Discussions on Theater

Doing this by theater is pretty straightforward:

[{
  "id":   null,
  "name": null,
  "type": "/theater/theater",
  "theatrical_productions_staged_here": [{
    "id": null
  }]
}]

You can do it somewhat by other locations, too, although you probably won't get everything because this query relies on the /theater/theater instances to also be typed as /location/location, which they may not be. Note also that it also requires the theater to be directly linked to the containing location (e.g. if a theater is entered as being contained by London, but not England, querying for productions in London will find it, but not queries for England, let alone the UK).

[{
  "id":   null,
  "name": null,
  "type": "/location/location",
  "contains": [{
    "name":null,
    "id":null,
    "/theater/theater/theatrical_productions_staged_here": [{
      "id": null
    }]
  }]
}]

and some more ideas:

to whom the composition was dedicated is often interesting.

who (person, or sometimes entity such as the san francisco opera) commisioned the work is also often interesting.

location, date, and performer of the premeir is also often interesting.

As with most good user suggestions, I will say: Go try it out!

The question of catalog keys is easiest. Go make /user/arielb/koechel, and create an enumerated property for a Mozart composition type. Other notable catalogs (Schickele) can be similarly modeled. Opus numbers could be a machine-readable string, but probably on a Classical composition type; other compositions do not tend to have those.

The key, dedication, commission, première, all seem like good properties for classical compositions as well.

The date and place of composition is an interesting challenge, an example of a frequent modeling challenge in Freebase. Representing this information complicates the model when done properly; one really wants the composer-composition relationship to be a CVT. However, most compositions don’t have this information readily available, making it an unnecessary composition. Would it be acceptable to have the date(s) and place of composition simply depending from the composition itself? That would mean, for example, that one could not correctly describe compositions begun by one composer and completed by another.

ok - i'll look into the catalog numbers seperately in a classical music domain once i get around to it.

i set up a user domain for dedications (Dedicated Work).  I think this could be generally useful (applied to literature and what not) and does not need to be directly tied to composition.

Place of composition should likely be non unique since there are numerous instances where the composer travelled while writing the piece.  I think for modeling place composed similar to places lived is sufficient.  Similarly, capturing a start and end date is also likely sufficient.  Modelling compositions begun by one composer and finished by others is basically just hard (see this example) and happens infrequently enough that i think if someone cared enough they could break out the variant completions into seperate compositions.  but for simplicity's sake, i think just having a date begun, date completed pair on the composition itself would help capture lots of useful data.

Been thinkin about the right way to handle place and dates of composition.

I think the creation of any work of art (including theater, film, visual art, whatever) should be considered a /project/project with the /music/composition being the /project/project_focus. This allows for multiple roles for collaborative works as well as start/end dates for each role and subsection. I would go as far to say that every major work of art should have a property that points to the project of it's creation.

I've been trying to figure out if a creative process deserves to be a child class of /project/project, but I can't think of a compelling reason.

Now, location isn't so much a property of a composition as it is a property of the composer (or author or sculptor) at the time of their participation in the /project/project. So map Liszt's travels in his own /person/person/places_lived cvt and then you can implicitly figure out where he was when he was involved in the /project/project focusing on each piece. This would require a more detailed places_lived field than most artists currently have, but I think that's a good thing.