I am looking for an authoritative guide to writing, punctuating, and capitalizing titles of classical music—not an anecdote, blog, zine, or fluffy lifestyle article!
Any ideas?
The request in itself is open to debate. This is more of a personal decision to make in your case.
There is some direction here already if you search for Grammartron.
https://community.mp3tag.de/search?q=Grammartron
But for some perspective outside of this forum on the modern ideals for structured capitalization of titles, there is some guidance that follows standard practice here regarding APA and MLA title rules.
One more aspect. Titlle Capitalization is used only in English, and only in the last 1-2 centuries. This practice arose from increasingly loud and outbidding each other's advertisements, otherwise it is linguistically unfounded. This is the opinion of many non-english native speakers, myself included.
Alas, no such guide exists. There are only conventions and style guides, which vary by language, institution, and music genre. You have to choose among these as best you can.
Although scripts can be helpful with capitalization, they are limited because they cannot distinguish parts of speech. For example, an Mp3tag script may be written to lower case a list of short prepositions like "to", but what if "to" precedes a verb? Then in a title it should be "To" because it is part of an infinitive.
To make matters worse, composers are free to use whatever capitalization suits them:
where have classical music's uppercase letters gone?
My suggestion is to choose a style guide that looks right to you, and then try to apply it consistently. I capitalize by applying my script (some of which was incorporated into Grammartron) but I still have to review the results and correct manually when needed.
For classical music, this excerpt from the widely-used Chicago Manual of Style is a good place to start:
Basic Guide to Program Formatting
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As other already stated: There is no such guide.
You have to decide if you want to use some of the mentioned sources or if you build your own rules for your collection, your preferred syntax and your requirements.
IMHO there is no right or wrong. Every composer or music label or user can write the tracks as they want. If you want to see the tracks for "Don Giovanni" in correct original Italian spelling: Fine.
If you think, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was Austrian, so the tracks have to be spelled in correct (old) German: Fine.
If you want to see an english translation of this tracks its fine too.
This isn't geopolitics.
My Chicago Manual of Style does not address the formatting of file names, nor does it address the ways in which titles of classical music are formatted, let alone which parts are capitalized in various languages.
One is not generally born knowing German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, and English. However, one would well imagine that most classically trained musicians are taught the skills necessary to parse various structures and titles, and it would then stand to reason that this information isn't a state secret, that it is instead available in some form designed to guide and remind the student as he progresses through his studies.
One might well imagine that when using tagging software to . . . oh, maybe apply tags to classical music . . . that some basic guidelines and rules could be considered by reasonable people as something more practical and less inciteful.
Sorry to bother anyone in their corner of the Internet.
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There are no special rules for titles or filenames, so here is a Wikipedia article about German grammar:
The rules described there apply to any data in lyrics, title, album, artist etc.
E.g. for Mozart it would be:
- Akt: Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja
- Akt: Dies Bildnis ist so bezaubernd schön
- Akt: Ach, ich fühl's, es ist verschwunden
- Akt: Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden
which shows the rules: capital letters for nouns and capital letters at the beginning of sentences.
Other languages will have different rules.
For an overall correct representation it would also require a deeper understanding of the language structure, e.g.
Ich habe genug: IV. Rezitativ: Mein Gott! Wann kommt das Schöne: Nun!
where "das Schöne" is "the beautiful" and a noun. But in "das schöne Mädchen" "schöne" would be an adjective and therefore not get a capital letter.
I found an example for a title with 2 languages in it:
Mignon II 'Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt' - 'Solo quien añora'
I know that the first part follows German rules, I think the second part is Spanish.
Filenames may have other restrictions, e.g. the colon will not be accepted for Windows filenames.
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Well, you haven't found it and we haven't found it, so one might well imagine that no such reference exists. However, the UW-Madison guide that I gave you is based on a much longer reference book that is indeed used by music students:
Writing about Music: A Style Sheet by D. Kern Holoman
(ISBN:9780520958814, 136 pages, 3rd edition, 2014)
Scroll down in the above link to see the complete table of contents.
I have not looked at this book but Amazon has both new and used copies.
[Personal opinion] I think the format of "filenames" is more or less irrelevant, as these are key to the OS only, and perhaps for those that still feel it necessary to browse by folder.
This really comes down to your personal taste for how you want it to look. I myself still cannot wrap my head around the newer concept of the rules for APA and MLA for example. I was always taught in school (in 1980's English Canada if that matters) that all words in a title were capitalized. Makes for a pretty simple rule. I see "What to Capitalize in a Title" and think it just looks wrong. So in my library, I follow my rule, with the only exception being words that are intentionally stylized by the artist, as listed on the cover.
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Simply choosing not to care does not work for me because of the way my brain got wired. I cannot help but care too much about how I do this.
What I find most infuriating are ubiquitous contradictions amongst various sources—sources one might assume speak with some authority.
The best path forward may be to pick one reference and stick to that, regardless of what other sources propose.
I've always deferred to the Chicago Manual of Style. I've recently also found its section on classical music referenced by various universities.My physical copy is some thirty years old. Perhaps it is time for an upgrade. The 18th edition comes out in September of 2024.
With regard to file names, remember that file names are tied to metadata—at least when using MP3Tag! Both have to be taken into account.
Naming conventions for classical music are not trivial. So much has to be taken into consideration that the very length of file names can become an issue. For example:
GRIEG: Peer Gynt Suites 1 & 2^SIBELIUS: Pelléas et Mélisande
Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan
1983
Edvard Grieg and Jean Sibelius
Deutsche Grammophon
GRIEG^ Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46^ I. Morgenstimmung. Allegretto pastorale
GRIEG^ Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46^ II. Åses Tod. Andante doloroso
GRIEG^ Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46^ III. Anitras Tanz. Tempo di Mazurka
GRIEG^ Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46^ IV. In der Halle des Bergkönigs. Alla marcia e molto marcato
GRIEG^ Peer Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55^ I. Der Brautraub. Allegro furioso—Andante doloroso
GRIEG^ Peer Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55^ II. Arabischer Tanz. Allegretto vivace
GRIEG^ Peer Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55^ III. Peer Gynts Heimkehr. Allegro agitato
GRIEG^ Peer Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55^ IV. Solvejgs Lied. Andante—Allegretto tranquillament
SIBELIUS^ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46^ I. Am Schlosstor. Grave e largamente
SIBELIUS^ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46^ II. Melisande—Andantino con moto
SIBELIUS^ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46^ IIa. Am Meer. Adagio
SIBELIUS^ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46^ III. Am Wunderborn Im Park. Comodo
SIBELIUS^ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46^ IV. Die Drei Blinden Schwestern. Tranquillo
SIBELIUS^ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46^ V. Pastorale. Andantino pastorale
SIBELIUS^ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46^ VI. Melisande Am Rocken. Con moto
SIBELIUS^ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46^ VII. Zwischenaktmusik. Allegro
SIBELIUS^ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46^ VIII. Melisandes Tod. Andante
For those wondering, ^ is commonly substituted for a number of punctuation marks that cannot be used in file names, such as the colon and slash—punctuation that appears in nearly all classical music.
AFAIK filenames only have to have the property to be unique - which is the requirement of the underlying OS.
There is no mandatory relation to any tags. You could name all the files with e.g. just an ascending number.
I understand your frustration. I have decided the #1 priority has to be the metadata, completing as many fields as possible for every track consistently. Even though this often involves some duplication, it does ensure every music player has the data at its' disposal whether it uses it or not.
As far as the filenames go, I am now less concerned with these. My folder structure is still based Albumartistsort/Albumsort/ and files are names disc-track title, and validated. This maintains a complete and manageable directory. I don't need to depend on the filename to create tags, they already exist.
I have several remote backups to protect my Investment. If catastrophe strikes I can restore from any of these quickly and not lose anything. Well maybe a couple of hours of my time...
It depends.
If you never plan to switch or use multiple devices or OS'es and systems, that notion is fine.
I have always liked the idea and use more or less the naming convention as MotleyG uses, but there are too many pitfalls which are not immediately obvious.
The most common one are
- Character set limitations, some support UTF in various formats, some 8-bit semi official sets, some are limited to 7-bit ASCII.
- Special characters, control and identity characters also varies widely.
- File name length and total path length, especially for classical music which can be very "wordy"
You may think that as long as you stay with one OS you will be fine, but that’s only an assumption valid if you never upgrade or change any software or devices.
There is no guarantee that your new backup solution just fails silently, do something funky or will tell you if it can’t deal with a file(name).
You have to consider that your OS, file system, shell(for scripting), API or framework, network, archival and backup solution, player software and devices, all have different requirements.
Even on same systems these things change over time.
You can start with a style guide from an existing database instead of inventing another. If you disagree with a particular element there, change it.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Classical
Classical music titles seem to be very long sentences and are naturally better suited for sentence case capitalization where only the first letter after major dividing punctuation is uppercase.
I think filenames must be kept safe and of reasonable length. Tags are there to carry practically unlimited data, logically divided among fields. Only recently I encountered an issue where I couldn't generate spectrograms with SoX if any national characters were included. It is a reasonably new program running on WinNT, but has some Linux baggage apparently.
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Thank you very much for the Musicbrainz link. It's an excellent reference.
I agree completely. The Musicbrainz guide is for their data base and does not suggest file tag content, file and folder naming conventions, or folder organization. For these we have to rely on our own ingenuity and creativity.