Discussions on Composer
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A composer writes MORE than songs, e.g. symphonies, tone poems, chamber music, etc. There is no way one can mix these with songs together. Can we, please, have a special property for this?
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This is a good point. I’ve renamed the “Songs composed” property to “Works composed”; it already expected the Composition type but was poorly named.
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Hey, this is fantastic! The truth is we need BOTH. There are composers who only write songs, for them is it good to have the "Songs composed" property.
Others write all sorts of things and for them we need the "Works composed."
One should have the choice between the two alternatives, use the one which is needed and let the other one obscured
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I disagree pretty strongly. Artistic judgments, particularly judgments of quality (when does a mere song rise to the level of composition?) are so very subjective as to invite edit wars. We have the Songwriter type with which a Composer can be co-typed if appropriate. But segregating the works—are Schubert’s Lieder songs, or compositions? And what about career songwriters like Billy Joel or Paul McCartney who start writing classical compositions late in life?
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I did not mean to separate the songs from the works "within" the same composer! I wanted to keep Billy Joel and Schubert separately!!
"Songs composed" = Billy
"Works composed" = Schubert
That's why we need both categories
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But Billy Joel has composed classical music. So has Paul McCartney. It doesn’t make sense to shoehorn their classical compositions into a song bucket just because most of their work has been songs.
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Alright, I see your point. So what do we have now?
Songwriter with Songs composed and
Composer with Works composed ?
If so, then everything is fine
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Currently, Songwriter has no properties of its own. It is a convenience type which includes Composer (with “Works composed”) and Lyricist (with “Lyrics written”), as well as Person (with all its properties).
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Why can't we have "Songwriter" with "Songs composed"? It makes sense and we need it
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Some composers are good arrangers, again, one cannot mix their arrangements with their original compositions, that is a differernt category...
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I wrestled with this for a while before deciding the other way. Sometimes it’s very clear, as Grainger’s several arrangements of his setting of “Country Gardens.” However, sometimes it’s much blurrier; the folk song “Country Gardens” existed for centuries before Grainger did his definitive scoring of it. Consider also Jimi Hendrix’s arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” or the notion that the 1812 Overture is an arrangement of “La Marseillaise” and the Russian national anthem. The Arrangement type makes the nature of the composition clear, but the creative rôle of the arranger is hard to limit so precisely.
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That's true, so what do we do, for example when a composer takes a cantata and makes it into a PIANO CONCERTO?? I just had this problem with Xian Xinghai who wrote the Yellow River Cantata, which was transformed by a Chinese pianist into the Yellow River Piano Concerto! Who does take the credit for the new composition? I think the "arranger," but at the moment there is no way how we can credit HIM. You, as a pianist, should care about this...
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I just edited the Yellow River Piano Concerto. It is now credited to the arranger, but also marked as an arragnement of the Yellow River Cantata, which has its own composer.
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That's correct, thank you!
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