, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Notability of Kentaro Sato

I'm leaving this on your talk page since the discussion at Hyacinth's has moved beyond what properly belonged there.

I've put some data I've collected about Kentaro Sato here to try and better evaluate notability.

Could you tell me what you think? Should I withdraw the nomination for deletion?

Note this is all raw web data. Not all the data has been factually checked by me and from what I could check part did check out and part didn't.

Thanks.

Contact Basemetal here 05:07, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, poor Hyacinth. We rather hijacked his talk page, didn't we? He is characteristically laconic in the extreme, and so our rather loquacious exchange very nearly tripled the traffic there in a matter of days.

I don't know what to think about the Sato article's merits, but I do not recommend withdrawing the nomination for deletion. As I said previously, I hope that the editors responsible for that article are able to answer your charges with better sources, but it is a well-justified challenge. I will take a look at your compiled data, which may change my mind about this.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:29, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Transposition at sight

Called it "hellish" as requiring fluency in all clefs. Students here (everybody including strings, bassoon, timpani; not sure about voice with their "solfège pour chanteurs" rather than the regular classes) had to sing solfeggios (such as Lemoine) with one clef change per bar. If one isn't able to do it my own beotian method of choice would be by "scale degree" rather than "interval". How did you become fluent in all clefs? Contact Basemetal here 21:07, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I learned clefs gradually, and according to need. As for most non-keyboardist musicians, I expect, treble clef was where I started. Being a clarinetist, the most useful clefs after this were tenor and alto (for transposing A and C clarinet parts on B-flat clarinet). Bass clef of course became necessary at about the same time, perhaps even a little earlier. It was only when I began playing recorders (and other "early" instruments) that things really got under way. In the end, what motivated me most, I suppose, was an eagerness to read more music without having to go through the process of transcription. It does not take very long sight-reading from facsimile editions to begin to realise that there are actually only seven notes than can belong to a given staff line, so already knowing four clefs means there are only three others to learn. Throw into the mix woodwinds that finger most often in four different basic scales (so-called F-, C-, G-, and D-fingerings), and it is a very short step to simply checking where your fingers need to start, and the diatonic intervals surrounding that point. Once I reached this stage, I stopped even thinking about key signatures most of the time—knowing where the "mi-fa" points are is sufficient (unless you are playing twelve-tone music, of course!). Now, I agree that changing clefs every bar is a bit extreme. Not many composers are sadistic enough to actually require this of performers, and the ones who do probably don't get many of their pieces played.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:32, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

You've learned it hands on by practicing transposing with your instrument and at your own pace rather than going through what those poor guys have to lest they fail their end of year tests. Those pieces with one change of clef per bar are not published music. They're exercises in solfeggios such as the "Solfège des solfèges" of Henri Lemoine and not all are like that. You may take a look the S. des s. some time if you're curious as it is now on the net. The idea of aiming at this kind of fluency is supposedly that if, for example, you're a conductor and have to jump in the score from the B-flat trumpet to the French horn to the flute in G you have to mentally "change clef" fast. When you answer this whole business of not writing all parts at concert pitch in the conductor's score is what's insane, you're told surreal stuff like that the conductor has to speak to the French horns "in their own language", that is in F, and so has to see their part the way they see it. As if it weren't saner he switch to "talking in F" when he addresses the French horns rather than having to have in front of him constantly a part he's got to mentally transpose. Our friend Kentaro Sato (remember him?:) who, though Japanese, is a product of the American musical education system, thinks preliminary training in Europe and Japan is unreasonable: see a statement I found while rummaging through his website for hints of notability. Funny thing, he slightly reworded the statement from the 10th to the 11th, I don't know why. I would tend to side with him on that, if I felt I really knew what I was talking about. And there've been other crazy things in music education in France and Belgium in the past 200 years, e.g. the fixed-do system, I had to undergo 5 years of that and I still don't understand how such an idiotic system is possible. Since I've got you on the line, do you remember a minor piece by Stockhausen where he uses an equal temperament of the 12th into 19 equal parts (19th root of 3)? Contact Basemetal here 00:14, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

It's always best to learn things when you can see the need. I can well imagine how pointless those tests must have seemed to the poor slobs who had to pass them. I do know that those test pieces were not "real music". That was just my point. If your are going to read 17th-century viola da gamba music (for example), you may expect to have to change clefs a few times per page. Perhaps an exercise requiring twenty or thirty clef changes in the same space will make reality seem easy by comparison, but it still is unreal.

Your example of the conductor is exactly the kind of thing my professor would talk about. As a conductor, this is precisely what he would do (or so he said he did), and this had a lot to do with the fact that he had an acute sense of absolute pitch. He needed to "see" the correct pitches on the page of the score in front of him.

I think the Stockhausen piece you are referring to must by the second Elektronische Studie, only the scale used there involves an interval of 5:1 divided into 25 equal parts (25th root of 5). Is there some other piece with the 19th root of 3? Stockhausen had just as acute a sense of absolute pitch as my former professor. Neither of them let this prevent them getting past twelve-equal A=440Hz tuning. My professor was, amongst other things, an ethnomusicologist with an intense interest in non-Western tuning systems (or, to be more precise, "non-systems", since he was convinced that many world tunings are not systematic at all). Stockhausen explored microtonal tunings of the most refined sort (though he told me once that he believed these subtler divisions of the octave would always remain nuances within the chromatic semitonal system). For him, too, these microtonal elements were not systematic, but rather pitch inflections of a practical compositional interest.

This sort of thing does of course exceed the usual function of clefs, and I'm not sure how music-education systems are supposed to deal with them (for example, in sight-singing exercises).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:02, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

If you don't remember such a piece then it doesn't exist and I mixed up in my mind 5th and 3rd harmonic. But why 25? A 17th is divided into 28 semitones. How do his 25 pitches map into the expected 28 pitches inside a 17th? Each interval may be only slightly bigger than the 28th root of 5 but little by little the discrepancy must accumulate and you'll end up with some pitches being ambiguous, won't you? Regarding the view that subtler divisions of the octave would remain nuances, I can see how that would work if the inflected note is closer to one of the twelve uninflected tones: the ear would hear it as just a variant. But what happens if it is in the middle of a semitone and remains ambiguous and the ear refuses to identify it with either the higher or the lower tone as in the case of a neutral third that the ear refuses to hear either as a major third or a minor third? What then? Finally I'd be delighted if you had the time to expand on the opinion of your professor that non-Western traditional tuning practices are actually non-systematic. Ok I'll go listen to Studie II. Talking with you always expand our horizons. The problem is we all take a lot of your time. Lots of people have questions to ask you and you must sometime feel overwhelmed. That's the problem with being WP's resident musicologist :) In the past Antandrus pulled his weight but lately he's been sending people to you :) Thanks again for all this information, but don't hesitate to ask for a little peace and quiet if it gets too much. Contact Basemetal here 08:39, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

I don't think I understand your question. What has a 17th to do with this? The ratio 5:1 defines an interval of two octaves plus a just major third, but this only can be called a 17th if you assume seven diatonic scale steps in each octave. Your count of semitones assumes not only this, but also division of each whole tone into two semitones. I think most commentators agree that Stockhausen must have chosen this particular interval because it is fairly close to a semitone in size (a little bit larger, in fact), and because the resulting scale misses octaves by a wide margin. It also fails to approximate perfect fifths, which is one reason that the harmonic sound of the piece is dominated by thirds. The composition is constructed from sets of five elements, which is as good a reason as any for choosing a tuning system based on 5 and 25. Semitones however are not relevant when using such a tuning system (unless you redefine the use of the word "semitone", of course, to mean an interval that divides a 5:1 into 25 equal parts—a "tone" then being the interval that divides a 10:1 into 25 equal parts).

Sorry for not making much sense. I guess I saw this file

Tone mixtures in Group I of Stockhausen's Elektronische Studie II (Maconie 2005, 134).

which uses standard note designations for the frequencies, assumed (w/o doing the calculation) that his frequencies could be reasonably approximated by the notes of our usual 12 tone equally tempered scale and so thought I'd try to understand Stockhausen's ${\sqrt[{25}]{5}}$ system as an inflection of a usual 12-tones-to-the-octave system which a ${\sqrt[{28}]{5}}$ system would be. That was a mistake I guess. The "octave" in a ${\sqrt[{28}]{5}}$ system (that is ${\sqrt[{28}]{5^{12}}}={\sqrt[{7}]{5^{3}}}$) would still miss $2$ though not by much. Contact Basemetal here 01:55, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, those notations are misleading, but there is no clear way of representing non-12-equal pitches in conventional notation.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:15, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

As for my professor's contention that non-Western tuning systems are non-systematic, you can read the arguments in his book, Donald Lentz, The Gamelan Music of Java and Bali: An Artistic Anomaly Complementary to Primary Tonal Theoretical Systems (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). As he explained it to us, he asked instrument makers in Java and Bali how they arrived at the intervals they used. Most could only say, "they are traditional", but one pointed up into a tree, and said, "Do you hear that bird? Those are the notes I use to tune these two keys", and demonstrated by playing the two notes on the instrument before him. I think to a lesser degree this same line of thinking informs his earlier book, Tones and Intervals of Hindu Classical Music (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), but I have not read that one. The book on gamelan was very badly received at the time, since the dominant paradigm amongst ethnomusicologists was the overtone-series or small-whole-number-ratio basis for tuning, even though it was very difficult to explain certain intervals in gamelan scales that way. However, times have changed and, had he published that book twenty years later, Don's views would have found much greater favour. By then Paul Berliner's classic The Soul of Mbira had been published (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978; reprinted, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). This book was largely responsible for the repudiation of (or at least for casting strong doubt on) the number-ratio or overtone theory, which is now regarded by many ethnomusicologists as an indefensible imposition of European music-theoretical thinking on extra-European cultures.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:40, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

I'll have to try and see where a copy The Gamelan Music of Java and Bali can be located, and that may not be easy, but before I do, I'm curious if Donald Lentz found that the scales used varied widely and randomly from gamelan to gamelan? And shouldn't we have a Donald Lentz article in WP with some description of his theories. These seem musicologically significant. Even on the web it is not that easy to come by information regarding Donald Lentz let alone his theories. This is all I got from Googling "Donald Lentz Music" (first 5 pages). Contact Basemetal here 01:55, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it may be difficult to track down a copy of this book. To answer your question: Yes, if I recall correctly (and it has been a very long time since I last re-read his book) the tunings varied from village to village. Berliner found the same sort of variation for the mbira, with especially pronounced differences in the sixth scale degree.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:15, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Non-free tone row images

You may be interested in Talk:Tone row#Non-free images. (I must go on something of a wikibreak.) Hyacinth (talk) 05:20, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

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Dream

When I talked to a new editor about The Dream of Jacob, I remembered my old efforts regarding the Polish Requiem. Listing multiple performances is fine with me (that's why it says "performed", not "first performed", and more details could be mentioned about a premiere, example), but not everybody thinks so ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:16, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, but the Polish Requiem is an especially difficult case, because of the several successive versions. This is of course not a unique situation, but there cannot be many pieces with quite so many successive versions, so that each time Penderecki expanded it, there was another opportunity for a "world premiere". As a matter of fact, there was a "first performance" before any of the ones currently in the list, though only of the "Agnus Dei". This was in the Spring of 1983, I think, but was highly "unofficial", since the Requiem was not supposed to be performed, either whole or in part, until the premiere scheduled in Washington in the Fall. I know this because I was present at the performance. Of course this is "original research" and, should any documentation surface (and I don't believe that should be too difficult to find, since there is at least one published review of the concert and a published preview of it, which I wrote), it will turn out that the "Agnus Dei" performed was a completely unrelated a-cappella choral setting which has since mysteriously vanished without a trace. Those pigeon-hole-minded editors who insist that there can be only one "real" date of a premiere would be well-advised to retrieve their minds from out of those pigeon-holes (because we all know what is lurking in their dark recesses) and join us out here in the real world, where things may not be all neat and tidy, but at least things don't smell as bad.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:21, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Jacob wrestled with an angel, that was certainly not tidy, - thanks for your thoughtful response, - it's one of the reasons for not saying "first performed". One unofficial premiere happened in our living room ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:35, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

I like in the infobox some kind of reference to a time (and location) of a topic. "Performance" is only one option, others are "composed" and "published". "Composed" we often don't know, but published might help in this case, two dates, I guess. Keep simple ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:54, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

As you know, I am skeptical about the usefulness of infoboxes, which I see as the ultimate expression of pigeonholing. If their purpose is to reduce the content of an article to a few basic, incontrovertible facts, then this example you give is eloquent testimony to the way in which infoboxes are self-defeating. If that "date" field can be used in so many different ways, of what use is it when surveying a dozen or a hundred different articles? On a more fundamental level, I find there is a point of disagreement amongst editors of opera articles, whether to treat the date of composition or the date of first staged performance as referential. In some cases, the difference can be extreme. There is one Haydn opera, for example, that was never performed in his lifetime. The manuscript languished in some archive until it was finally rediscovered and staged for the first time in the early 1950s. I am certain there must be dozens of even earlier operas that have never been staged, and may wait another century or more before they finally are. The details of individual cases are almost always more interesting than such generalized data, and frequently reveal the uselessness of "simple facts". Dates of publication are only useful when a work has actually been published, of course, and are not of much use when discussing music written before about 1850. I have recently been working on the article on Solage. With this composer, we know the precise year of composition for at least three songs (and this is remarkable for a 14th-century composer), but if we were to use date of publication we could pinpoint all twelve of his surviving compositions to 1950—not very useful to a reader who wants the most pertinent information about a medieval composer, I think.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:26, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for more thoughts. I see the whole topic more from view of a random reader who might like some guidance to "this is a composition, written in the 20th century", - I compare an infobox to a book cover. For the details, the reader should turn to the article ;) - When {{infobox opera}} was developed it was kept simple, on purpose. I like the last example, a self-portrait, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:19, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

You are more than welcome. It seems we both have in mind the same readership, though we differ on how best to serve him/her. I hadn't looked at the instructions for the opera infobox, but I like the stern instruction not to put in it anything that is not necessary. I also see that it has no field for date of composition, only for date of premiere. I immediately think of all those operas that exist in three or four sometimes drastically different versions (I vespri siciliani immediately springs to mind), each with its own premiere date—not to mention operas whose staged premiere is unknown, but date of composition is plain. Best of all, naturally, are operas that were never completed but have been staged, and operas that require a separate completion for each perfomance, like Pousseur's Votre Faust or Nono's Prometeo. I do like the self-portrait in example 4: I have always wondered what Jacob de Backer looked like!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:42, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Precious again

knowledge and modesty
Thank you for helping me consistently, from my second article on, and for adding your admirable knowledge to this project in almost an understatement, about Stockhausen in particular. You mentioned in Freundschaft: making joyous music together, perhaps something playful as this. In Freundschaft, - you are an awesome Wikipedian!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:42, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Two years ago, you were the 40th recipient of my PumpkinSky Prize, - do you remember "in nomine"? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:08, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Lawrence Chandler

What is your problem with Chandler having worked for Glass? One source states "he went to The Juilliard School (during which time he worked for Philip Glass)." The other two sources list engineering credits from recordings done at The Looking Glass Studio. Who owned the studio? Philip Glass. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TalkingMusic (talk • contribs) 03:55, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

I have no problem with Chandler having worked for Glass. The one source you cite says he did so. It does not, however, say in what capacity. The engineering credits, on the other hand, do not claim he was working directly under Glass's direction, but rather for other people. Do you not understand the difference?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:36, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Annie Bélis

I am willing to create a wikipedia entry for Annie Bélis, that is the reason I created internal link. Please do not revert my modification Ayabmura (talk) It is done. Ayabmura (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 21:42, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

This is excellent news. Did you read my edit summaries and, more importantly, did you read the document I cited in them, namely WP:WTAF?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:34, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Carmina Burana

What do you think of the latest edit to Carmina Burana removing both some content and a source? CorinneSD (talk) 15:50, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Obvious vandalism (it breaks the sentence off in mid-phrase, not to mention the deletion of a footnote). I have reverted the edit. There is no reason why you shouldn't do the same, whenever you see something like this and, if you can figure out exactly who did it, tell their mother to take away their computer privileges for a few days as punishment.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:04, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Soliciting comment...

Hi! Would you care to review or comment at my FA nomination for the article Misterioso (Thelonious Monk album)? It is a short article about a jazz album. Information on reviewing an FA nomination's criteria is available at WP:FACR. If not, feel free to ignore this message. Cheers! Dan56 (talk) 10:04, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Fair use: Tone row

See: File:Schoenberg - Op. 25 Minuet Trio tone row melodies.png. Hyacinth (talk) 04:07, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't know what to think, Hyacinth. Certainly this is the kind of thing that ordinarily ought to be covered by US and UK copyright laws under "fair use". On the other hand, does Whittall acknowledge permission for use of these excerpts from Universal Edition? UE is notorious for denying applicability of fair use to musical excerpts, however small. The other test being invoked here is whether an alternative free-use example can be substituted. If the illustration must include the rhythms and registers, then this seems impossible. If on the other hand a schematic presentation of the row segments (in a "neutral" register) would suffice, then perhaps this should be done. The problem I can foresee with this latter option is that it could be construed as "original research".—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:49, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. There's no way to have a public domain tone row melody, given the age of the twelve-tone technique. Hyacinth (talk) 13:51, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

This is true, though of course the same logic could be applied to any excerpt from a music score published since about 1915.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:25, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

I believe you are correct, and anything past that date is fair use at best. Hyacinth (talk) 10:15, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

You may or may not be interested in Category:Music pupils by teacher, which I created, and the discussion regarding it at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical music#"Pupils and pupils of pupils of X". Hyacinth (talk) 21:40, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

I have been following the List of music pupils by teacher, and that has made me aware of the category. I was unaware of the discussion, however. I shall have a look. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:25, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Maximalism

regarding your note about the word "maximalism" by an artist in 1987 is still in no way relevant to a whole movement called by "maximalism" by daryush shokof, in addition to the first ar ehibition under the title "maximalism" by daryush shokof and a group show of over 15 well known artits taking part in the first group show under"maximalism in 1988 in Germany under "maximalism in Schulze gallery. there was never any manifest about "maximalism" before 1988, or an art show under that title, or not even afterwards has tere been an art exhibition with a clear definition what "maximalism" is except all that has been established as a movement, with styles of art works and a manifest done by daryush shokof.many references exist of his one man shows from Italy to Germany and the USA under "maximalism" from 1988 to date. Please, correct your absolutely wrong information about this style of art and thoughts in the English wikipedia and write me again if you need references so that i give you at least 5 more references other than Gallery Schulze exhibition in 1988 under "maximalisten" or galleria Verlato in Milan , Italy under "maximalism" in his one man show in 1992. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:8109:8BC0:CE8:98B:80D5:F251:F204 (talk) 23:29, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Head joints of recorders etc

FYI, on the recorder page we've had this IP user insisting on his noise for some time. Last December I tried to get protection to keep him off the serious page, in the end I've split recorder (educational uses) and recorder (musical instrument). See the talk page on the later. He's managed to get a citation from a German professor about the educational value of noise making devoid of melody, so the admins have to accept it as valid. Regards, Martin of Sheffield (talk) 23:47, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up (if you will excuse the expression). I expect this must be the same character who is putting uncited material about "rhythm bands" on the Noise in music article (and I assume this is why you are calling my attention to his activities on the recorder articles). I have no problem with discussion of noise or its place in music (as I think my extensive work on the "Noise in music" article attests), but I do have considerable resistance to the inclusion of unsourced and possibly wild opinions, whether I agree with them or not.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:18, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

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Flute concerto?

This edit you made on the Chamber Music page seems to have been based just on the description in the caption. I don't know this painting, but if you look closely you can see at least two violinists in addition to the identified musicians, so it might be a concerto after all. Anyway, Flötenkonzert Friedrichs des Großen in Sanssouci is the title of the painting (Of course this was painted years after everyone involved was dead, but that's another matter.) —Wahoofive (talk) 22:48, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Uh-huh. And as you probably know, the German word "Konzert" can mean either "concert" or "concerto". I looked as closely as I could, but could not clearly make out any other instruments at all. Even assuming a full orchestra was present, we would still need to be able to read the title of the music on the stand in front of the king or on the harpsichord desk. If we could do this and triumphantly proclaim that, indeed, this is a concerto they are playing, we would merely have proven that this picture is unsuitable for illustrating an article on chamber music. Unless it is a chamber concerto, of course ;-)—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:25, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

A closer look with a better monitor still doesn't turn up any unambiguous violins, though one of the three gentlemen standing by the music stands at the right of the picture seems to be holding a bow. I guess I am going to have to travel to Berlin to look at the original! The German Wikipedia article says that one of these two violinists (both of whom are at the moment just looking on, though of course this could be during a cadenza) is Franz Benda, and that the figure standing by the third music stand is J. J. Quantz. This must all be from remarks made somewhere by the painter, who could never have seen any of these people in the flesh. Still, the only real issue is whether it suitably illustrates the concept of chamber music. A concerto, especially from that period, can of course be chamber music—it is only a form, and Bach composed concertos for an unaccompanied keyboardist—but I think the innocent reader is likely to believe otherwise and wonder why the picture is there if the caption uses that word.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:43, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

That's definitely a violin at right (perhaps a viola). And since all three standing gentlemen have music stands we'd know they must be players of something, even if they didn't all have bows. But you're right overall. Perhaps we should not describe the piece being played at all since we don't know what it is. —Wahoofive (talk) 00:14, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Even in the detail—or should I say, especially in the detail, which is even more obscure than the full picture—the image on my computer screen is far to dark to make out the violin. However, by downloading the image, magnifying and lightening it, I can see the violin. Since this is the figure described by the German Wikipedia as Franz Benda, then it had better not be a bassoon!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:53, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Aram Khachaturian

Hello, Jerome. Are you watching the article Aram Khachaturian? What do you think of the many edits just made to the article? CorinneSD (talk) 14:36, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi, Corinne. Yes, I am watching that article, and noticed yesterday a flurry of activity. I have not taken the time since then to evaluate them, but will certainly do so today.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:46, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

There has been quite a discussion regarding the pronunciation of Khachaturian's name. The last one does not make sense to me, but I'm sure Kwamikagami, who is a linguist, will deal with it. I'm writing because of the very latest edit to the article in which an editor deleted "recognised worldwide as among the leading composers of the 20th century", referring to not only Khachaturian but also Shostakovich, and one more composer, saying that it was contentious and unsourced. I don't know why this would be contentious and why it couldn't be sourced if needed. CorinneSD (talk) 14:41, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

I see. I shall have to read the discussion, but I imagine that Kwamikagami is better equipped than I am to resolve the pronunciation issue. I speak exactly five words of Armenian, and would prefer not to get into issues of how such a name might be pronounced by English, Russian, or other speakers. I can see how that sentence in the lede would cause trouble, not only for the reasons you mention but also because it is hopelessly vague. Every composer who actually lived in the 20th century could be so described, so long as you put a large enough number just before the word "leading" ("among the 5,000 leading composers of the 20th century" should be safe). Made as specific as "one of the three leading composers of the 20th century" and you will have an avalanche of protest. It is the kind of phrase that a publicity agent puts into a press release, and should only be allowed on Wikipedia in connection with a quotation from a cited source. See the lede to Karlheinz Stockhausen for similar examples, which are fully cited.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:29, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

I realize that it would be wrong to write that Aram Khachaturian was one of the three leading composers of the 20th century, but the way it was worded before the edit, it didn't say that. Did you go back and read the way it was? It said this:

"The decree condemned Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and other Soviet composers as "formalist" and "anti-popular." The three named composers had by then already become established as the so-called "titans" of Soviet music, recognised worldwide as among the leading composers of the 20th century."

How can one argue with that? Is that too much of a claim? CorinneSD (talk) 22:13, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

I had not gone back to check earlier versions, no. While Tikhon Khrennikov undoubtedly would have taken issue with being left out of the list of "titans of Soviet music", it is not an entirely unreasonable claim, but is still the kind of thing that ought to be sourced—not necessarily in the lede, but somewhere in the body of the article, where the composer's reputation (including its growth and/or decline) should be assessed.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:56, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

O.K. Thank you. I can't do that. I just thought I'd point it out to you. CorinneSD (talk) 14:12, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Good faith and added value

We talked about a composer, and I tried to say something about assuming good faith. I am restricted (by arbcom) to two comments in a given infobox discussion, and my observers might count even such a comment. You misunderstood me. I didn't say that fools (or not) show good faith (or not). I said that seeing fools always filling empty parameter shows some lack of good faith. As even I know that people are not perfect, I leave only those parameters empty that I think should be filled some day, for example "image" and "education". Repeating: nothing bad happened to the articles for which I feel responsible. As for what an infobox adds to an article, even if those capable of reading English might not see it, RexxS made it four easy to grasp bullet points in the longish discussion: shortened:

• The infobox ... contains a brief collection of the key facts ... placed in a position familiar to visitors and enables them to get that information at a glance in the same way that they are accustomed to in over 2,500,000 other Wikipedia articles.
• The information in the infobox is arranged as "key-value" pairs in a table that allows natural language processing tools to read that information with a much higher degree of certainty and to more accurately glean information from other parts of the article.
• The data in the infobox is emitted as a microformat, in particular: vcard, bday, dday, deathdate, role. These microformats may be collected by many data collection tools.
• We have a sister project called Wikidata that collects data from all Wikipedias to create a central repository of information.

I add that value to "my" articles, but agree that others are free not to do the same. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:48, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

I thought I answered your question about advantages of an infobox above. I can't answer on the composer's talk, I had to be restricted, battleground, did you know? - see the infobox on my user page, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:18, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, you did, and pointed to a very useful discussion of the Chopin talk page that presents both sides of the argument. I believe I answered your message, and I thank you again for being so even-handed, in spite of the fact that you are a member of that project that is supposedly "bullying" the editors into refusing an infobox. FWIW, I have checked the membership list and, of the editors involved in this debate, only you and I are on it. This tells me all I need to know about how much "bullying" is coming from the members of that project.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:27, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for "supposedly". I am going to thank the arbitrators for the merciful restriction to two comments per discussion (only wishing they would pass it to everyone), - it gives me a lot of time for better things, such as Cantiones sacrae. Thank you for the Cologne studio. In case you missed it, Season's greetings are on top of my talk ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:01, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

I had missed that "season's greetings"! It is quite a spectacular photo, and a truly outrageous project. BTW, I had not realized what a precocious person you are: your infobox informs me that you are only four years old!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:04, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

I hope you will not confuse me and my 4-year-old user who will have to learn more to behave ;) - the top of my talk is back to BWV 12, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:41, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Intonarumori Centennial Performance

Hello, Jerome, could you please elaborate on why you've removed the article 5 minutes after it's publication? There's references to a newspaper publication and official publications of the university on the centennial reconstruction of the instruments. Excuses if it's not well formatted, but please clarify on what's out of place? It's an academic event, and not just a student concert featuring multiple artists. It's a subject rarely articulated in the arts community and I understand that it may look promotional(?), but I'm sure the event must have a significance. Ran into this while doing my research, hoped to contribute as much as I could. Thanks a lot for your contributions to the community. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.237.179.171 (talk) 19:18, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for asking. It did indeed have the appearance of an announcement of an event, hence the reference in my edit summary to WP:PLUG. I have no doubt of the respectability of the event, but Wikipedia is not a notice board. Items added to an article ought to contribute to an understanding of the subject and, in my (possibly hasty) judgement, an announcement of this event did not accomplish this. It is the kind of event that might prove to offer useful information in retrospect (a recording, for example, or a published report with hitherto-unknown facts), but nothing can be gleaned from just knowing it is going to happen at some time in the future. Do please try to convince me that I am wrong—I am always willing to listen to reason.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:47, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

The event has happened in 2013. A year ago. It is not an announcement for anything that will happen in the future. Also, on the same page I've added links to the video recordings of it, and on the newspapers' website there are photos of it. If you wish to see the printed copies of the newspaper I can ask from the university archives, I'd assume that they should have a copy. Thanks a lot for your quick reply. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.237.145.16 (talk) 23:28, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

OK, I stand corrected. If I had looked more closely, I would have noticed it is a past event, now documented. My apologies—I shall revert my edit.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:16, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. I've just noticed that you can speak German too btw. Meine mutter ist Deutscher. - Looking forward to contributing more together. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.237.145.4 (talk) 06:57, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Fair use files

I'm not sure what to do. Files I've uploaded and licensed under fair use are being removed from articles for not having fair use justifications (even when they do), and then being deleted for being orphaned. This seems like circular logic, and is especially distressing when used on files with fair use descriptions. If you could assist I would appreciate it. Examples include File:Stravinsky-petrushka-fanfare.png & mid and File:Copland Sextet poly.PNG & mid. Actions appear to be initiated by User:Werieth. Hyacinth (talk) 23:25, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

I didnt remove them for being replaceable in Polytonality. It has nothing to do with their non-free use rationale. (See WP:NFCC#1) Werieth (talk) 00:06, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Apologies, to the both of you. Hyacinth (talk) 01:18, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Names of progressions

Hi Jerome,

I find the theming of a whole article on just one possible segment from the cycle of fifths—just the last four components—a little odd. Why not iii–vi–ii–V–I? What is the logic for a boundary drawn in the middle? Better still, why not reorganise the treatment so that there's one article called cycle (or circle) of fifths. In the literature, as you know only too well, we find lots of ways this theoretical resource can be drawn on, usually not in its entirety. Would it not be simpler to thematise it as a whole cycle (from I to I), and within the text show typical segmentations?

I'd also like to see jazz and pop music treatments and nomenclature in explicitly title sections of the article. Tony (talk) 06:25, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

I agree with you, though at the same time, I must say that the Roman-numeral naming is more drab and perhaps not the first thing a jazz player would think of when looking for this subject. Of course, there is already an article titled Circle of fifths, and the present article is faintly self-contradictory by first presenting just this four-chord segment, and then later offering the full circle-of-fifths progression as an alternative. My purpose in editing the lede was merely to do with the fact that "circle progression" was still offered as an alternative term (and perhaps it is in some quarters, though it is not familiar to me—I have always known it as a "chain-of-fifths" or "cycle-of-fifths" progression, and referring not to just these four chords, but to a chain of any length, ending on any chord), and it sounded very odd to say "the progression is called vi–ii–V–I" because it follows the circle of fifths, while at the same time saying it is "also known as the circle progression". There are many other artifacts of the original name of the article, which should perhaps be considered for change. I'm afraid I am at something of a disadvantage when it comes to jazz and pop terminology, but I also agree with you that any such terms, which will be more familiar to many people than successions of Roman numerals, ought to be present in all such articles.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:28, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Piccolo trumpet photo

Well done here. Your correction is indeed, ah, correct. It's actually my trumpet and my photo, so it's one of the very rare areas in which I know what I'm on about! To be honest I don't think I've heard of a B natural pipe, and I have certainly never encountered one. Cheers! DBaK (talk) 20:44, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Cheers! Always glad of be of service! Indeed it is difficult to imagine how you would change a B-flat piccolo trumpet to B-natural by adding tubing—unless of course it was long enough to lower the instrument by a diminished octave, which would rather defeat the purpose of having a piccolo instrument in the first place. I suspect that the editor who made that mistake was misled by the description, which says the pipe is used to "raise or lower" the pitch by a semitone. Of course, starting from B-flat one lowers the instrument a semitone to A, and conversely one may start from A and rase the instrument a semitone to B-flat. The mistake is in assuming one starts from B-flat in both cases. I wonder if that caption should be revised in order to make this clearer.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:11, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

I hope I haven't opened up another can of worms...

Hi again Jerome. Thanks for fixing up the article. There I was, just adding a reference for the premiere of Short Ride in a Fast Machine (recently bought a 20 CD box-set "Imaginary Landscapes: Sounds of America", inexplicably marked down from $AU 249 to $AU 49, and so on) and I came across this rather well-known music critic who didn't have a Wikipedia article. Doing the research, I noticed there had been some... unpleasantness. (I blame the lawyers, of course.) Pete AU aka --Shirt58 (talk) 12:10, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

It took me a little while to work out what it was I had done, and to which article. Yes, there appears to have been some unpleasantness on more than one occasion. I do not know the critic in question, nor even am I very familiar with his work or opinions, but I remember reading at the time about the incident in Cleveland and wondering who really may have been at fault. Critics of course are expected to have opinions, and to make judgments based on their tastes, and this is bound to conflict with the judgment and tastes of at least some of the artists who come under their scrutiny. I have known cases where a critic got his facts badly wrong and, when confronted with overwhelming contradictory evidence, refused to back down and apologize. I have no reason to believe this was the case in Cleveland but, as I said, I am not particularly familiar with that incident. No doubt lawyers were involved, but whether that was cause or effect I do not know, either.

In fact, all that my edit did was to restore the name of his instrument to the preferred form, following Wikipedia's guideline per the preferences expressed ever since 1971 by the International Horn Society. There is one particular anonymous IP editor from the southwestern US who has been persistently replacing this standard with the regional English form used in his/her particular quarter of the world. I'm afraid this has made me hypersensitive to that particular national attribution, while at the same time I have a professional proof-reader's eye for the lack of hyphens in what are meant as unit modifiers (e.g., "a Dutch chocolate manufacturer" vs. "a Dutch-chocolate manufacturer"). In short, no can of worms here.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:15, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

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Questions about citing

Ok, so there's been some back and forth editing between us regarding use and style of citations.

So ... would a reference like Encyclopedia Britannica count as proof-of-fact? ... and would it be citable in wikipedia?

As for style, I see the merit of (author year) references ... but how can this be made to use the 1992 CERN HTML feature of clickable references? There should be a way to combine this.

Tatzelbrumm (talk) 20:04, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, the Encyclopedia Britannica is regarded as a reliable source, and it is citable in Wikipedia. In fact, I think there may even be a template specifically for use with it. I do not know the finer points of 1992 CERN HTML, nor am I exactly sure what "clickable references" are. If you are asking whether there is a way of linking inline author-date citations to the corresponding items in an alphabetical list of Sources, the answer is "yes". The sources must use {{citation}} templates (about which I have some reservations generally, since this template lacks parameters for some commonly used bibliographic elements, and forces some formatting that I do not much care for. The inline citations then use the {{harv}} or {{harvnb}} templates to establish a link to the full reference listing in the list of sources. Is this what you have in mind?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:54, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Apologies for being unclear about "1992 CERN HTML". I wanted to say that HTML was invented for allowing hyperlinks, so citations, whatever format they are in, should use them, so you can click back and forth between inline citation and the full list. Where would I find out about the finer points of the templates you mention? (Edit: See how nicely a reference list links to other relevant material that would be hard to find if one had to scroll manually? Tatzelbrumm (talk) 22:11, 17 May 2014 (UTC))

Tatzelbrumm (talk) 22:04, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. While I tend to be skeptical about the reasoning "If something can be done, it should be done", in this case I am inclined to accept your view. I should also add that the difficulties with the citation template can be overcome, since the only elements necessary for making the link work are the author's name and year of publication (and I believe that "n.d." is accepted for year of publication when there isn't one). This means that the remainder of the citation can be manually formatted outside of the template. For documentation of the templates in question, see Template:Harvard citation, Template:Harvard citation no brackets, and Template:Citation.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:15, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

A n00b's impertinent (albeit hyperlinked) lengthy criticism of well-established editorial practices

So, as a proof of concept, I tried the Harvard citations on the doctrine of the affections page references. I'm a little insistent here, believing, as I do, that the world wide web was invented primarily to render all bibliographic citation styles, alphabetical list of sources, etc. obsolete, and replace them with hyperlinks based on uniform resource locators. But as long as traditional citation styles don't effectively vandalize the concept of clickable links, there's no harm in making them look like the kind of references that made good sense before hyperlinks were available. The remaining problem with the Harvard style is that it doesn't provide links to where the references are cited in the text -- a problem for another day. Tatzelbrumm (talk) 03:02, 18 May 2014 (UTC) Actually, come to think of it, making references work as intended by Tim Berners-Lee and look right is quite an important problem. Whatever citation styles are used, they should comprise hyperlinks in both directions, and maybe even scripts that generate citation lists, sorted alphabetically, by date, by citation, younameit, on the fly. Who, in addition to you, are the people to ask about this? Tatzelbrumm (talk) 03:45, 18 May 2014 (UTC) You should probably talk to the people who design the templates. You might try the Talk pages of the templates in question, though there must also be project pages and the like. You might also try asking at the Village Pump. When you lament the inability to go from the alphabetical citation list to the points in the article where it is used, I suppose you must be thinking of the way multiple citations work with footnotes, when you use the <ref name="" /> template: a row if little letters accompany the footnote number at the bottom of the article, from which you can link successively to the places where citations occur in the article. I don't know anything at all about how templates are designed, but it does seem that, if it can be done with the footnote "ref" templates, it shouldn't be impossible to do it with "citation" templates. I have had a look at your work on the Doctrine of the Affections article, and I can see you have already come up against some of the formatting problems inherent in those templates. I have fixed a couple of them, but I cannot work out how to remove the parentheses from around the place and publisher information for the New Grove entry without screwing up something else. Not only are parentheses suitable only in footnotes, but it is inconsistent with the other book entries in this list. It looks like this must be generated by the use of the "journal" parameter, which of course is not strictly correct for the title of an encyclopedia. On the other hand, bibliography entries for journals should not carry place and publisher information. Amongst other reasons, academic journals often change place and publisher from time to time, and may be produced by an academic press on behalf of a society headquartered in another city. It may be that the best thing in this case is to put this information outside of the template. This may be a criticism of the shortcomings of the template, or it may simply mean that I don't know enough about how to use it.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:15, 18 May 2014 (UTC) Thanks for pointing me in the direction of Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Template_expansion_limits ... this is where the discussion about a comprehensive solution needs to go. As a user — even though I have enough academic background to be bothered by the inconsistency of placing parentheses around years where they don't really belong — I'm reluctant to mess with the equivalent of BibTeX style files (trying to stick to the IEEEtran style as closely as I can when I write outside wikipedia), so my approach with the Doctrine of Affections references is to find a hack that meets both my (working hyperlinks) and your citation formatting standards well enough. As of now, I haven't quite explored the available fields of templates like Template:Cite_encyclopedia ... partly due to laziness, but mostly because you are the expert — I'm trying to find the right middle path between insisting on references, however formatted, that support hyperlinks, and being helpful enough to make citation templates painless enough to contributors of content (at the moment, you) to develop a habit of citing in a way that works both in the WWW and in traditional academic settings. Tatzelbrumm (talk) 05:55, 18 May 2014 (UTC) ... as an aside, while I'm trying to guess what the correct tags are ... what, if any, is the equivalent of BibTeX you're using, and how much attention do you pay to metadata like Wikipedia:COinS? A field like editor-first1= Stanley is more useful to computerized bibliographies than editor-first1= Stanley (ed.), and both are more useful than any free form text you write outside the citation, no matter what that looks like. Tatzelbrumm (talk) 07:14, 18 May 2014 (UTC) The "equivalent of BibTeX" I am using is called The Chicago Manual of Style. When necessary (because of the different styles used on other articles) I can rely on the APA Style Manual, the Oxford Style Manual (formerly Hart's Rules), and so on. Despite the difficulty many editors have wading through the complex rules of these manuals, I find that the automated systems (templates, and such) actually require more expert knowledge than they seem. You present one example with the "editor-first1" field, which is designed for the inverted names used in alphabetical lists. Editors who do not understand this are prone to using this field in footnotes (as opposed to alphabetized lists of sources), instead of the "editor1" field, which is for use with normal-order names—or at least, I presume this is the case. This is certainly true for the various "author" fields. As result of this misunderstanding, Wikipedia is chock full of footnotes with inverted author names, including second and third authors, editors, translalators, etc. that come later in the entry. Every style manual with which I am familiar says not to do this, but it has now become one de facto standard on Wikipedia. This is an example of how the false security of templates creates problems, when the pilots in charge of the "errcraft" have not yet received their "wings".—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:12, 18 May 2014 (UTC) Too, too true! Johnbod (talk) 22:14, 18 May 2014 (UTC) Ha! If I ever sit in the front seat of an airplane ever again, with intent to commit aviation as PIC, it will be in a rag-wing cub with two seats front by each, painted yellow, and with the gas gauge being a cork with a wire sticking out of the filler cap, right there in plain sight in front of the windshield for all to see. Prof. Kohl, I genuflect more or less in your direction. The next sound you hear might be me, shutting up and listening. __ Just plain Bill (talk) 01:46, 19 May 2014 (UTC) This shaping up into the classic opposition of machine vs. people (especially taking into account the long message that Tatzelbrumm has now seen fit to retract). I have to say that, while I appreciate the difficulty of writing elegant code that can do complex things with bibliographical data, when it comes down to sacrificing human readability for the benefit of ease-of-reading by computers, I will come down on the side of people every time. That said, a large part of the problem under discussion here is that the script writers, by allowing different options for different purposes (e.g., formats meant for alphabetical bibliography lists on the one hand and formats meant for use in footnotes on the other), without providing constraints to enforce the correct usage according to context (e.g., "alphabetical-list context detected; display inverted name order" vs. "footnote context detected; display inverted name order"), then we will remain at the mercy of the overconfident editors who trust too much in the machines. And please note that I am referring here to the way text is displayed, not to the way it is entered, or the kinds or numbers of different fields that the machine may require. It is perfectly true that the reference-formatting styles used in any one field (say, the humanities) are complex and take time to learn. Mix up many different fields, as we do on Wikipedia, and the problem is hugely increased. A "one-size-fits-all" approach, as demanded by machine reading in such a context, is bound to encounter difficulties, but if the people writing the code do not thoroughly understand the majority of these diverse styles so that their different requirements can be taken into account, then we are certainly flying straight into a mountain. For now, I prefer to walk.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:02, 19 May 2014 (UTC) First, thanks for your patience with a new kid on the block who sometimes has a tendency to look down on others (that's what 600 flying hours do to you). I found myself on the doctrine of the affections page by playing Six Clicks of Separation, starting from the blog post of a guy who wrongfully got thrown into jail simply for inventing a machine-readable version of a telephone book. The fun of browsing the world-wide web, and the genius of Tim Berners-Lee, is that you don't walk, but can instantly jump from place to place via hyperlinks, which work like a Star Trek Transporter — irrespective of format and style conventions beyond the <A HREF= ...> mechanism. My attempts to extend the chain of hyperlinks met your resistance because of a Wikipedia:CITEVAR#WP:CITEVAR conflict with, as User:Johnbod's example shows beyond doubt, well established and accepted citation conventions ... and you were the messenger. So I'm trying to work around your concerns, which, in the context of hyperlinked documents, do make you look like an alte Perücke sticking to his obsolete notions of style. Having tried to get the template:citation style to conform to your convention, I find that it is possible in principle (although it might be necessary to add an option to lines 1915 and 1949 of the code in Module:Citation/CS1), but it's really quite tedious to do, and a huge overhead for a simple hyperlink to a reference. If there's no hyperlink mechanism as agnostic of style conventions as the original HTML anchor, I agree with you that this is unnecessarily bothersome. So the question really is: What would make hyperlinks painless and low-overhead enough to be used with any style convention that you would actually use them? ... and the other question is: What would be a mechanism that inserts hyperlinks to the prolific work of others while maintaining any chosen display and citation style with minimal overhead? Tatzelbrumm (talk) 06:50, 19 May 2014 (UTC) In turn I thank you for the opportunity of trying out some of these template thingies in an article with a relatively small number of references. I cheerfully agree with your characterization, and I'll have you know I wear my old periwig with pride! I am only sorry to say that I do not know how to answer your question, which seems to me to require some fairly extensive knowledge of the inside workings of the software involved. Seen from the outside, the problem is not one of making things "painless". Half of the difficulty is that users can make the most unholy mess without feeling any pain at all. The other half has to do with display vs. input. Too often the templates display undigested input data, instead of reformatting it for the benefit of human eyeballs. The most obvious example from the present exercise has to do with the "author first name"/"author last name" fields (and similar). There is nothing wrong with keeping these separate upon entry, if it helps the machine parse the date appropriately, but why do they have to be displayed this way, unless the alternative "author name" field is selected or, worse, "author last name" is filled in with the author's full name, and the "author first name" field is ignored. This produces the correct display in many cases, but I am sure it must screw up the hyperlinking. There are probably far too many styles for any hyperlinking system to address completely, but there are some features common to most styles that are not being adequately managed by the templates I see at present. One of the most basic is distinguishing between alphabetical bibliography (or reference-list) format and full-citation footnote formats. (Shortened footnotes basically fall into the same formatting category as parenthetical citations—they merely require one more click of separation, not a whole different way of displaying the data. This is one reason that I prefer parenthetical referencing on Wikipedia—the footnotes simply make the hyperlinking more complicated.) A further problem is created by offering alternative choices in input fields, and then leaving it up to unprepared editors to make the right decisions. This is what I mean about needing a little more "pain" rather than less. If the editor is not expected to have a thorough grounding in the rules and styles of reference formatting, then the templates are going to have to be a lot more sophisticated than they presently are, in order to guide the editor appropriately. This probably means having many more templates from which to choose, and much clearer guidelines/instructions (written by people with language skills, and not just code-writing chops) so that the novice editor will not accidentally try to use a template meant for, say, newspaper articles, when actually entering data for an encyclopedia entry.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:05, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Well. Turns out that the solution to the problem is surprisingly simple, and it requires very little knowledge except how to override all the fancy wikipedia "simplifications" to get back to the Thema in der Urgestalt, as Tim Berners-Lee intended it. Let's see if basic HTML still works in Wikipedia: <a href="#ref:Berners-Lee 1990" name="cite:Berners-Lee 1990">(Berners-Lee 1990)</a> ... Not quite; I'll have to use the template:anchor template that mimics it: (Berners-Lee 1990) ... and now you can cite with reckless abandon, and not give an airbornefornication about citation style. Source code: I'll have to use the [[template:anchor]] template that mimics it: {{anchor|cite:Berners-Lee 1990}}[[#ref:Berners-Lee 1990|(Berners-Lee 1990)]] ... and now you can cite with reckless abandon, and not give an {{anchor|cite:Flying Fuck}}[[#ref:Berners-Lee 1990|'''<sup>airborne</sup><sub>fornication</sub>''']] about citation style. {{anchor|ref:Berners-Lee 1990}}[[#cite:Berners-Lee 1990|^]] [[#cite:Flying Fuck|<sup>'''''♭'''''</sup>]] T. Berners-Lee / CN, R. Cailliau / ECP, [http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html Proposal for a HyperText Project], CERN 1990 ''"A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals, they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done by entering a number). When you select a reference, the browser presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser follow a hypertext link".'' Generated HTML: <dl> <dd>Well.</dd> <dd>Turns out that the solution to the problem is <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/">surprisingly simple</a>, and it requires very little knowledge except how to override all the fancy wikipedia "simplifications" to get back to the <i>Thema in der Urgestalt</i>, as <a href="/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee" title="Tim Berners-Lee">Tim Berners-Lee</a> intended it.</dd> <dd>Let's see if basic HTML still works in Wikipedia: <a href="#ref:Berners-Lee 1990" name="cite:Berners-Lee 1990">(Berners-Lee 1990)</a></dd> <dd>...</dd> <dd>Not quite; I'll have to use the <a href="/wiki/Template:Anchor" title="Template:Anchor">template:anchor</a> template that mimics it:</dd> <dd><span id="cite:Berners-Lee_1990"></span><a href="#ref:Berners-Lee_1990">(Berners-Lee 1990)</a></dd> <dd>... and now you can cite with reckless abandon, and not give an <span id="cite:Flying_Fuck"></span><a href="#ref:Berners-Lee_1990"><b><sup>airborne</sup><sub>fornication</sub></b></a> about citation style.</dd> <dd>== References ==</dd> <dd>Analogously, the basic HTML reference</dd> <dd><a href=#"cite:Berners-Lee 1990" name="ref:Berners-Lee 1990">^</a> T. Berners-Lee / CN, R. Cailliau / ECP, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html">Proposal for a HyperText Project</a>, CERN 1990 <i>"A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals, they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done by entering a number). When you select a reference, the browser presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser follow a hypertext link".</i></dd> <dd>becomes:</dd> <dd><span id="ref:Berners-Lee_1990"></span><a href="#cite:Berners-Lee_1990">^</a> <a href="#cite:Flying_Fuck"><sup><i><b>♭</b></i></sup></a> T. Berners-Lee / CN, R. Cailliau / ECP, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html">Proposal for a HyperText Project</a>, CERN 1990 <i>"A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals, they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done by entering a number). When you select a reference, the browser presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser follow a hypertext link".</i></dd> </dl> References Analogously, the basic HTML reference <a href=#"cite:Berners-Lee 1990" name="ref:Berners-Lee 1990">^</a> T. Berners-Lee / CN, R. Cailliau / ECP, Proposal for a HyperText Project, CERN 1990 "A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals, they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done by entering a number). When you select a reference, the browser presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser follow a hypertext link". becomes: ^ ♭ T. Berners-Lee / CN, R. Cailliau / ECP, Proposal for a HyperText Project, CERN 1990 "A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals, they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done by entering a number). When you select a reference, the browser presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser follow a hypertext link". Next question: What does it take that y'all consistently use this? — Tatzelbrumm (talk) 19:08, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Let me stress at the outset that I like hyperlinks, and I want to use them wherever I can. The barriers, for me, are (1) I am unwilling to sacrifice human readability for the convenience of machines, and (2) if programming a hyperlink into an article takes half an hour, and typing in the equivalent text takes ten seconds, manual entry wins every time. Now, having gotten that off of my chest, let me turn to your proposed solution. First and foremost, I do not understand a word of what you are saying, but that is because I am not fluent in HTML. I can work my way through the code, and eventually will understand how it works. (I am slow, but not entirely without background both in computer programming and in garden-variety markup code.) It seems to me that this is likely to be an insuperable barrier for most editors: If they have to learn an entirely new language in order to "take advantage" of the technology, then they won't take advantage of it. It seems to me that the whole point of creating these templates is to make it possible for the programming-challenged to actually access the mechanisms, without having to recreate the algorithms manually every time. As I have already hinted, the problem is that, as the templates grow to become more flexible and sophisticated, their ease of misuse increases sometimes faster than their ease of use. Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you are saying here (until I unravel all the HTML, I must plead ignorance), but it sounds like what you are saying is that there are currently ways of overcoming the output formats dictated by the templates. This sounds wrong-headed to me. If the templates do not easily produce the desired formats, then surely they need re-thinking—not subduing by extraordinary effort on the part of the end-user. Of course, an underlying problem is the inability of Wikipedia to determine a single, uniform citation style. If there were one such, it would be a comparatively simple task to write templates to conform. This does not look like happening anytime soon, but I suspect one unstated goal of the template designers may be to gradually push things in that direction. I am sorry to see that many of the features being pushed by this process (whether deliberate or not) are not in accordance with commonly used citation styles, which were themselves the product of careful, conscious decisions. While the current diversity of citation-style formats persists, probably the best solution is to have a corresponding number of different citation templates. As just one tiny (and in fact trivial) example: Why cannot there be a template that displays Chicago-style reference-list entries for use with author-date citations, in which the publication year is displayed without enclosing parentheses? This would also entail a number of other deviations from the current "citation" template, but I won't burden the discussion with these details until I have had a chance to work my way through the HTML explanation above.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:15, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Maybe my sandbox, at the moment, gives you a less cluttered idea of the concept I am proposing: simple two-way links, no extra bells and whistles, that neither require nor support any particular citation style — I'm just making the references, whatever they look like, clickable. Formatting is entirely up to the author. You may want to look at the source in wikipedia edit mode, and at the HTML in the "view source" mode of your browser, too. This way of implementing links is useful if and only if you (and authors with a similar set of skills and interests) voluntarily use it. Tatzelbrumm (talk) 23:01, 19 May 2014 (UTC) That is so simple that even I can understand it! I have a suspicion that there are still going to people who are dissatisfied because it does not require using those {{citation}} templates, or something similar, but if the objective is to enable hyperlinking, then I'm all for it. Let me know if you have got any further wrinkles in mind. Otherwise, I'll start using it right away.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:49, 20 May 2014 (UTC) I like the sound of it, but I need to warn you that there are nutcases among the wikipedia editors, who use up to 100 references, referencing each of them multiple times. Without a script, it takes forever to patch in the links, and the reverse links (from reference in the list back to where the reference is cited) are not unique, probably duplicate, and very hard to get right. In fact, I think I just totally vandalized a page about some crazy German dude making electronic noises. Tatzelbrumm (talk) 04:30, 20 May 2014 (UTC) Hey, pretty good vandalism! It took me a while to track down your obscure reference, but I got there in the end. I think it works much better with the link anchored at the end of the entry, though, instead of the beginning. The little blue circumflex is OK, but when there is a string of numbers, it suggests the entry should be alphabetized starting with "O" (for "one"). That was a rather ambitious example to be starting with!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:52, 20 May 2014 (UTC) If I had known how crazy you are with citations (and if I took my own academic job a little more seriously), I wouldn't have dared doing this — manually, which took forever. But we have proof of concept now. How do you like it? ... and do you like this enough that you can convince others to use it, too? It's up to you to decide where you want to put the reverse links and how to label them; I placed them where the <ref> template puts them. From my point of view (minimum distance between landing and take off spots when clicking) that's where they belong — I don't care about Ordralfabétix and such things; that's something computers should do on the fly. You may even choose to omit the reverse links altogether; but I find them very nice to have. If this way of doing things, that I ended up spending about the time the Klang (Stockhausen) page is supposed to be about editing manually, makes the difference between using hyperlinks and not using them for, say, half a dozen contributors like you, the next logical step would be to write: 1. a batch script that adds hyperlinks to and from references to existing pages that should have them, but don't; and 2. a set of (minimal, lightweight) templates with a minimum set of bells and whistles that facilitate adding these links ab initio. (It's a little tricky because the links are, by definition, non-local, and I don't want to produce metadata). I need your input what makes sense and what doesn't; in the meantime you have a proof-of-concept page to play with and to show around. I hope this turns out to be worth my while, and will end up adding ≫O(104) internal hyperlinks to wiki pages using liberal arts citation styles, because you can now keep whichever citation style and keep wearing whichever old periwig you want. Have fun and make good use of the new toy! − Tatzelbrumm (talk) 07:19, 20 May 2014 (UTC) So far, I like this solution very much. The Klang article was a good choice because of the relatively large number of references, and your efforts show me just how much hard work it takes to manually format everything. It is probably just as well you did not attempt this on the parent article, which has more than twice the number of inline citations, and perhaps four times the number of sources! It is especially useful to have the links in long, complex articles like this. The "Doctrine of the affections" article, where we began this exploration, was hardly representative, since it had only four or five references in it and, with everything visible on the screen at once, the hyperlinks seem a little pointless (of course, that article is meant to grow and, when it does, this will change). I do not understand the mechanics of what you are suggesting as a next step, but the objective is clear: to simplify the editing process. This would be especially helpful for existing articles with a large number of references already in place. I may yet find things to criticize but, as you say, we now have a test case to work with. Thank you for all your hard work.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:00, 20 May 2014 (UTC) What prevents you from applying the methods I demonstrated to your flagship article? It has been demonstrated that: Hyperlinks can be added without disrupting your (or pretty much anyone's) preferred style you are abile to modify the result to your liking (which was a crucial part of my solution) A parser for regular expressions would come in extremely handy, and such things probably even already exist, but the key question is usability, and you are an excellent representative of the target audience. I very seriously suggest that you copy the Stockhausen article in your sandbox and start modifying it yourself; then get back to me (or whoever else you decide may help you with this) about problems or inefficiencies you encounter. Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. Alternatively, I suggest you create wiki pages explaining the concept of regular expression with the subject (and variations) of BWV 1080, and/or passus duriusculus illustrating the design of a unit test using BWV 565 as Computer science for DummiesMusicologists contributions, and as test platforms for my proposed hyperlinked citation method. Have at it! — Tatzelbrumm (talk) 20:05, 20 May 2014 (UTC) There is nothing at all to stop me. This is going to be a long project, though, since there are approximately one hundred offspring articles in addition to the main biographical article, and many of the subsidiary ones are quite substantial. It should keep me off the street for some time ;-) BTW, one substantial benefit to putting the anchors at the end, rather than the beginning of each bibliographical entry has to do with a complaint I have often heard about citation templates: In edit mode, it is difficult to see where the relevant data is (the author's name in particular), especially because the template parameters can be inserted in any order. Visually, this results in a chaos of mixed code and content in edit mode, which can be very off-putting and often results in errors of alphabetizing (since this is not an automated property of those templates), requiring repeated edits after returning to view mode to see where things actually are going to end up. With your method of simply anchoring the links, even in edit mode one can clearly see the entries in the form in which they are meant to be read, which speeds up the editing process considerably.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:52, 20 May 2014 (UTC) Unlike the people who know how to write lexers, parsers, interpreters, and citation templates much better (and faster) than me, I want to leave having an opinion where anchors have to go to the professional editors — seems that you're one of them. I am firmly in the TeX faction, so, for serious editing, I expect to work with two (source code, displayed text) to three (TeX source, BibTeX source, displayed text) open windows simultaneously. But once you are comfortable with reading source code, it should be easy for you to find out how much, exactly, I care about formatting details in this context. As you will find out when you get into editing, a lot of tasks are repetitive pattern recognition and replacement, and you want to do things automatically. The people who know how to build these things expect specifications in terms of regular expressions and design patterns. Once you get comfortable with the idea that these are nothing more than (very rigorously specified) citation styles — and what the Affektenlehre is all about, incidentally —, it shouldn't be too hard to communicate to computer wizards how my very basic tool can, and should, be improved ... or use one of the basic tools, like, maybe sed, to do it yourself. — Tatzelbrumm (talk) 22:26, 20 May 2014 (UTC) I can at least meet you halfway on this. I do understand the concept of regular expression and, though it has been a lot of years now, I was once fairly comfortable working with ed in Unix environments. I also have worked with markup coding (everybody editing Wikipedia has, of course), though as I said before, my experience is limited (my first word processor was WordStar so, when I finally encountered MSWord, I was initially suspicious because I couldn't see the markup codes).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:07, 20 May 2014 (UTC) (oh dammit, that template:outdent thing [h/t @CorinneSD:] badly needs a dentist's appointment)

A challenge: As a professional editor, your citations are generally not hyperlinked, but highly regular (not as regular as I'd like them to be, but still ...).

Can you write regular expressions in Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Regular_expression format that identify all of your citations (even if your parenthetical referencing style allows citing multpile sources between one pair of parentheses) and bibliography items, and assign them unique identifiers, with matching identifiers for matching entries?

With your level of experience

45,000+This user has made more than 45,000 contributions to Wikipedia.

and activity

This user is one of the 1500 most active English Wikipedians of all time.

,

it's time you secure that old periwig with a piece of wire and learn to fly. — Tatzelbrumm (talk) 10:20, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Sounds like a good plan. Just one thing needs doing first: write to all publishers and authors and get them to standardize their formats, or at least agree to limit their parameters to a defined set. The problem is that there are all these @#$%^&*() "individualists" out there, who keep thinking up stuff to add to publications that will not fit into the established pigeon holes. It is periwigianism at its height to assume the fields used in bibliographies can be "capped" in, say, 2011, and nothing more will change forevermore. Life is change, and I highly recommend reading the chapters on citations in the Chicago Manual of Style, which contains great wisdom on the importance of remaining flexible. The bottom line is that it is difficult but not impossible to achieve consistency of formats within one publication or even a series or journal, but a completely different matter in the larger environment. This is why Wikipedia must establish a single referencing style if this sort of thing is going to work. There is no hope in trying to standardize these things piecemeal, any more than J. Dundridge could subdue the untidiness of Nature he so abhorred.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 15:22, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

The WWW has one single referencing style, and that's the hyperlink to an HTML anchor.

So, a solution that will have any hope to work and actually be used should just add the links and leave everything else as it is.

Two questions remain.

Is there a simple enough way to add links that most of all these individualists link their stuff when they create it?

Is there a simple enough way that major contributors with established best individual practices can add some 10000 links to their existing body of work? That one requires self-consistency of one contributor, not consistency between any of them.

... and yes, I, for once, don't ask the question whether all the experienced folks who know it can't, or isn't worth to be done are right, after all.

Uncharacteristically irony agnostic, Tatzelbrumm (talk) 16:30, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

P.S. template:wikicite works, even with your bad habit of putting several citations into the same parentheses. Up to you now how religiously you want to use your new knowledge, and whether you want to do what it takes to spend the 5 hours to request, install, and learn Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser, so that it will take you about 20 minutes to embellish pages like Karlheinz Stockhausen. My work is done for now; time for you to solo.

Tatzelbrumm (talk) 01:47, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Ah, yes, that terrible bad habit of mine, following Wilipedia guidelines. And, of course, parenthetical referencing shuns the practice of listing, say, seven consecutive references with each separately cocooned in its own parentheses. It simply isn't the done thing, old sport.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:48, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Tell that to \((?P<author>[A-Z][a-z]*)\s+(?P<year>\d{2,4}[A-Za-z]*)\) in regex101.com. Tatzelbrumm (talk) 06:39, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Erm, right. I just get an error message at that link (out-of-date version of Internet Explorer, but I am currently on a borrowed dial-up terminal far from home), so I shall have to take your word for it. But if that is a parenthetical citation, I will eat my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, without ketchup.--Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:57, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

You are quite right, this should be \(\s*(?P<author>[A-Z][a-z]*)\s+(?P<year>\d{2,4}[A-Za-z]*)\s*\) to match ( Kohl 1983 ), not just (Kohl 2012b) in [3], but unfortunately this does not match (Kohl 1983, Schröder 1998, Merkel 2005), because this case can't quite be expressed in a context-free grammar, but requires a context-sensitive grammar ... yet another example of a bad habit from Chicago.

In any case, enough of these technicalities. I'm sure a tool exists that provides a context-sensitive grammar which can insert hyperlinks to all your Chicago-style references — if I haven't thoroughly deterred you yet.

The more interesting question really is: Is the pattern language of baroque musical affects based on a context-free grammar or a context-sensitive grammar? ... and how do I include youtube references, like http://youtu.be/9PMeYCqG52c?t=1h5m54s into a wikipedia article? — Tatzelbrumm (talk) 05:05, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Chicago School of Economics? Don't let's go there, OK? This has nothing whatever to do with the Chicago Manual of Style. I'm sure I don't know whether Aristoxenos the Younger (for example) based his theories on context-free or context-expensive grammar (which somehow I doubt he ever heard of), but I believe that YouTube is generally regarded with suspicion as a reliable source, even if is not entirely unacceptable. Deterred me from what?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:31, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

OK, looking at Chicago School of Economics related stuff, I understand why certain topics in wikipedia need to be handled with care.

I have the strong suspicion that Renaissance and Baroque composers were among the first to hear of context-free and context-sensitive grammars, because they used the concepts before Chomsky et al. formalized them in the context of computer science (you are, of course, the expert, and would know how far the analogy can be stretched). In any case, the audience whose expressed interest in Baroque music prompted me to edit wikipedia pages in affect know a lot about formal grammar and design patterns, but won't get the Aristoxenos the Younger joke.

As for WP:YOUTUBE, I read somewhere that

if someone would want to explain his ideas on this matter, perhaps with several practical examples, he would not be censored [to cite some pathological examples of music],

so I would think that "Ungewitter" on YouTube and "B''''''! Fu'chtba' kalt!" on YouTube will give an audience with little background in music theory, but good pattern recognition skills, an intuitive understanding what Aristoxenos et al. are talking about, anyhow — what does the expert (i.e., you) think about this?

I hope that I'm pestering you enough to transfer your pattern recognition skills from music to a scripting language that will automatically add hyperlinks to your 100+ reference pages, not too much. If someone else does it for you, they may have a very different idea about the meaning of CMOS and inadvertently vandalize your work ... Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages may be useful to overcome initial periwigism, but in general, I believe that "if something can be done, it should be done by someone who knows what he's doing", and wikipedia is primarily about content, for which I (or bot writers in general) am not the expert.

Tatzelbrumm (talk) 08:36, 28 May 2014 (UTC) EDIT: Tatzelbrumm (talk) 14:36, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

List of musical pieces which use extended techniques

Do you think we should have criteria for inclusion of works in this article? George8211 // Give a trout a home! 17:07, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

I think there should be criteria for inclusion of things in all articles, but I think I understand what you are saying. As things stand, just about anything beyond the most basic techniques are being treated as "extended". Most egregiously, col legno, which was unusual in the 17th century but has long ago been assimilated into ordinary violin playing, permits hundreds of pieces to be included. Yes, we should discuss this on the list's Talk page.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:22, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Pleyel et Cie

I just thought I'd let you know that there is a "citation needed" tag at Pleyel et Cie. You might be able to find a reference. CorinneSD (talk) 16:32, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

@CorinneSD: I found one the first place I looked, but it didn't quite confirm what was being claimed. Whoever placed that flag had good cause to suspect the statement, but at the same time I can see how it happened. It was one of those cases where the truth got distorted a bit in the re-telling.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:34, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Forgot to thank you for this. CorinneSD (talk) 23:20, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

No, you did thank me, using the "thank" option on the edit menu. Still, it's nice to have it put into words. You're welcome!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:16, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Manuel de Falla

Hello, Jerome -- I've been reading the article on Manuel de Falla and have made a few minor copy-edits. I came across something that seemed a bit strange, and I wanted to ask you about it. It is the first sentence in the fourth paragraph in the section Manuel de Falla#Madrid:

"The following year he composed and performed Allegro de concierto (this was composed by Granados, not Falla) for the Madrid Royal Conservatory competition."

The first part of the sentence says "he composed and performed Allegro de concierto". Then in parentheses it says it was "composed by Granados, not Falla". Those two statements don't go together. Perhaps someone just added the parenthetical statement as a bit of vandalism. What do you think? CorinneSD (talk) 23:20, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Note - it was added almost two years ago in the only edit from this IP. Without wishing to be horrid about anyone I think it could go. If someone really wants to make the point they could try again with a reliable source ... DBaK (talk) 23:32, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I deleted it. CorinneSD (talk) 00:18, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, DBaK. I haven't been following the Falla article, but you have drawn the same conclusion I would have done. Inexperienced editors do this kind of thing all the time, and though the violation of procedure is irritating, it is certainly a good-faith effort to improve Wikipedia, and should be treated accordingly. It should be easy enough to check whether such a piece is in Falla's catalogue. It is certainly not an uncommon title, so it is entirely possible that both composers wrote works with this name.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:24, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Theodore Levin

Do you know anything about ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin? See section "Your thoughts?" on Dougweller's talk page. CorinneSD (talk) 14:20, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I do not know anything about him, though I do wonder why an historian might be preferred as a source over an ethnographer (one of the essential fields for any ethnomusicologist), when it comes to reliability on a point of ethnicity.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:11, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

I agree. Perhaps it's because Avicenna lived so long ago. Does an ethnographer delve that deeply into history? CorinneSD (talk) 17:27, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

To be honest, I don't know, but I imagine one could turn that question around with validity and ask, does an historian delve that deeply into ethnography?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:59, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Request for advice

Hi Jerome,

I've left a message for you at my own talk page, User talk:Milkunderwood#Request for advice (Jerome Kohl). Thanks for any help, if and when you might have time. Milkunderwood (talk) 18:36, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Many thanks - I responded there. Milkunderwood (talk) 21:26, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Another, again at my own talk page. I really appreciate your help and good advice! Milkunderwood (talk) 04:56, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

replied there again - thx. Milkunderwood (talk) 17:32, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Carl Orff

I wonder if you can help clarify a sentence for an editor who posted a comment on the Talk page of Carl Orff at Talk:Carl Orff regarding the last sentence in the second paragraph in Carl Orff#Nazi era. CorinneSD (talk) 17:13, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for getting to this, although because I didn't look at the time stamp, I don't know whether you responded there before or after I posted this comment, but either way it's fine. It's interesting how the availability of references can affect an article. CorinneSD (talk) 17:59, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

It was in response to your message here, thanks. Perhaps I can find the requisite source, but it may take a little time.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:01, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Apology accepted ;)

I figured as much by the type and style of revert it was, which is why I just did a quick AGF revert back and dismissed it as being it turned out to be. It happens, I've done it more than once myself. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 21:50, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

It's such a helpless feeling: you click, the screen image jumps simultaneously, and there is no way to stop the edit going through. ("No-o-o-o! Stop!") Then by the time you can get back to the article to revert the mistaken revert, somebody else has gotten there first. Thanks for being so understanding.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:10, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Paul Kildea's middle name

[4].

Hi Jerome. You must have the original edition of the Britten biography. I have the 2014 softback reprint, which contains no reference to any author except plain "Paul Kildea". Cheers. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 01:44, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

I have neither printing. I am working from the photograph of the 2013 edition, displayed in the Library of Congress Worldcat listing for the book. To be honest, the author's name is very, very small in that photo, so I am taking the LoC's word for it that Mr Kildea's middle name is Francis. It could be Walter or Elmer for all I can actually read.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:21, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

I have to take on trust what his middle name is too. It looks to me that there's another Australian writer named Paul Kildea, who's co-written a book about the Australian federation. The one who writes about Britten and music is the one with the Francis in his name. I'd be very surprised if they were the same person. I think the librarians have decided to disambiguate them by this means, but that doesn't mean the latter author uses his full name on his books. The photos I can see on the World Cat site are all exact facsimiles of the cover of my copy, and the author is shown in all of them as "Paul Kildea", not "Paul Francis Kildea", eg. here. Can you show me a photo of a cover that has 3 names? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:59, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Nope. That's the same image, only with much better resolution than the one I was looking at (where it turns out I was actually looking at the wrong line of type). I often have wondered what the odds really are for two people with the same fairly unusual name to find themselves in the same arena. It has happened twice to me locally, in two places widely separated geographically, and also once to my wife, whose name is no more common than my own.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:18, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Song structure

I understand that vocal music is not your focus, but I believe you can contribute valuable comments to this move discussion. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:08, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Nice painting

Here is a nice painting with a musical theme I got from User talk:Hafspajen's talk page:

• 
  Still Life with Musical Instruments, by Pieter Claesz. 1623.

I don't know why there would be a turtle there, though. Maybe they'd been drinking and picked up a pet turtle, or maybe they were near a lake. CorinneSD (talk) 23:01, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Looks like an "Allegory of the Five Senses", with the tortoise for the sense of touch. It's an exotic pet, that can't swim. Johnbod (talk) 23:33, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Or it might represent the sense of smell, if it isn't still quite alive ;-) Thanks, CorinneSD. I am very fond of Claesz's paintings, and I know this one, though only from reproductions, having never visited the Louvre. Johnbod is quite right. Dutch still lives from this era are almost always allegories of one sort or another, and ones with musical instruments are usually "five senses" allegories. The thing that really distinguishes Claesz, though, is that—apart from his exquisite attention to detail—he has a fantastic sense of luminescence. The canvas seems almost to glow from within, and the surface gloss is manipulated in a way to enhance that effect. I don't know how he accomplished this, technically, but send me into a room with paintings by a dozen different 17th-century Dutch artists and I will gravitate directly to the one by Claesz, nine times out of ten.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:52, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Interesting! I'm impressed that you know so much about Dutch painting. Did you see the other still life paintings from which I selected this one, at User talk:Hafspajen#-? I really like the one called Pronkstillleven by Abraham van Beijeren, but they're all pretty nice. CorinneSD (talk) 00:10, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

I don't know very much at all about Dutch painting. My formal education in art history is restricted to the period after 1750 (and even then at the undergraduate-survey level), but when I have an opportunity to visit museums I tend to head first for the galleries with 16th-century Italian and 16th/17th-century Dutch paintings. (It depends on the museum, of course.) In addition, because I am a musician, I am always drawn to paintings of musical instruments, and musical subjects generally. Claesz painted several still lives with instruments, and his seemingly photographic eye makes his paintings an especially interesting window on that period. Of course, allegories are notorious for introducing distortions in the interests of making a moral point, so one must be wary of treating such paintings as "evidence".—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:22, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Hm, I was thinking of nominating this, but it doesn't have enough pixels. But this it could make a good adition at Still life, as a new theme. Or in a music related article. Hafspajen (talk) 16:01, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

It might indeed find a place on the "Still life" article, or else at Allegory or a related painting article. From a musical point of view, one distinctive feature is that the cello on the foreground has got five strings, instead of the usual four. Five-stringed cellos certainly existed, and there is even one supremely important composition that requires one: Johann Sebastian Bach's Sixth Suite for Cello in D Major. I cannot tell from the painting (perhaps a cellist or cello maker could do so) whether this is a full-sized cello or a violoncello piccolo (or even a viola pomposa, though it looks too large for one of these).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:25, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Septet (Stravinsky)

Hello Jerome. Great work, thanks for your expert assistance. It is now better than the first contribution. I don't know the composition, but I love this selection of Stravinsky's chamber works, performed by phenomenal Karel Krautgartner. Histoire du soldat is one of the best compositions ever written, full of dark energy :) Best regards! --Vejvančický (talk / contribs) 06:02, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

I am astonished that you do not know the Septet. Certainly L'Histoire du soldat is a magnificent work, but so is the Septet, in quite a different way. Please become acquainted with it. You will not regret knowing it!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:37, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

I still have a lot to learn. I'm a big fan of smaller forms, as they reveal the true composing mastery ... + journeys with Stravinsky are always inspirative and surprising, his style is changing and permanently searching, but never repeats itself. So the Septet must be a good tip :) Enjoy the sunday! --Vejvančický (talk / contribs) 09:12, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

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