Fort Towson

Nice work on the Peter Maxwell Davies symphonies! I have been reading the articles with interest as they have appeared. One little question about No. 3 — in the Discography and References sections you have "London" in square brackets with a question mark after the catalogue number of the Edward Downes recording. I'm not sure what this refers to. If it is the place of recording then it was Studio 7, New Broadcasting House, Manchester, but if the place of publication then I guess London is correct as the location of the head office of BBC Enterprises. --Deskford (talk) 00:55, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. It is always pleasing to learn that one's efforts are appreciated! The "London" in square brackets is the (supposed) place of publication. It is not printed on the CD label, or on any of the accompanying materials. It is standard bibliographical form to include the place of publication, if known. When not known, but there is good reason to suppose a particular location, it may be given in square brackets, as I have done; otherwise it is customary to put either "[N.p.]" or "[S.l.]". It is of course possible to include the place and date of recording, but this is usually considered optional.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:25, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Ah! And thank you also for adding the navigation template to the article on No. 7, which I seem to have overlooked doing—an oversight I have only just noticed you have corrected.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:38, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

The missing template was perhaps more obvious to me as a reader, as I was using the navigation template to navigate through the series of articles. Thanks for explaining the square brackets — that makes perfect sense. --Deskford (talk) 22:58, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

That's the problem with writing articles: you know what you thought you remembered to include! I have caught this problem myself in at least two of the other Davies symphony articles, which I thought were "perfected" until I noticed the missing navbox.

You are welcome for the explanation. I just added a Discography to the article on No. 1, for which I included the dates and venues of the recordings. Perhaps I will add this data to the recordings of the other symphonies, as well.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:09, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

I would think that after No. 3 the discographies would just consist of single entries, if that. Next question: in the instrumentation section of No. 7, what is a "bubbolo"? A percussionist colleague thinks it might be sleigh bells that have somehow ended up in the wrong language. --Deskford (talk) 23:35, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, there would only be single entries for symphonies 4 through 6, none at all for 7, and perhaps nothing for 8, though there was once a recording of the Antarctic available as a custom issue from MaxOpus (I don't find it there now, though I obtained a copy of it several years ago). In the fullness of time, I expect that No. 9 will appear on disc, if for no other reason than the occasion of its composition. The word bubbolo appears in the instrumentation list, both on the Boosey & Hawkes site and on MaxOpus. It is Italian for "jingles" or "pellet bell" (in German, Schelle), or, as your percussionist colleague says, sleigh bells—though technically sleigh bells are only one particular variety, and Davies may have something else in mind (so-called "Indian bells", for example). When my copy of the score arrives in the post in a few days' time, perhaps there will be a more ample explanation.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:26, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Update: Score has arrived, no further clarification therein, I'm afraid. The bubbolo makes its first entrance at the second bar after rehearsal 22 in the first movement. With the designation p dolce, I don't suppose it is meant to be a jingling johnny. It is very odd, though, that an Italian term should be used for such a familiar object as sleigh bells, in a list otherwise employing English terminology (e.g., "tubular bells", "wood blocks", "side drum", "bass drum", "clashed cymbals").—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:35, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Very strange, and unlike Max to use an obscure term unnecessarily. There is another clue on the MaxOpus page for Spinning Jenny: here the percussion list also includes "bubbolo", but gives "sleigh bells" in brackets. I don't know who writes the MaxOpus content — is this an editorial gloss or a reliable indication of the composer's intentions? --Deskford (talk) 02:16, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

The MaxOpus website has got to be more reliable than just about anything else, short of an explanation directly from the composer. Thanks for pointing this out. A recording would help. Unfortunately, this is the one symphony that has not appeared commercially.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:52, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi! From your edits, it looks like you might be interested in contributing to WikiProject Romania. It is a project aimed at organizing and improving the quality and accuracy of articles related to Romania. Thanks and best regards!

--Codrin.B (talk) 06:10, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Hello, you deleted my comment about first electronic instrument in the article electronic musicDid you checked the link to Denis d'or ? What part of it do you consider not to be documented, or not connected to the topic? Thank you for explanation, best regards, David (Cole.Porter) Znojmo, 21 January 2012 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cole.porter (talk • contribs) 09:01, 22 January 2012‎

• Note to Jerome, above user inadvertantly deleted the section he's referring to (Chord Chart, at the top of this page). I've restored the section and moved this comment here. Voceditenore (talk) 09:45, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for help, and my apologies for deleting the section.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Cole.porter (talk • contribs) 14:09, 22 January 2012‎

Apology accepted. The reason for the deletion was: no source. It looked like a hoax to me and, no, I didn't bother to check the link. Now that I have done, I see that indeed the Denis d'or was a musical instrument, but Wikipedia cannot be used as a source for itself. Please restore the material but this time include an inline citation to the New Grove article or some other reliable source. While you are at it, why don't you change the section header as well, to include the 18th century. Best wishes, and thank you for calling my attention to this astounding (almost unbelievable) historical detail.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:59, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Further to the above: Having now read Hugh Davies's Grove Online article, I see that in fact the Denis d'or was not an electrophone, but rather a keyboard stringed instrument. The header for the historical section should therefore probably be left as it is, since the only application of electricity was a device by which an electric shock could be administered to the performer—presumably a useful feature for sadistically inclined music teachers.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:09, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

This is an automated message from CorenSearchBot. I have performed a web search with the contents of Expo (Stockhausen), and it appears to include material copied directly from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4rfoYpJJa8.

It is possible that the bot is confused and found similarity where none actually exists. If that is the case, you can remove the tag from the article. The article will be reviewed to determine if there are any copyright issues.

If substantial content is duplicated and it is not public domain or available under a compatible license, it will be deleted. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material. You may use such publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. See our copyright policy for further details. (If you own the copyright to the previously published content and wish to donate it, see Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials for the procedure.) CorenSearchBot (talk) 07:19, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi,

If you have a spare moment (and only then) could you skip to the bottom and suggest a way forward? I also left Gerda a question about Bachian parody, which maybe can be distinguished from Groves' Parody (iii). Sparafucil (talk) 02:24, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to Wikipedia. However, please know that editors do not own articles and should respect the work of their fellow contributors on Piano. If you create or edit an article, know that others are free to change its content. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Personal views such as "Not as nice a photograph as the Bösendorfer..." are not significant. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JAL78 (talk • contribs) 22:40, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Ownership? I looked at JAL78's cross-wiki contributions -- the pushing of that Steinway pic on every language Wikipedia is nothing short of ridiculous. Antandrus (talk) 22:57, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

(Edit conflict). If you (JAL78) wish to discuss the relative merits of the two photographs, the place to do so is the article's Talk page, not to plant a Warning template on an editor's talk page. I shall be more than happy to explain there the difference between a good illustration and a good photograph. I see that User:Antandrus has already begun discussing this subject there.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:00, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

The ownership warning is of course placed because of the history of the Piano article. It seems to be clear, that you have an ownership mentality.[1]

User:Antandrus's comment above beginning with "Ownership?" has nothing to do with ownership mentality. --JAL78 (talk) 23:12, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm so glad you have taken the trouble to explain why you placed the warning here, instead of discussing the issue on the article talk page. It simplifies things so much: you are flat wrong. If you had actually looked at the edit history of the Piano article, you would see that my contributions there have been minimal. You are also dead wrong about Antandrus's comment above, which begins with "Ownership?" as an indication of incredulity (or so I read it—Antandrus may choose to correct me). I would suggest, while you are about it, that you read the guidelines at Wikipedia:Civility, and here.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:24, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

If you don't like the edits made in the Piano article you revert them. That is ownership mentality. Users with ownership mentality should be warned on their talk pages and not on articles talk pages. You keep ignoring that the ownership warning is placed because of your ownership mentality of the Piano article. --JAL78 (talk) 23:51, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Utter rubbish. There are many reasons for reverting another editor's changes: vandalism, uncited defamation added to the biography of a living person, demonstrably erroneous claims, and so on. I have no ownership mentality in the case of the Piano article, merely the conviction (which is evidently shared by at least two other editors, to judge from the discussion on the article's talk page) that the photo you prefer is inferior as an illustration to the one already there. Of course, you could not possibly be wrong, could you?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:18, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

You may have seen that JAL78 (talk · contribs) has been blocked as another sock puppet of Fanoftheworld (talk · contribs). --Deskford (talk) 14:37, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

I did see that, yes, but thanks for making sure I knew.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:11, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm curious as to why you're reverting my edits to the tablature page. I'm trying to indicate in a respectful way that tablature for the guitar has strong merits for more than beginning guitarists and that is in actual fact the standard way of notating virtuoso electric guitar performances. The tone of the article as written continually references tablature as being 'easier' for 'beginners' when in fact masters level electric guitarists find it indispensable.

To illustrate that this is in fact true it is only required to search for the music of Joe Satriani, Steve Morse, Steve Vai, Eric Johnson, Robben Ford (masters level guitarists all) etc. to see that their music is rarely published in standard notation. Given that the masters are publishing in tablature form clearly demonstrates my point.

Please, the references to 'beginner' and 'novice' etc. in relation to modern guitar tablature are insulting to many experienced guitarists and reflect a bias of some sort or another.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.22.38.235 (talk) 18:52, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

My apologies, but there were certain indications that your edits might have been vandalism. In particular, the errors of grammar and fact in "the note C4 could be played on the third string at the fifth fret or on the sixth string at the eight fret": the eighth (not "eight") fret on string 6 produces C3, not C4; the original text was correct when it said this not can also be achieved at fret 10 on string 4. In the added unreferenced paragraph beginning "On the other hand tablature is …", the missing comma is unfortunate, since it suggests there is something called "hand tablature" (possibly contrasted with "foot tablature"?), and the incorrect capitalization of "de facto" looked suspicious. The edit you particularly refer to was at least clumsy in syntax ("it is often easier and quicker to interpret for both beginners and experienced guitarists")—your later edit simply removing "for beginners" is much better, and you will have noticed that I did not revert that one. I could not for the life of me see what you had changed in your fourth edit (and I still cannot), but the other factors triggered my suspicions. I am now satisfied that your edits were in good faith, and regret not having made this clear in an edit summary.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:36, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Jerome, regarding syntax and grammar - you've got me, I'm a computer programmer and use the keyboard much differently most of the time. But I stand by the fact that the fourth string at the tenth fret is an octave higher than the fifth string at the third fret! - It's actually the sixth string at the eighth fret, and the fifth string at the third fret that are the same note - trust me on that one, given standard tuning that is. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.22.38.235 (talk) 22:46, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Maybe with some fancy computer programming you could convince me that a mere eight frets (a minor sixth) above the open low-E string yields the same pitch as five frets (a perfect fourth) above the G string a minor tenth higher. Perhaps you could also convince in that way that black is white, and that politicians always talk perfect sense. The maths, however, yield two Cs an octave apart, not a unison: 8 frets is a minor sixth, it takes seven more frets on the low E string just to reach the pitch of the open G string. Adding five more frets does not lower the pitch, but raises it, and 7 + 5 = 12, not 0. I think your error is that the article says the third string at the fifth fret, and the fourth string at the tenth fret. You changed IV at 10 to VI at 8, lowering the pitch an octave.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:14, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Actually, we don't need programming for that! - I just have to pickup my guitar and demonstrate! - As it stands the article reads "for example the note C4 could be played on the third string at the fifth fret or on the fourth string at the tenth fret."

You're correct - I misread it apparently and read it as "3'rd fret fifth string" - which is a C note, and whose counterpart is the sixth string, eighth fret. The misread is an easy mistake for a guitarist to make and 5/3 and 3/5 are both C's - good catch and I stand corrected (and a bit embarrassed). I think at this juncture I should just compose something new on the guitar to go with this feeling! And note that if we'd communicated via tablature in this discussion there would have been no ambiguity (grin). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.22.38.235 (talk) 06:59, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps it helps in my case that I am not a guitarist! However, having played the lute, very badly but for long enough to have coped with French, Italian, and Spanish tab, I can understand how knowing from which side of the instrument to start counting strings is sometimes confusing. Thank goodness I never got as far as trying to play from German tab. That way madness lies!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:49, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi Jerome Kohl, You noticed the mix of different English varieties in the Stravinsky article, which I am also unhappy about. Do you think it should be consistently British English or US English? Personally, I'm happy with either, but I can only convert the American spellings to British ones, as I'm from the UK. Hel-hama (talk) 22:48, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

The usual protocol in such cases is to trace back the edit history to determine which form of the language was there earliest, and correct later deviations to match. There are of course possible overriding considerations, for example in the case of an article's subject belonging to one or the other linguistic area. It could be argued that Stravinsky has more to do with America than with the UK, but this is hardly as clear-cut as would be the case of the article on Benjamin Britten on the one hand, or Elliott Carter on the other. Perhaps it would be prudent to discuss this on the article's talk page before setting about trying to make it consistent.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:28, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi Jerome, please tell me what you think of this revert. I believe you know that the progression in question refers to a chain of secondary dominants because the 3rd, 6th and 2nd degrees in major are minor chords. Thank you very much in advance. Hearfourmewesique (talk) 23:22, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

The situation has pretty much spun out of control by now... Hearfourmewesique (talk) 04:22, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

I can see that it has. I'm sorry that I've been offline all day, but on the other hand I'm not sure I could have been of much help. I see that the two of you have taken your dispute to the article's talk page, which is good, but in the end it looks like a difference of religious opinion over alternative ways of naming chords.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:52, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid the bigger concern is how the information is passed from the sources onto the article, and how dangerously misleading it can be in the hands of a misinformed (or incompetent) editor. When writing roman numerals that normally indicate diatonic functions, one should expect the reader to associate the roman numerals with those functions. In this particular case, we are dealing with a chain of secondary dominants, which is radically different, and unless we quote the entire text (which would most likely be WP:COPYVIO), which explains the clumsy attempt to simplify chord names (I mean stuff like "III7/♯"), the reader will not get the point, and therefore we fail, as an encyclopedia, to properly educate the reader. As I wrote on the talk page, it's an issue of WP:COMPETENCE; another fine example of that would be the redirect Hyacinth created for the previously non-existent term "supertonic chromatic chord", which is most likely a made up colloquialism used by Peter van der Merwe as a way of explaining the secondary dominant of the primary dominant (and not of any other degree), and simply creating a redirect of that term to "secondary dominant" is wrong information (since secondary dominants do not necessarily have their root on the supertonic of the scale, unless it's V7/V) which, again, fails our purpose as an encyclopedia. Hearfourmewesique (talk) 22:30, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps you are right, but I am not myself so sure about what we may expect of Wikipedia readers, where Roman-numeral analysis is concerned. Speaking as someone who first learned harmonic theory from the textbooks of Goetschius and Piston, I do not find the symbols used by Hyacinth at all difficult to follow; on the other hand, if the article originally used "V7/V/V" and such, and Hyacinth changed this without first seeking consensus, then that is a different matter, as would be the reverse case. I have not examined the edit history closely enough to know the truth of the matter, but I will go have another look.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:47, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Do you at least agree that the secondary dominant of the sixth degree is not the same as the mediant? Hearfourmewesique (talk) 05:11, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

No, I would not—at least, not necessarily. The root relationships between III and VI can be a dominant-tonic relationship, supposing that the chords supported by those scale degrees are suitable to the purpose. It is important to remember that root relationships and tonal function are two separate, if not entirely unrelated things.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:44, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Your last sentence agrees with my stance. Just because a chord has its root on the mediant note, does not make it a mediant chord; Roman numerals indicate tonal functions. Therefore, V7/vi and III7 are two completely different things, which is why I came to this page to begin with. Hearfourmewesique (talk) 05:49, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

No, that is not strictly true. Roman numerals indicate the scale degrees upon which chords are built. Assumptions of function are only built into these relationships from the outside. If you assign III the function of progressing to IV or to I, then that is its function. Indeed if a chord has its root on the mediant, it is a mediant chord. If you read Goetschius or Piston, you will find that the functions of chords must be understood; later theorists, such as Forte, insist that function should be explicit in the Roman numerals (e.g., V/VI instead of III). It is not an unreasonable position, of course, and one to which I have been accustomed since the early 1960s. But I have not forgotten that there are other ways of labeling chords, and neither have all theorists writing since that time accepted the position adopted by Forte and others.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:03, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Completely acceptable, just one more thought: shouldn't we embrace the more current mentality (for inclusion on Wiki) and list the others as predecessors? Hearfourmewesique (talk) 06:12, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

A very recent squabble on the (American) Society for Music Theory discussion forum shows that the "more current mentality" on this subject is scarcely uniform. Which of these disparate points of view should be explained to the unwary Wikipedia reader as "the truth"?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:22, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

(JK watcher): In my vast naive innocence, not having the faintest idea what either of you are talking about, I can't help wondering whether it might not be helpful to refer back to Chord progression#Circle progressions and align the disputed naming conventions with those given on that page. Or would this just spread the problem to another article? Milkunderwood (talk) 07:45, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Gotta go now, but I'll definitely look it up later. Thanks for your advice so far. Hearfourmewesique (talk) 06:32, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

• To Milkunderwood: the article, to which you refer, talks about diatonic progressions and for some reason, throws in the chain of secondary dominants without the needed explanation.

OK, I figured it probably wouldn't be useful for some reason or another - just a thought. Milkunderwood (talk) 19:19, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I guess my thought was that if we have two separate articles discussing the same thing - ragtime progression - it would be less confusing to readers if they were somehow in sync with each other in approach and terminology. Milkunderwood (talk) 22:35, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

• To Jerome Kohl: do you have a link to the aforementioned forum? Hearfourmewesique (talk) 18:33, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

It is a subscription list, which says it is for current members of the Society for Music Theory. If you are not a member of SMT you may be out of luck, but you can find information here and here. There is an archive, in addition to the opportunity to choose whether to receive posts by email as they come in, or as digests.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:34, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

As usual, I don't really care how the chords are labeled. This could be because I usually believe there is more than one way to do things. There was an insistent very early on the proper way to do things, which though unmentioned includes verifiability. Thus I included a verified and verifiable way of labeling the chords once there had been a dispute. Now the only uncited way of labeling the chords is the "chain of secondary dominants". I don't believe that I have disagreed with those labels in any way, though some people may interpret citation needed tags as disagreement. However, it seems that if those labels really are such obvious common knowledge it should be relatively easy to find a source for them. Hyacinth (talk) 23:31, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

It's a paraphrased version of your own cited text: "by a process of gradual accretion. First the dominant chord acquired its own dominant...This then acquired its dominant, which in turn acquired yet another dominant"... but then again, I already stated that. You keep demonstrating an astonishing lack of understanding when it comes to sources that you cite, which was the initial reason I raised the WP:COMPETENCE issue. Hearfourmewesique (talk) 23:59, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

If you want to have a debate, there are better places to do it than on my talk page. If you expect me to mediate or moderate, you will be disappointed, I think. There are formal mechanisms for resolving such issues on Wikipedia, and I imagine both of you are familiar with such things as Wikipedia:Mediation. I know and respect Hyacinth's work on Wikipedia, and I can also see where Hearfourmewesique is coming from. I prefer not to take sides here, thank you.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:46, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

If you have a moment, please look in at the article talk page, where I have posted a link to a suggested recasting of the article which I hope may meet with approval from interested editors. Tim riley (talk) 13:13, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Might not the same bit of text in the 1936 and the reprinted 1962 edition of Stavinsky's autobiography possibly be on different pages? If so, the correct edition must be cited, in this case the 1962 one. Hel-hama (talk) 05:25, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

One assumes we are speaking here of a reference in the article Igor Stravinsky. If the 1962 "edition" is in fact only a "reprint" of the 1936 edition, then the page numbers ought to be the same, and the correct citation is to the original 1936 editon. If instead it is a new edition and the page numbers are different, then the edition used must of course be the one cited. If I recall correctly, earlier today I tagged an inline citation referring to something by Stravinsky, cited in author-short-title format to something I could not find in the bibliography. This is hardly surprising, since the bibliography is listed in author-date format, not author-title. The inline citation did not include a year of publication but, now that I look for "Stravinsky, Igor. 1962", I find only "Stravinsky, Igor. 1936' and "Stravinsky, Igor. 1947". Are you trying to say that the listed reprint of the former (which I now see is called "Autobiography") is the intended citation, and its pagination is not the same as Chronicle of My Life? In this case, a separate listing should be added to the bibliography and, if there are no citations to the 1936 edition, it may be listed as "originally published as …". If there are citations to both editions, then they should both be listed, with cross-references each to the other.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:10, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your advice on this important point. Until I find the need to cite the 1936 book, it won't be listed separately. Hel-hama (talk) 08:52, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

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

I do my best. Thank you for your expression of appreciation.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:20, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for Herbstmusik! One of the dedicatees is this year's featured composer at the Rheingau Musik Festival (booked), --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:36, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

You are welcome. I do not need to ask which of the three dedicatees is the composer in question!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:30, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

No, just follow the link and look for 2012. I inserted him right after Walter Fink told me last year, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:47, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

I think you misread me. I said "I do not need to ask", since Suzanne Stephens is not a composer nor (to the best of my knowledge) is Joachim Krist.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:56, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

I did, hope you don't mind, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:35, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

I forgive you this time. (Don't let it happen again ;-) —Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:10, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi Jerome,

I apologize for substituting my question about a better definition of the term perfect with the answer that I found on the article. Would you mind if I restore my question, restore your answer, and delete the following two comments, which only concern you and Dickylon, and are not related with the discussion topic?

• Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:22, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
• Dicklyon (talk) 07:44, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

This kind of mild refactoring is encouraged in Wikipedia, as it makes easier for other readers (and possible contributors) to focus on the discussed topic. By the way, thank you for your insightful comments. Paolo.dL (talk) 14:08, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

So that is what happened! I could not for the life of me see what Dicklyon's problem was, since in my experience he has always been a thoroughly knowledgeable and perceptive editor. Of course you have my permission to refactor the discussion.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:14, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

I have no idea what Paolo is referring to, but if you review the diff of your edit that I reverted, you'll see that you (accidentally, I presume) deleted several of my comments, and messed up some other stuff. Like a stale edit conflict, unresolved, or something. The question that you added back was never removed, so it's there twice now. Dicklyon (talk) 00:15, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

I would have to check the edit history to see exactly what Paolo may have done, but I can assure you that all I actually did in my edit was to insert a reply to Paolo's question. In this edit, which appears to have been made by you, not only was my reply deleted, but so was Paolo’s question, "Do you have a better explanation for the etimology of the term perfect in this context?" I have examined the edit to which you refer, and I cannot account for any of the other deleted material, which I never touched. I have always assumed that an "Edit conflict" protection message would intervene if two editors were simultaneously trying to add/delete something on a talk page. Perhaps that is not necessarily the case?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:11, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

That edit is a revert of yours. Please look at it. From that derives my edit summary "your edit seems to have gone badly wrong". I have no explanation of how it went so wrong, but there it is; it needed to be reverted, right? Dicklyon (talk) 03:38, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Kindly refer to my previous remarks, where I said "I have examined the edit to which you refer". I agree that some of it, at least, needed to be reverted. However, I must re-emphasize that the damage that needed reverting had nothing at all to do with me. I await Paolo's refactoring with interest.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:04, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that I should have attempted to repair what went wrong, rather than reverting and asking you to try again? 'cause no way, man. It was your edit, your problem; that's what it had to do with you. Dicklyon (talk) 07:57, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

I am not suggesting anything at all. What I am saying is that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the edit I made. It only added my reply to Paolo, despite the deletions shown in the edit you quote. On the other hand, in your reversion edit, which I quoted to you, it is absolutely clear that Paolo's question, which prompted my reply, was removed, which made it appear that I was responding to nothing at all. I am not saying that you were responsible for this removal, but I resent your saying that I was responsible for removing material that I emphatically left in place at the time of my answer to Paolo.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 08:05, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

I carefully avoided saying that what went wrong was due to your own mistake, though that is the most likely interpretation. It's quite possible that a software error made the mistake, and that you did nothing wrong, so that's why I didn't accuse you of anything. But to say "there was absolutely nothing wrong with the edit I made" is to stick your head in the sand, ignore the record of your edit, and try to push blame for it to me, who fixed it by reverting. Don't do that. Dicklyon (talk) 17:04, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

It occurs to me that you don't know what a revert is. My revert was exactly the inverse of your edit, not something in which I decided what to remove. I simply restored that state from before your edit and asked you to try again, since what did went so badly wrong. Anything you see in my revert was caused by your edit, in the sense of being the automatic inverse of it. Dicklyon (talk) 17:07, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

As for the removal of Paolo's question, he took that out himself, before your edit. So you were responding to an old version, and perhaps somehow the normal edit conflict thing didn't alert you to that fact. Bummer if the software screwed up and caused this. Dicklyon (talk) 17:16, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Well, this is the only plausible explanation. The version I opened was the current revision at the time. Perhaps Paolo was in the process of removing his question at the very moment I was responding to it. (When he asked permission to refactor, I presumed it must have been something like this.) The software should have caught this and alerted me, but it did not. This still does not explain the removal of your paragraph from further up the discussion chain, though. I cannot see how I could possibly have done this without being aware of it.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:30, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps, there was a software glitch. If I remember well, I received notification about an edit conflict while I was trying to delete my question, or writing the next comment. We all were possibly trying to edit at the same time. I'll remove from the talk page the text regarding this problem, which is only interesting for us, and not interesting for the other (possible) readers of the talk page. Paolo.dL (talk) 14:04, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, Paolo. This may explain the difficulty. I have no idea how the software is supposed to respond to a three-way edit conflict, but perhaps it notifies only the last person in the chain. Removing the text about this problem from the talk page seems the best course of action. Thanks again.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:05, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Done. You are welcome. Paolo.dL (talk) 20:25, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Please stop the reference formatting war on article Harald Bode. Currently this article is needed to re-verify and add the new references, based on the reliable papers reprinted on journal published in 2011. --Clusternote (talk) 02:11, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

If you will kindly read the guideline to which I have now pointed you twice, I think you will find it is you, not me, who is edit warring. While you are at it, you ought to read the article on Harvard referencing, since you keep claiming this is the "standard" to which the Harald Bode article should conform. I am perfectly willing to discuss the formatting of that article with you (and I do not particularly like the established format, BTW), in order to establish consensus to change it. This should be done on the article talk page. What you seem not to appreciate is that arbitrarily choosing one of two or more conflicting formats present in an article, just because you happen to think it superior to the others, is a violation of the guideline. The correct procedure is to check the edit history to determine which format was first established. In this case, it was a form of the traditional footnoted full citations. Any citations conflicting with this format should be changed to conform. Otherwise, consensus must first be obtained for a change of format.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:17, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

The article states that Orfeo is not the first opera, which then leaves the average reader dangling. "Well, what is it, then?"
I did a quick 'n' dirty See also.
Maybe you feel more ambitious about rephrasing the article.
Cheers, Varlaam (talk) 22:13, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

I was not aware that the article was exclusively about Monteverdi the opera composer. In fact, I see that it says "Monteverdi's works are split into three categories: madrigals, operas, and church-music", and he was also not the first composer of madrigals or church music. Peri was not his only predecessor in the opera genre, of course. Monteverdi took a full ten years to take it up, by which time Giulio Caccini, for example, had already composed two operas (should he be added to the "see also" list, as well?). It seems to me that it would be of greater utility to add an explanatory phrase to that sentence in the article, instead of a coy "See also" that might well leave the reader wondering "Well, who is that, then?".—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:42, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

I was not trying to be coy.

I was only there looking for images of Baroque composers since I'm expanding the userbox assortment for opera.

My See also, to me at least, was clearly intended for elaboration or expansion.

It's a marker.

If I have 3 bugs in a program, I might set up quick 'n' dirty, an engineering term, workarounds for the first two, before solving the 3rd, thereupon one could revisit the first two more thoroughly.

You don't have to adopt an adversarial posture with me, you know, eh.

Varlaam (talk) 17:11, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

I'll try not to be adversarial. My apologies for that, but I did find that addition annoying, since it is even more opaque to the innocent reader than the remark in the text that (I now see) it was meant to address. Had it been me, I would have flagged the offending remark with a {{Vague}} template, or something similar, and a hidden-text editorial note asking "Who was first, then?"—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:50, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

would you care to offer an opinion here? Semitransgenic _talk. 21:23, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Huh?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:30, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

sorry! : ) here. Semitransgenic _talk. 21:55, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

It just makes you look an idiot to tag as "original research" the most banal cliches on a particular subject. Since you appear not to be an idiot this is a pity. If you mean "unreferenced" tag accordingly. Johnbod (talk) 03:28, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

It is so kind of you to call this apparent lapse to my attention, and in so charming a manner. However, I am somewhat surprised to discover that you have been editing on Wikipedia nearly as long as I have, and yet seem unaware of the fact that in Wikipedia jargon "original research" does not mean original research as it is understood in ordinary English, but in fact means, as you yourself put it, "the most banal clichés on a particular subject", supplied without benefit of reliable source. In fact, "unreferenced" and "original research" are exactly synonymous in this context. The template for "original research", however—{{Or}}—is shorter than the one for "unreferenced"—{{Citation needed}}—and so saves time typing, especially when there are a lot of them needed in a short space. Of course, simply deleting the offending material is more efficient still (and often the more humane option since these most banal clichés are usually easier to prove false than to verify), but in most cases I do feel that the author ought first to be given the opportunity to supply a reliable source, following Wikipedia policies and guidelines.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:49, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

You have failed to read WP:OR. This begins: "The term "original research" (OR) is used on Wikipedia to refer to material—such as facts, allegations, and ideas—for which no reliable, published sources exist". My bold. Not the same thing at all, especially for someone as well-informed as you no doubt are. That is why the two different tags exist. Johnbod (talk) 13:14, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

And you, sir, have failed to notice that the template produces a question mark as well as the phrase "Original research". There is also a footnote at the word you have bolded, reading "By 'exists', the community means that the reliable source must have been published and still exist — somewhere in the world, in any language, whether or not it is reachable online — even if no source is currently named in the article. Articles that currently name zero references of any type may be fully compliant with this policy — so long as there is a reasonable expectation that every bit of material is supported by a published, reliable source." I interpret the template as meaning to question the likelihood that this is the case.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:13, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

A very far-fetched interpretation, and one that is not generally used. You surely don't doubt that RS do in fact exist for all the points you tagged? On a subject like Romanticism that would be unlikely for almost any reasonable assertion. The only tagged point added by me, re Friedrich, consisted of a statement that even the most cursory and superficial acquaintance with artist would demonstrate to be true. Johnbod (talk) 20:05, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Far-fetched? Perhaps, but I don't believe so. Not generally used? In my experience (which is approximately the same as yours), it is the only way it is used. Our experiences must occupy very different segments of Wikipedia (which is, of course, vast). In any case I don't understand your missionary zeal in this matter. If you believe (as I do not) that there is an important distinction to be made between these two template tags, then by all means change the one to the other. I am completely indifferent on the subject. Concerning Friedrich, I think it very dubious indeed whenever a "cursory and superficial acquintance" leads one to suppose something to be true and, as I'm sure you do not need reminding, "Wikipedia's core sourcing policy, Wikipedia:Verifiability, defines the threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia as "verifiability, not truth" (citation from WP:VNT). It also seems problematic ever to rely on "reasonable assertions" when it comes to matters of aesthetics, the arts, or art history (including the defining of genres), since these matters are in a constant state of debate, reinterpretation, and revision.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:45, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

It is certainly not the usual way it is used, although, as I said at the start, there are always some idiots who will add it to "London is the capital of the United Kingdom". You might give a moment's thought as to how it looks to those who do not share your esoteric interpretation of the policy - for example the 6,000 a day who hit on Romanticism. But it is clearly pointless to prolong this. Let's just hope we never run into each other again. Johnbod (talk) 21:14, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and one last thing - {{cn... for ^{[citation needed]} works fine. Johnbod (talk) 02:18, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi Jerome--

The image of Hovhaness with an Indonesian rebab has been proposed for deletion. I have posted at both File talk:Alan Hovhaness.jpg and at the jpg file itself. If you might have thoughts concerning the proposal, or on my objection, they will be welcomed. Thanks. Milkunderwood (talk) 00:31, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

I'll have a look, but opinions don't matter much in these cases—it is usually a question of copyright and/or licensing. In the present case, it looks like a record-jacket illustration, which can sometimes be justified if the album itself is the subject of discussion, but in this case appears to be used solely for the portrait of the composer. That photo is undoubtedly copyrighted so, unless the copyright own can be contacted and convinced to release the image, either to public domain or under an appropriate license, it must be removed.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:21, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

More fun with genres Semitransgenic _talk. 10:22, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

I have been following that discussion with interest, but I have not formed any opinion—apart from the fact that the article should never have been moved without first discussing it and reaching consensus. Clearly there is something called "Noise music" (but is it really a "genre", or more of a catch-all category), and clearly there is the issue of the place of noise within the broader concept of music. Reading the presently constituted article, I'm not at all clear which it is meant to be about, and so I am going to have to think about it for a bit.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 15:05, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

i know how you feel, currently i am tending toward WP:DGAF on most of these genre based debates, simply don't have the time or energy to deal with them, fighting memes is futile. Semitransgenic _talk. 22:52, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Learn a new word every day (in my case, "meme"). Setting aside the genre issue, the business of what "noise" really means in a musical context is intriguing, though. The generic Noise article begins "In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound", by which definition anything determined to be valuable to a musical performance is ipso facto not noise, and so there can be no such thing a "noise music". Acoustical definitions of noise are less problematic, but an interesting question was raised only yesterday here about whether tabla are pitched or unpitched. According to one reply, the answer is: one drum of the pair is, the other isn't. Whatever the facts of this case may be, there is a noise element in virtually all musical sound—it is only a question of how much. By this logic, all music necessarily is at least partially noise music—it is only a matter of degree. It may be counterproductive to wax philosophic in the article itself, but it might be nice to settle on some ground rules about what noise in music is (or might be), before charging into the fray.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:38, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

my personal feeling on the noise/music thing is that we have past the point, historically, where such distinctions are meaningful. Also, it's unfortunate that there is still an undercurrent of subversivity associated with "noise making," it's a cliché that is still seen by many as something that stands in opposition to bourgeois "music making." Being able to self-identify with a genre called "noise music" is important to those interested in sustaining a "noise making" sub-culture, that's why it's a complete waste of time trying to point out how silly the term is.

Don't know a lot about tabla but from what I have seen and heard, the right drum is tuned, guess relative to the raga played, and pressure alters pitch on the other drum. I saw Badal Roy with Ornette Coleman once, and he had a bunch of tabla tuned to different pitches, which he played melodically, that was interesting. Semitransgenic _talk. 10:30, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

And of course there is also the "yoof music" aspect of deliberately annoying the older generation, which become equally ridiculous when the young themselves grow up to become parents of teenagers. My point about tabla was not as clearly put as it might have been: even the relatively clear pitch of the tabla proper (the right-hand drum) has a considerable noise element, while the allegedly unpitched duggi (the left-hand drum) is not only perceived as lower than the tabla, but also has that ability to alter pitch to which you refer, which is an absurd idea for an instrument that has no pitch in the first place. The fact of the matter is that all drums have a certain pitch component, as anyone who has heard Chávez's Toccata for Percussion or Steve Reich's Drumming (or indeed any orchestral composition involving timpani) will know. The only issue is how clear the perceived pitch is. Tom-toms, tabla, teponaztli (and other log drums), bongos, and congas can even be tuned to a chromatic scale, though not as precisely as, say, pianos, cimbaloms, glockenspiels, xylophones, or other so-called "pitched percussion" instruments. Bells are a particularly interesting problem where pitch is concerned, because of their non-harmonic pitch structure, and that leads to the question of whether some pitch combinations are "noisier" than others (compare, say, a French augmented-sixth chord to a root-position major triad, or a diatonic tone cluster to a full dominant thirteenth chord containing exactly the same set of pitch classes).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:20, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes there is a noise component with tabla (or perceived roughness as a result of complex inharmonic spectra). I couldn't agree more re:all drums having a certain pitch component, it's one of the reasons why I have always had a problem with works for percussion, many composers seem to pay little regard to the pitch/timbre complex of "non-pitched" percussion, they think according to register but without considering spectral nuance, the snare drum is a great example, I've heard it described as "just white noise," try telling that to, for example, a jazz drummer. Semitransgenic _talk. 20:09, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Exactly. It's the usage not the sound. Bells provide many of the best examples. When I use the shoulder of the stick to play the bell of my ride cymbal in a crescendo (a very common technique in rock music) the sound produced would have definite pitch if heard in isolation, but in context it is unpitched. On the other extreme I've played a set of tuned Paiste cup chimes as melodic percussion (that particular set is now in storage but the owner has promised me a photo) and they are identical to unpitched bell cymbals in all but use. The tabla is another interesting example, most westerners would take it for a type of unpitched bass drum but it is tuned to a degree of the scale in use and its drum head is built specifically to make this possible.

And intonation enters into it too. A root position harmonic seventh chord played in just intonation is far less noisy to my ears than even a minor triad, but play those same two chords on an ordinary piano and that sensation reverses. I dream of the day when someone will produce a fully workable electronic keyboard in just intonation, I imagine there are such experiments gong on even now, and that the player interface is the challenge. If only Alexander John Ellis had been able to use such technology rather than his glass harmoniums, musical history might be vastly different, see his appendices to his translation of Sensations of Tone. Andrewa (talk) 20:49, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Phil Treloar in the late 1960s was tuning his four-piece kit in rising 4ths, bass to G, floor tom C, hanging tom F, snare Bb. But we saw that as a bit radical. Again I have no ref unfortunately, I guess we could ask him. Andrewa (talk) 20:58, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

I seem to have stepped into something here. I really have no interest in quibbles over what constitutes a genre. My only agenda is to to get a good article on noise in music, at a suitable title.

I had not even considered that rhythms and even larger structures could be examples of noise in music, but of course they can be. This material belongs in the article on noise generally in music, as does the material I am most interested in which relates to the perception of percussion as unpitched. It all fits wonderfully well with the concepts that I heard from Karlheinz Stockhausen when he visited Australia (late 1960s I think). He described all music as being frequencies, from the very lowest frequencies (movement structure in a symphony or track sequence in a record album) up through rhythm to pitch to the overtones that we perceive as sound quality rather than pitch and overlapping all the way. Unfortunately I have no reference for this but I'm sure he published it somewhere, but possibly in German, he spoke quite adequate English but admitted to struggling sometimes for the correct term and dismissed his interpreters' attempts to provide one on many occasions.

I look forward to your future contributions to music articles. Andrewa (talk) 20:49, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments, Andrewa. I am not myself a percussionist, but I have worked with enough of them to know a little about all this. The tuning of drum kits goes back a lot earlier than the 1960s, so I have to smile that Treloar's tuning was seen a "a bit radical" in those days. Then again, we thought an awful lot of stuff was radical and new, simply because we had never encountered it before, and it was fashionable to be "rad".

Perhaps I should also say that I personally found this approach a total failure... it obviously favoured certain keys but, far more important, did none of them well. In a drum solo fine; In a combo useless. His tuning, for example, was ineffective with the rest of the band in G major, the bass drum and floor tom (G and C} would be inaudible at times and the hanging tom and snare (F and Bb) somehow irritating and unmusical. As the key became less related, things improved, but the bass, snare and toms never achieved the clarity and musicality of what I regard as the traditional approach, which is to tune each drum first on its own, tuning the heads to the shell and to each other, and then make whatever minor adjustments are needed to get them to work together as a kit. The better the kit (both shells and heads), the less is needed in this second step... My stage kit with good matched heads typically needs none at all, and as a result I can completely rehead it in a solid half day's work. On the other extreme some kits I've played (and yes, even owned) have not been capable of a good balance however much time was spent on step 2, and however good the drums sounded individually. This is a particularly common result when you try to "economise" and end up with a motley collection of new and used heads and/or of different makes and/or of different weights. Some things ya just gotta learn the hard way. I'd guess that most kit drummers try tuning their kit to pitch at some stage in their careers, it's an obvious thing to do, and we tend to have a bit more freedom (and some would say less discipline) than many musicians.

I'm sure that excellent music could be written for a pitched kit, and probably has been, but it's not as simple as it might seem. The only good use I've regularly heard of pitched kits has been extended kits which add, for example, a set of pitched quarter toms to an otherwise unpitched kit. In capable hands that really rocks! Similarly Terry Bozzio's set of tuned gongs works really well, but if you have only one gong it should probably be unpitched (and he has one of those too!). Bozzio also plays pitched drums of course but he does use an exceptionally large number of them and with his own custom heads, it's possibly not a good indication of what works on a four- or five-piece kit. Andrewa (talk) 13:15, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, of course the problem with tuning anything is that you have to take into consideration the musical context you will be using that tuning in. The old orchestral trick of using a timp tuned to G for a context that momentarily requires a bass F is a not-entirely satisfactory workaround from the days before pedal instruments were invented. That it works at all is largely a product of the relatively indefinite pitch of the drumhead, and the better the timp (in terms of pitch focus) the less well this device works. This problem is by no means restricted to percussion. For example, try tuning a harpsichord as purely as possible in F major (and its most closely related keys), and then use it to accompany a violin in Bach's B-minor sonata. Talk about noise music!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:46, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Stockhausen's consideration of "all music as frequencies" (including noises) finds its first full expression in his most famous article, "… How Time Passes …", though there is an earlier discussion of the tuning of drumheads in an article written in 1952–53 (though not published until five years later), titled "Arbeitsbericht 1952–53: Orientierung" (found on pp. 32–38 of his Texte vol. 1), starting from a consideration of Varèse's Ionisation and John Cage's invention of the prepared piano. There are some later writings on the subject as well, and in the Jonathan Cott conversation book Stockhausen describes the overall plan of Klavierstück XI as the durational/formal counterpart of noise. This is pertinent to the present discussion because the piece is actually composed in proportions analogous to the overtone series.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:42, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

I will chase up that article, thank you... I have not had much contact with experimental music of any sort since the early 70s I confess, I was part of a workshop in the 1960s but other commitments took me out of it and I never got back. There is so much to music. But that's what took me to the Stockhausen lectures. I did get at one of them to ask a question that he seemed to enjoy... How do tremolo and vibrato fit into that spectrum? They seem to be part of tone quality, the uppermost frequency band, but their frequency is below that of pitch. He motioned the interpreter to silence, understanding perfectly the English and the issue, and replied with a broad smile Ah, good, it is all about perception. I'm not sure I agree with this answer, I think non-linearity and fourier analysis come into it, so that the significant frequencies that we perceive are actually in the higher band despite the lower frequencies of what our fingers etc may be doing to produce them. But perhaps that is what he meant. Andrewa (talk) 13:15, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid this will sound even more cryptic than Stockhausen's original answer, but you ought to listen very carefully to layers 2 and 23 of Cosmic Pulses (the second-fastest, and second-slowest). The opening portions of each can be heard on the analytical tracks from the CD recording. If, instead of concentrating on anything in particular, you let your mind wander, you may discover exactly what he meant about perception in such cases. (And, FWIW, Stockhausen never had anything to do with experimental music—for him, any experimentation involved was something to be finished before the composition process began.)—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:46, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, point taken, although his description of his creation of Mikrophonie #1 which I heard him present in quadraphonic sound did sound experimental to me at the time... I guess these days it's called process music in that the experimentation was part of the composition process rather than the performance. Interesting point... similarly, I suppose that the use of a random number book in composition rather than in performance is noise but is not experimental. Interesting...

Thanks again for your comments, they are very helpful. Andrewa (talk) 01:40, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

My pleasure. However, please do not (necessarily) confuse "process music" with "experimental music". According to Michael Nyman's definition, they may amount to much the same thing, but in the context of Stockhausen (who is expressly excluded by Nyman from the category "experimental"), they are quite separate categories. Mikrophonie I certainly involved considerable preliminary experiments. This was exactly the piece I had in mind when I referred to experiments concluded before beginning composition. Some people may be startled at your reference to quadraphonic sound in this piece, but live performances are meant to use spatialisation of this sort (though it is improvised by the sound projectionist).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:29, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

History is complex, and memories imperfect. But I know there were four of the biggest Yamaha loudpeakers I have seen to this day, brought from Japan for the occasion and all facing inwards towards us, and the publicity prominently proclaimed that we'd have quadraphonic, and Stockhausen was in the centre controlling the whole thing, and had spent the whole afternoon setting it up, and it was certainly in surround. I imagined it was four-track tape, but you think not? Andrewa (talk) 03:58, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I think you are saying there was no six-foot diameter gong with four percussionists tapping, scraping, hooting at it, and moving hand-held micorophones over the surface. In that case, you were doubtless listening to a four-track tape playback. I have only seen this piece performed live on two occasions, but the performance practice involves projecting the transformed sounds over four (or more) channels, surrounding the audience. Stockhausen often managed this by himself, but I have also seen it done with two filter operators, one at each side. The sounds can be made to move forward and back, as well as from side to side, and diagonally. The visual aspect of the tamtam and the antics of the percussionists tend to dominate the proceedings, to the detriment of the work done by the sound projectionist(s). This is also true in pieces like Prozession and Kurzwellen. If you close your eyes and just listen, you discover a whole world of moving sounds whirling all around. Four-channel tape playback has a certain advantage in that it removes the "temptation of the visual".—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:09, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the music came entirely from the tape. But Stockhausen was himself busy, and at each session he said at the end of his introduction although this is not a live performance, please be very quiet, because I will be making fine adjustments throughout the piece and it is important that I hear clearly.

From what you were saying before I was fearful that perhaps these recordings had been lost and only two-channel stereo now existed of Stockhausen's own direction of the piece. That would be a crime. Kontakte was awesome, but in his introductions it almost seemed as if Stockhausen was sick of being stereotyped as its creator, while also still being immensely proud of it. And it was the only one of the four sessions that sold out, the others were quite sparsely attended. The Mikrophonie however he quite obviously delighted in presenting, even to a small audience, and looked far more focussed and intense as he set about its "fine adjustments" than with any other piece. I closed my eyes for the pieces themselves, I can't even remember whether this was his suggestion or not but it worked very well. Andrewa (talk) 06:11, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

This is perfectly consistent with my own experiece. Stockhausen always "rode gain" on tape playbacks, adjusting the levels and balance on the fly. He explained that this was necessary because every room has its own characteristics, so that it is not possible to make a single master recording that will work for every venue. Kontakte of course incorporates a huge amount of spatial movement into the tape itself, but the balance-tweaking issues remain. Since Stockhausen's death I have also attended Bryan Wolfe's seminars in sound projection (Bryan was Stockhausen's assistant for many years), and have formed a deep respect for the importance of the routinely disregarded function of the sound projectionist in Stockhausen's music. At the 2008 Courses (the first ones to take place after Stockhausen died), a "new" version of Kontakte was unveiled, in which we discovered to our astonishment that the music continues at the end for a few seconds beyond the point that everyone (including Bryan) had up until then taken to be the end. These are very soft, wispy sounds that were somewhat enhanced in the cleaner recording, but also were helped by the sound projectionist (Bryan) boosting the level ever so slightly at the end.

Stockhausen often recommended closing the eyes while listening to tape playback, because under these circumstances there is nothing visually relevant in the room, so that looking at things necessarily becomes a distraction from the music.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:51, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Noise in music

I would very much appreciate any comments on User:Andrewa/Noise in music, which I'm about to propose to move to the article namespace (together with its history and talk page of course).

In particular, any big blunders I've made, and any references you can supply to reduce the number of unreferenced sky is blue statements still there, or to fill out the incomplete references I have copied from elsewhere in Wikipedia.

But any comments at all. Of course it doesn't have to be perfect to go "live", that's just the start of the collaboration. But I'd like it to be reasonably good, and to err on the side of conciseness rather than bloat, but on overreferencing rather than under. Andrewa (talk) 03:58, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I've been trying very hard to ignore the discussion on this subject, which has gotten, shall we say, passionate. If things have simmered down to the point of drawing up formal proposals, perhaps I can peek out from under the duvet and risk a look.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:09, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

It has indeed been passionate, and not always pleasant.

I will try not to say anything controversial. It appears that the immediate action will be to move the article (which I, rashly as it turns out, moved from noise (music) to noise (music genre)) to the new title of noise music. There have been many passionate objections to this, but the one person making them has also voted in favour of the move.

There has also been the excellent suggestion that the new article I want to write should be at noise in music rather than at noise (music), and no objections to this so far. So, that's what I am preparing in my user space. Andrewa (talk) 05:45, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your contributions to the article, now "live" of course. Andrewa (talk) 23:25, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

No probs. I'm only sorry I didn't respond a little more quickly to your request. It's nicely done although, as you note on the Talk page, some references are needed. I don't think I can help with sources for the Hendrix items you specifically ask about, but perhaps I can supply some for the entirely unreferenced "avant-garde" section.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:05, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

I would like to ask why you connected verbunkos with "Hungarian people" and deleted all sources I added. In sources was written:

1) "verbunkos a type of music played by Gypsy bands" "representation of gypsy music-making" http://books.google.cz/books?id=EPL5nSMP5C4C&pg=PA89&dq=verbunkos&hl=cs&sa=X&ei=Np2BT4GIHsyXhQeovayWBw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=verbunkos&f=false

2) "music in Hungary was filled mostly by foreign orchesters and composer with Czech and German origin" "Budapest and Hungary is synonym for Gypsy music" "Gypsy musicians were engaged to play verbunkos" http://books.google.cz/books?id=2jca_nfnrDIC&pg=PA22&dq=verbunkos&hl=cs&sa=X&ei=Np2BT4GIHsyXhQeovayWBw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=verbunkos&f=false

3) "small instrumental Roma bands played verbunkos" "music is rooted in hajduk and islamic and slavic music" http://books.google.cz/books?id=WK_130Hqbr4C&pg=PA160&dq=verbunkos&hl=cs&sa=X&ei=Np2BT4GIHsyXhQeovayWBw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=verbunkos&f=false

4) "verbunkos are collectively reffered to as ciganyzenye, which means Gypsy music" http://books.google.cz/books?id=XCe-grzP4swC&pg=PT87&dq=verbunkos&hl=cs&sa=X&ei=Np2BT4GIHsyXhQeovayWBw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=verbunkos&f=false

5) "verbunkos style in Hungary appealed Gypsy musicians" http://books.google.cz/books?id=T9-6-KDJlDwC&pg=PA107&dq=verbunkos&hl=cs&sa=X&ei=Np2BT4GIHsyXhQeovayWBw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=verbunkos&f=false

Please find a sources which say that verbunkos is connected with Hungarian people and not with Roma people, coz it seems like a racism from your side. First five sources at google.books said, that its music of Roma/Gypsy people (not Hungarian people) originating in Hungarian Kingdom. So why did you remove it? I agree that origin is in the Hungarian kingdom (Hungary), but Roma musicians lived there and invented this music. Later it was adopted by Hungarian majority. Btw Slovácky verbúnk (as you written in article) is incorrect term, correctly its Slovácky verbuňk.. Slovácko (Moravian Slovakia) is the specific cultural region where are roots of this dance. And if we have music which is play in Czech republic and Hungary is strange to connect it only with Hungarian people. --Samofi (talk) 08:50, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I did find such a source, and I cited it: the article "Verbunkos" by Jonathan Bellman in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which is I think a bit more reliable than some of the tourist-guide books you offer. The point is (as clearly stated in the article) that the musicians who played the music were usually Roma Gypsies, but the music itself was not of Gypsy origin. As Bellman's article states, "Although the verbunkos is sometimes considered Gypsy music, it was actually Hungarian, often derived ultimately from the song repertory, but played in a fashion characteristic of the Gypsy musicians." This agrees with at least one of your citations: "Gypsy musicians were engaged to play verbunkos", and none of the others actually says that verbunkos was created by Gypsy musicians—only that this style "appealed to" them, and that csárdás and verbunkos are "collectively referred to as ciganyzenye", not that these repertories were created by Gypsies. I adjusted your reference to the Slovácko verbŭnk by following the UNESCO website which you quoted. If the name is misspelled, then you had better inform UNESCO. My Czech is not good enough to notice such mistakes. BTW, I do not know what happened, but despite the multiple reference numbers in the text, your edit ended up displaying only a single source: the article on Haydn's "exoticisms" from the Cambridge Companion to Haydn. This is a very respectable source, of course, but it failed to support the claim of Gypsy origin of the music—in fact, it contradicted this claim along the same lines as Bellman's New Grove article.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:05, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Further to the above: I have double-checked the UNESCO site, where the misspelling occurs on the English page, and have discovered it spelled differently on the Spanish and French versions: Slovácko verbuňk. This still does not agree withttp://www.djangobooks.com/site-news/transnational-dialogues-otherness-and-authenticity-roma-music-in-europe/h the spelling you describe as correct (and which my ear tells me is the possessive case of Slovácko—what little Czech I have is purely aural, I never learned to read or write the language).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:54, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your arguments and sorry for my tone above. But I cannot agree. Gypsy bands were used by military to play THEIR music for Hungarian recruits (ie citizens of Hungarian kingdom) [2]. Its not a tourist guide but a book from the professor of music Carol Ann Bell from Oklahoma Baptist University. As it was written in the source above music has Hajduk roots with Islamic elements and Slavic elements. Mr. Horowitz (Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington) is specialist for a Gypsy music and in his opinion verbunkos belongs to Gypsy music of Hungary. I will cite him: "During the 18 th century it was fashionable for Hungarian nobles to maintain their own Gypsy orchestras (i.e. several violins, a bass, and a cimbalom ) who specialized in a genre called verbunkos" [3] Bela Bartok wrote: "The verbunkos sources, not yet completely known, include some of the traditions of old Hungarian popular music, certain Balkan and Slavic elements, probably through the intermediaries of the gypsies". So Gypsies were intermediaries of this music. Origin of this music is connected with Kingdom of Hungary (Hungary) and with Gypsies (Roma people). But why did you linked it with "Hungarian people" [4]? It was a multinational country and only 35% of population of the kingdom was Hungarian [5]. We dont know exactly which nation from kingdom played this music the first, but almost all sources say that Gypsies.. --Samofi (talk) 19:53, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Little school of Czech grammar :) Here is Czech alphabet: [6]. Such letter "ŭ" is not present there. --Samofi (talk) 20:04, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I accept your apology, and of course you are entitled to your opinion, but Wikipedia nevertheless requires reliable sources. Prof. Bell's book on Brahms is an interesting and certainly respectable source, but all that I see on that page are references to Gypsy performing style: "noted for two general playing styles …", "The ballgató style was based on melodies, or nota, from popular vocal literature". (Prof. Bell does not say whether this literature was Hungarian, Romany, Slavic, Turkish, or something else.) "The free and rhapsodic manner in which the gypsy musicians played often transformed these melodies in ways that had little to do with expressing the original meaning of the text." "The Hungarian gypsy musicians became known throughout Europe for a highly improvisatory style …", and so on. The description of the verbunkos that follows similarly describes the manner of performing, but does not mention where the melodies came from. Certainly this performing style is extremely important, and it could even be argued that it is the most distinctive feature defining verbunkos, but that is not the same thing as saying the music was originally created by these musicians. Your other quotations also address only the manner of performing or, in the case of Bartók's quotation, mention gypsies as "intermediaries", which strongly implies that they did not create the melodies. None of this conflicts with what Bellman says in The New Grove. As to the link, the only viable choices I could see were "Hungarian language" and "Hungarian people". Of the two, it seemed more suitable to choose "people". If you think just plain "Hungary" better represents what Matthew Head means in his article in the Haydn Companion book, then by all means make the substitution. Thank you for the alphabet. I had never seen that character before (I am not completely unfamiliar with what written Czech looks like, even though I can read it only with difficulty), but it was what I copied from the UNESCO website. I could not know that the diacritic belonged on the next letter.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:39, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Jerome, many thanks for your guidance and help throughout this project. Milkunderwood (talk) 00:38, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

My pleasure. Always glad to be of help.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:58, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your note - I've responded on my talkpage. Milkunderwood (talk) 19:20, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

And again now. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:34, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Jerome, I am curious where you think Phil Kline's "Unsilent Night" belongs, if not in this genre. I think this page on Electroacoustic Music could use some further clarification. Thanks! (Sansevieria4 (talk)) —Preceding undated comment added 19:39, 15 April 2012 (UTC).

Having never heard it (or even heard of it until this morning), I can only suppose from the description that it is electroacoustic music. What sort of "clarification" do you think the Electroacoustic music article needs? By all means, make suggestions on the article's Talk page.

If on the other hand you are asking why I removed Unsilent Night from the list of representative pieces in that article it is because, unlike all the other pieces mentioned, it has no article on Wikipedia and clearly does not match the others in terms of notability. This may in part be down to its relatively recent creation (of the included works, only Boulez's Répons dates from after 1970). In time, Unsilent Night may well establish notability comparable to, say, Varèse's Poème électronique, Babbitt's Philomel, or Davidovsky's Synchronisms No. 6, but at present the alternative to removing it would be to lift the restriction to "notable" and then add several hundred thousand other electroacoustic compositions from the past sixty-odd years. Such indiscriminate lists are strongly discouraged on Wikipedia, and for good reason.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:02, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Please see rondo. Hyacinth (talk) 03:32, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Utterly amazing. Who let the non-Italian-speaking creative writers loose without a dictionary? I suppose the best way of dealing with this is to create a separate article on the rondò. In the meantime, whoever wrote that article should be set the task of translating "One and yet one more anchor is still an anchor" into Italian. Thanks, Hyacinth, I needed a laugh!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:57, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. How do you make a distinction in Wikipedia article titles between two words differentiated only by an accent mark?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:01, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Article created. The problem had to do with a redirect created to steer the Italian spelling to the English one. Since the Italian spelling is now used in English for a different meaning, I simply overrode the redirect. Thanks again, Hyacinth, for bringing this to my attention.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:11, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

In your edit summary you linked to Wikipedia:Citing sources#How to present citations. FYI, the guideline has had no section by that name since September 24, 2010. The section name introduced in that edit has changed again; its current name is Variation in citation methods, with shortcut WP:CITEVAR.  --Lambiam 06:59, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. I shall change my shortcut file accordingly.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:07, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

I know this is a bit outside your bailiwick, but would you mind reverting back to the last stable version, remind the editor that content must be sourced, and that he should keep his personal comments to himself? I would really appreciate it. Cheers! ---RepublicanJacobite_TheFortyFive 02:43, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

By the time I got there, the editor had removed his unsupported comments. The article is on my watchlist now, however, and I shall be keeping my eyes open.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:14, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

I appreciate that. Thank you. ---RepublicanJacobite_TheFortyFive 03:22, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Bonjour, je suis le photographe qui a réalisé cette photo de Stockhausen en 1980, ainsi que précisé dans la légende de ma photo, au Palais de la Musique de Strasbourg, lors d'un concert avec l'Orchestre Philharmonique et les Percussions de Strasbourg. Merci de ne plus modifier cette information. --Ctruongngoc (talk) 07:19, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Go to Talk:E (musical note). Can you answer this question to put into the article?? Similar info already exists at F (musical note). Georgia guy (talk) 00:57, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh, brother! The problem was really with the "F (musical note)" article, which was inside-out, upside-down, and backwards, amongst other problems. Clearly someone has confused "note" (a written symbol or the musical concept associated with it) with "tone" (a vibrating frequency or the physiological response to it). I suppose the article on E could use mention of D-double-sharp, but on the other hand, maybe separate articles should be created for all of these note names. (Please, please, do not take this seriously—it is a joke!)—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:46, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi Jerome. Thanks for straightening me out on the business of putting translations in quotes or not. I'd been looking everywhere I could think of in the MoS for that, without success. The reason I got to tweaking the article the other day is that I'm considering putting it up for GAN. What do you reckon about that? Rgds, --Stfg (talk) 18:06, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

You are very welcome. As far as I am aware, the Wikipedia MoS does not address this question, but the Chicago Manual of Style does. It is entirely possible that other style manuals may give conflicting opinions, but Chicago consistently comes down in favour of the simplest format. Another variation given by Chicago is for situations in which a foreign term is presented in italics, immediately followed by a translation. In that case, quotation marks may be used instead of parentheses.

I think you should go for it and put the article up for GAN. I imagine that, no matter how much careful tweaking you give it first, you will still get some suggestions for further improvement, and that can only be a good thing.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:26, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Agreed, and nominated. If it passes, credit will be at least as much to you as to me, of course. --Stfg (talk) 10:34, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

I shall be watching with interest, and if I can address any criticisms, I shall do so gladly.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:45, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Wow, it started quickly! (I'm thinking of reviewing Janacek as a quid pro quo, by the way.) Are you sure about removing the template from FN8? We've used {{cite book}} for a couple of others, and I think the change may actually have made them less similar. --Stfg (talk) 23:50, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

The problem with the template is that it does actually specify a particular bibliographical format, and that format does not conform to the established one for that article. I changed it per WP:CITEVAR, therefore. I have to say, however, that this article is unique in my experience, in its use of a hidden list of references, with only the pointers embedded in the text of the article itself. (Usually, the main ref is placed at the first citation of the source, which means that there is no need to make a ref-name for an item used only once.) Still, once you get used to it, it works well enough. One problem with the templates that have been used (and several are still present) is that they are meant for an alphabetical reference list, not for footnotes (they invert the author's name, for example, and insert a comma, whereas the established format is traditional footnote style, with authors' names in normal order). As a result, several have been perverted in order to produce the suitable format. This is contrary to Wikipedia guidelines on templates, however. Beyond this, there are a host of other inconsistencies which will need to be resolved if the article is to achieve GA status. We should probably discuss this on the article's Talk page.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:46, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I see what happened. When I wrote the first version, I used {{cite book}} with the author= field. Much later, when I added Walsh, I used the first= and last= field, causing the name reversal in that case. I will correct that in a moment, without prejudice, by which I mean that I've noted your dislike of templates (you mentioned it in an edit summary once), and if you want to get rid of them here, I won't object.

The organization of references I used is list-defined references. It's less common than other methods because it was deprecated until about three years ago, but it's far from unique. I do a lot of Guild of Copy Editors work and therefore see a lot of different writing styles (if one can call it style!), and I do see it from time to time. I always use it, given the option, because it makes it much easier to find the definition of any given reference.

Anyway, that's what's happened. If you want to go to the talk page about it, please do, or else just change what you want to. There won't be a fight :) --Stfg (talk) 08:42, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. I did assume this format must not be entirely unprecedented—I simply had not come across it elsewhere. I think I am sympathetic to its purpose, which is to collect all of the references together in one place where they can be organized alphabetically, chronologically, or in some other tidy fashion. I find traditional full-footnote citations the least satisfactory of all formats, in print media as well as online, especially when there are a large number of references with shortened refs for subsequent entries, since the reader ends up spending more time chasing down the references than actually reading the article. This has recently become a problem at Noise in music, as the article has expanded enormously after its creation a few weeks ago, and I am currently in the process of converting the references to a list-based format, after consultation with the other editors. It will be a long task.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:43, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Mmm, a long job indeed. By "full-footnote citations", do you mean any method in which the footnote number links directly to the full details of the citation? If so, one thing I like about that as an editor (it wouldn't effect the "customer") is that if you you have pop-ups enabled, you can hover over the footnote number, see the citation details in the pop-up, and even shift-click on the URL, the ISBN, the DOI, or whatever, all without scrolling or bringing up a second window to display the references. List-defined references preserve that ability while getting rid of most of the clutter that goes between the ref tags in articles that put the whole kaboosh inline, which makes copy editing a pig in heavily cited articles. That's what I like about LDRs. Of course, a copy editor takes what he's given and can't afford very strong preferences. Hey ho! --Stfg (talk) 19:10, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I mean the traditional footnote format from print media, where the entire bibliographic listing is placed in a footnote the first time an item is referenced, rather than in an alphabetical reference list, and I know exactly what you mean about ploughing through heavily cited articles. It hadn't occurred to me that you could have the data pop up by floating the cursor over the reference number. However, this may depend on the browser you are using. I have just tried it with Safari 4.1.3 and Firefox 3.6.28 (under OS-X 10.4.11), and while I get popups for links to Wikipedia articles, I get nothing for footnote numbers.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:16, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Even with Navigation popups enabled in the Browsing section of the Gadgets tab of your preferences? That's a shame. (I have IE8, which is usually behind everyone else with such things.)

Oh, I see: not pop-ups enabled in the browser, but in Wikipedia tools. I'll have to try that, thanks (and Microsoft stopped supporting IE for Mac in 2001, so IE5.1 is the most recent version and that is now a teensy bit out of date).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:21, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Back to Threni, I'm a bit alarmed by the changes you've made to the references there today, as I think you are fighting the templates. It's very risky to open the parenthesis in one field and close it in another, for example. What happens if someone changes the implementation of the templates to format the output differently? If you're really keen to have that exact format, I won't object, but I think they need writing longhand, without invoking templates at all. Simon. --Stfg (talk) 20:47, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, exactly so. I have yet to meet a template that will handle any known citation format properly—they all make up their own formats, and you can either take it or leave it. You can see how the template leaves half parentheses attached to issue numbers of journals, for example. The boldfaced volume numbers can be defeated by marking-up the numbers within the template as boldface, but defeating templates is not encouraged, and seems an awful waste of effort, in any case. That was why I remove one template the other day, but you put it back in (with some features defeated) so I thought I should see what could be done with it.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:21, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

It was to make that one compatible with the others, which neither of us had accomplished up till then. I did say it was "without prejudice", and I did use the template parameters as they are defined to be used. Anyway, we need to decide what to do. I suggest that either I convert all of them to use {{cite}} templates with standard parameter usage (as I originally did, except for the mistake in Walsh), or I stand aside and let you un-template them in your chosen format. I'm happy to go either way. Which do you prefer? Best, Simon. --Stfg (talk) 21:50, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Since "standard parameter usage" means the idiosyncratic standards of the template(s), I'll go with manual formatting, thanks. I think I have gotten about half of them to that stage, anyway. It won't take long to complete the task.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:16, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

OK, it's a deal. --Stfg (talk) 22:30, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

(←) Hi. You'll have seen it made it to GA without much difficulty -- just a bit more lead needed. Thanks for working with me on it. It was a pleasure. (I looked at the Janacek GAN, but unfortunately I cannot access enough of the references to justify doing the review. Frustrating, as the article looks well towards FA in quality.) Rgds, --Stfg (talk) 18:38, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I saw that it sailed through. Not surprising, as it was well prepared in advance of nomination. I'll take a look myself at the Janáček GAN, though if the sources are largely Czech publications, my institution's library probably doesn't hold them, and few such publications are available online. A pity, since I read Czech like a native—a three-year-old native, unfortunately, but there you go.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:18, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Take a look at Aleksandar Simic and Alexander Lokshin. Both full of problems.--Galassi (talk) 17:51, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Two very different sets of problems, I notice. Lokshin at least has got an article in New Grove, which will help enormously in improving that article's credibility as well as its content. The article on Simić, however, looks like it was written by his press agent. For a start, the list of "more acclaimed works" needs balancing with "less-acclaimed works" (or should that be "fewer acclaimed works"?)—unless the peacock language is simply removed, which would probably reduce the article to half its present length. The main problem, however, is the lack of good sources. As far as I can see, everything cited amounts to a press release written on the composer's behalf by interested parties.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:18, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand the reason for deletion of the info box. It didn't have have the "please don't add infobox" tag, s assumed its safe to do it, don't you think? Or at least can I put the "please don't add infobox" tag so that other users like me wont be confused. Thanks!--Mishae (talk) 05:49, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Two things: (1) Have you checked the document I cited, and (2) did you notice my objection to the use of the wrong kind of infobox (even assuming that the requested consensus had been sought for use of any infobox at all)?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:01, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Well, I have changed it to a composer box haven't I? Plus, how can I know if consensus agrees with the use of the infobox or not? Are you a part of the consensus? And yes, I did checked the document that you have cited. If this is a wrong infobox, can you show me the right one? And to prove I have read it, here is my question: It said that the reason behind no infobox thing is because the dates are confusing. Now, I understand that when there is old date/new date segment, but if there is only new date, like here, whats wrong?--Mishae (talk) 12:44, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

I think your browser must have linked you to the wrong paragraph, or even the wrong page entirely. There is nothing at all in the section to which I intended to direct you about dates being confusing. On the contrary, it gives three reasons: (1) They may give trivia undue emphasis and prominence at the head of the article, (2) They tend to be redundant by duplicating the lead, and (3) They are often over-complex, vague, confused, or misleading. Since linking apparently is unreliable, I shall quote the most relevant passage: "We think it is normally best, therefore, to avoid infoboxes altogether for classical musicians, and we prefer to add an infobox to an article only following consensus for that inclusion on the article's talk page." If you will please post on that article's Talk page a request to add an infobox, you will soon discover whether or not consensus may develop among the page's active editors (including myself) for its addition. While no Wikipedia Project has the authority to forbid or mandate anything, it is generally regarded as rude to ignore their stated preferences, especially when an offer of negotiation on a case-by-case basis has been made.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:59, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

O.K. Then why the consensus can't simply add this: < please do not add an infobox, per Wikipedia:WikiProject_Composers#Biographical_infoboxes> So that it won't be confusing for me, or any other users for that matter?--Mishae (talk) 02:45, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

That might not be a bad idea, but do you have any idea how many thousands of composer articles there are on Wikipedia? The alphabetical list is here, if you re interested. It would be a very big job to tag them all.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:28, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the warning, but I except a challenge. Some articles like Mozart, are already tagged, and he is only an example. I assume there are a half of them that are tagged. Not only I will tag them, but I will also ask for infobox on the composers talkpage (and I mean every composer talkpage!) I will start NOW! 12:45 am, in Minnesota!--Mishae (talk) 05:44, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Explain to me why this composer is suppose to have an infobox?: Lucien Capet--Mishae (talk) 17:33, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

I know you will find this hard to believe, but Wikipedia editors sometimes have differing points of view. The way this is generally dealt with is by a sort of "grandfathering" system. If a particular format is adopted when an article is created (e.g., UK English, or parenthetical referencing), then that format is regarded as "established" for the article, and may be changed only by consensus. If you would like an example of the kind of debate this can generate, with specific reference to composer infoboxes, take a look at this talk page.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:58, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

I thought your knowledge may be of assistance with the image and discussion at Talk:Diminution#Relevance: Division Viol. Hyacinth (talk) 06:35, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Remembering that we talked about Waldhorn a while ago, I wonder if you could advise me about Corno da caccia, - possibly a redirect to something existing but what best? (There are more red links in the List of Bach cantatas.) I look at BWV 174, 5 parts (2Cc) added to a Brandenburg concerto movement, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:50, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi Gerda. This is an interesting Wikipedia issue, but the musical question is much simpler to answer. Corno da caccia is Italian for "hunting horn" (literally "horn of the chase"), and in the framework of Bach's music means the natural horn of the early 18th century, held either on the right forearm or in both hands and played with the bell pointing more or less upward, producing a brassy, blaring sort of sound (and with some notes difficult not to play badly out of tune). Later in the 18th century, the natural horn came to be played with the bell down at the player's right side, with the right hand held partly in the bell (as the horn is still played today). By adjusting the position of the hand in the bell, semitone alterations of the pitch could be achieved, and the hand-in-bell technique mellowed the tone as well. Today, natural horns played in this way are referred to as "hand horns", but historically they were just "corni" (or, as we discussed before, "Waldhörner"). The Wikipedia problem is that the article Horn (instrument) says almost nothing about the horn before valves were added, giving the impression that the valved horn sprang, fully formed like Athena, from the brow of Zeus. The history section is badly in need of supplementation to make clear these distinctions, and once that is done a link for "corno da caccia" can be made to that section. I have got Anthony Baines's book Brass Instruments: Their History and Development at home, which should provide adequate material for this purpose. In the article's present state, linking there would increase the confusion rather than clarify things. Consequently, I have removed the redlinking from the BWV 174 article, and corrected the grammar (saying "two corno da caccia" is the inverse of asking in a coffee shop for "one biscotti", or in a Russian bakery for "one piroshki").—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:35, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, we will see when the fighters for "cellos" will show up for the plural. (Had some "oboi" reverted already.) I hope then that the hunt can be opened for Pentecost? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:45, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

Ah, well, even "corno da caccias" ("cornos da caccia"?) would have been better than it was, but this instrument name has not been naturalized into English, the way that "oboe" and "(violon)cello" have. Somehow the image of shotguns blasting away at fowl descending from the heavens seems inappropriate for Pentecost. What can Bach have been thinking?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:05, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

As you probably read: Bach had become director of a Collegium musicum of musically interested Bürger and had to take what he got. Oboes, fine, but what about the d'amore? multi-culti, following the caccias, it would become amores, well ... amorous to amusing, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:14, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

The Historically Informed Performance crowd might well keep in mind how "authentic" it was to mangle foreign terms badly, while at the same time maintaining pretensions to speaking languages thought "superior" to one's own. (There is a letter from the future Augustus III of Poland written from Venice to his father, Augustus the Strong, concerning the recruiting of musicians for the Dresden court, in what the son—and possibly the father as well—thought was French.) Consequently, it may be a complete distortion of the truth to suppose Bach had flawless Italian or French, and his use of the accepted forms of Italian instrument names in Germany in the 18th century may well have caused Italian musicians either mirth or indignation—or both: "Oboen d'amore", "Jagdcornen", "Violen da gamba", etc.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:58, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

I reworked that beginning (it was getting pretty fragmented, redundant, and even self-contradictory, as many WP articles do) and hoped that those with the reference material at hand would clean up any mis-steps I'd made. So thanks for doing that! A welcome relief amid all the marginally-knowledgeable, semi-literate, half-baked editing I've seen lately. - Special-T (talk) 19:51, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the kind words. However, I must confess that the addition of the Rendall material was actually intended to produce a self-contradictory effect, in response to the addition of the "etymology" material taken from a school-level online dictionary by a redlinked editor calling himself BuzyBody, who has inserted similar marginally knowledgeable, semi-literate, half-baked etymologies into a number of musical-instrument articles recently. Several have been removed outright (not all by myself), but in this case the material seemed less disruptive than in the Trumpet and Cor anglais articles, for example. Of course I did not intend that the contradiction should remain in place, so your edit was just what I was hoping for. The facts of the case seem to be that the word appears in French a decade or more before it shows up in English, so it is entirely possible that the transmission to English was via French, even if the origin is Italian. I have not yet consulted the opinion of the OED, but I had the Rendall book off of the shelf already, to check some other details, and his prose was quite vehement on the subject!—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:08, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Yeah - I did leave a note on that editor's page to maybe read up & slow down. To no avail, apparently. - Special-T (talk) 21:12, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Nicola doesn't have a PhD, and the paper is an unpublished master thesis. It fails WP:V among other WP's.--Galassi (talk) 00:22, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps you would like to explain which part of that very long guideline you believe this source does not satisfy. Then we may move on to these "other WP's". I agree that there is no evidence that Nicola Schneider has a PhD, and the listing in the Wikipedia article describes the paper as a "tesi di laurea specialistica" which, if I understand the term correctly, is roughly the equivalent of a Master's thesis. The WP:Identifying_reliable_sources#Scholarship guideline on Master's theses says they may be considered reliable only if "they can be shown to have had significant scholarly influence". I admit there is little or no evidence of it having had such influence. However, OCLC Worldcat says of this document "Pavia, Univ., Diss., 2006/2007", not "thesis", and does not indicate the degree. Google Books list it simply as "Published 2007". As far as I can tell, the nearest copy to me is in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek—Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, which is not convenient, but neither is it impossible to consult there.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:55, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

You do a great job eliminating the 19th century works from the list, but why 21st also? If a 20th century composer still works in the 21st century why not list recent works also? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:32, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

The real question is where to draw the line between the centuries. If a composer died in 1901, after having composed nothing at all for three years, does he actually count as a 20th-century composer? Well, no, of course not, and Verdi is not in the list for exactly that reason. What about an important operatic composer who died in 1908, but who composed only some inconsequential piano pieces after the turn of the century? A marginal case, perhaps. What about a composer born in 1982, whose mature works only began to appear after 2001? OK, so what about those born in 1979? Or 1973, and so on? It is arbitrary, of course, when a major 20th-century composer like Berio, for example, composes a piano sonata in the 21st century, but is this really so different than insisting on listing Goldmark's Rustic Wedding Symphony, just because no-one has ever heard of the works he composed after 1900?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:47, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

As said above I agree with 19th century works not being representative for this list. But for composers born in the second half of the 20th century, why leave their youthful works and drop more mature ones, just for being composed in the 21st century? I would leave them until there is a similar list for the 21st century. Dress rehearsal for Lux Aurumque (2000, composer needs a clean-up) tonight ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:49, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Fluxus article

I've been thinking of extensively rewriting this page for ages, and have just started. If there are any citations that you specifically want, then let me know. I can't possibly keep the writing going whilst going through all the html looking for comments at this stage in the process. I'll let you know when it's finished, if you want, and then we can discuss citations more?? Franciselliott (talk) 19:05, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Why don't you place an {{Under construction}} template at the top of the article, to warn other editors that extensive work is underway? That way, we shouldn't disturb your ongoing work. The problems that I saw earlier today had to do with cryptic entries in the footnotes. The referencing system in use is one involving short title-author references in the notes, coupled to full listing in a separate list. Nothing wrong with this, except that a number of short entries had no corresponding full entry. Then I discovered the separate "Bibliography" further up the article, stuffed full of all kinds of things, including two or three items missing from the list of references. As you work, I would only ask that you try to keep the citations comprehensible. Divergences in format and the like are of secondary importance, and can always be fixed later.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:34, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi Jerome, sorry to trouble you, question concerning this discussion: is the English usage problematic in the lead? according to one perspective it should be simplified. Personally i believe it is succinct, yes clicking to other articles is required, but why should this be seen as a problem? Semitransgenic _talk. 17:40, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

The problem is that the so-called "consensus version" leaves Mozart's nationality AMBIGUOUS AND UNCLEAR in the article. Should an encyclopedic article not really make clear what Mozart's actual nationality or ethnicity was? Or what he himself considered himself? This "consensus" is nonsense, but just appeasement to people such as you, who for some reason don't want the word "German" anywhere (even in a compromise situation with the term "German-Austrian") in this article in regard to his nationality. Not cool or reasonable. Mozart was German-Austrian. Because if he wasn't that, then what nationality would you call him, given the variables in this situation?

Also, you did wrong in reverting rudely without discussing or addressing what I wrote in Talk first. Which is why in a few days I will (probably) undo what you did, simply because I put real effort to explain why I edited the way I did, and took much time in Talk. Which you didn't even bother with or care about. Again, not cool, or WP kosher.

You should have talked to me in Discussion page, before doing what you did, at this context. I can't do anything anymore, given 3RR etc etc. But come on, man. The article is sorely lacking, leaving it incomplete, and his nationality way too ambiguous or unknown. Why should a WP article on Mozart do that, but not for many other musical composers? Regards. Hashem sfarim (talk) 00:13, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Read my edit summary. Read New Grove. Read The Oxford Companion to Music. Read The Oxford Dictionary of Music. Read the editorial note in hidden text at the head of the article. Wikipedia insists on reliable sources. When such sources are in conflict, the conflict may be described in neutral language, but the article lede is not the place to carry out such an exposition. When editors disagree as violently as they have in this case, the only reasonable option is to leave things ambiguous, or leave things out.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:49, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

I understand, but your response here shows you miss the point, or don't care about the point. What I said was REGARDLESS of your edit summary, or reasons (even if they're somewhat valid, which they might be), you did wrong (in this context) of simply reverting me without first addressing me on the talk page, and all that I wrote there, out of WP respect, protocol, and etiquette, and policy. You should have (in this specific context) stated your case on article Talk, and NOT revert yet, given what was going on. You could have stated this stuff about "New Grove" and "Oxford" there, on the Discussion page. Because also, there's no need in the lede to have such a "reliable source" for the (sky is blue) fact that Mozart was "German-Austrian". What's the big deal with this anyway? Sighs... Again, I'll re-state, you should have, out of more deference and respect, NOT reverted yet, but address me on Talk, where I took much time to state my arguments and case. Regards. Hashem sfarim (talk) 01:36, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi, Jerome. Thanks for fixing my reference for "Donkey Carol". I wonder if there is a necessity to have 2 levels of reference (Article > Notes > Sources) instead of the more usual one in other articles (Article > References). I've also added a link to sheet music of Nobuo Uematsu's "Don't Be Afraid", but I cannot read Japanese to be able to derive info e.g. author, publisher and year. cmɢʟee☎✉ 19:27, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, there is a reason for using an alphabetical list of references: to reduce clutter in the note list, which is very long already in the quintuple meter article, and to present all the references in an orderly fashion, where they may be consulted independent of the items they verify. The main principle there, however, is to maintain the established referencing format, per WP:CITEVAR. Far better, in my opinion, would be to replace the note list with in-text parenthetical referencing, but I keep meeting resistance whenever I suggest this eminently sensible system. I will check the link you have added, but I am afraid that I, too, read no Japanese at all. Nevertheless, it is sometimes possible to coax the required information out of such sources by using indirect means.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:47, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Greetings, I would submit that WP:WTAF applies more to usage in lists, "see also", etc. In the musical scale article, the tetratonic scale former redlink was useful in that it pointed out a gap in coverage of scale types. WP:RED and WP:WTAF both note constructive uses of redlinks. In this case, there is no way that di/tri/tetra-tonic scales can be considered non-notable, so this isn't like just adding a little known violist to List of violists who may or not meet WP:N. Those terms are fundamental terms of music theory, but don't happen to have articles because the topics are somewhat niche. I'd submit they certainly should have articles, and I've written one today, but in the interim their absence as fundamental articles should be recognised with a redlink.

Just my stance, and in the case of tetratonic a moot point now, but I think the other redlinks I added should remain too. Shoot me a line if you disagree, MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:11, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

In my experience, this is the very first time that an article was actually created in anything like a reasonable time after a redlink was added to an article, and I am gratified to see it (especially since it is a relatively obscure term, even if self-explanatory to the professional). Since links are meant to help readers understand unfamiliar concepts, and added redlinks typically result in no action for years, it seems to me that there is a virtue in removing them promptly enough so that the adding editor will see the notice and do something about it.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:18, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Granted, long-lasting redlinks are to be avoided, but these are fundamental notable terms which are lacking articles. In that case, even if I weren't planning to write them soon (which I am), the redlink can serve as a "red flag" noting a term that really should have an article. Mono/di/tri/tetra-tonic scales aren't just theoreticals, but actual scales used in music; I'm actually surprised we didn't have them before. I came to that page specifically looking for info on the tetra, since I've been playing pentatonic stuff recently (Appalachian and Finnish) and it occurred to me that logically there must be some usage of the next scale down. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:41, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

I do understand the principle. However, in my experience redlinks seldom produce that result, for the simple fact that the only people who notice them are readers wanting to learn about the topic in question and find themselves frustrated by a link to a nonexistent article. I am not actually surprised that we did not have these articles before, but instead assumed that there were already redirects to the central "scale" article, since I believed that tetratonic and smaller scales would scarcely be notable enough to require separate articles. Your new tetratonic scale article has proved me wrong, at least for four-note scales. I am impressed, and look forward to an equally comprehensive article on the monotonic "scale" (not to mention the hemiotonic and null scales ;-).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:18, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

In Wikipedia talk:Article titles#The disambiguation policy does not respect the naming criteria I started a crucial discussion about the controversial policy that some people (improperly) uses to reject the RM Musical scale → Scale (music). I would love to have your support. Paolo.dL (talk) 20:25, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for calling my attention to this. I see that your discussion with User:JHunterJ (who makes a specialty of disambiguation issues) has already clarified some things, concerning the relationship between titling and disambiguation conventions. I shall have to think a bit about what is left, namely the desirability of consistency (in itself a no-brainer for me) and the issue of "natural" vs "parenthetical" structure, outside of the area of disambiguation. This is not as simple as it looks at first glance, I think.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:05, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

I look forward to reading your contribution. To me, it seems quite simple. I think being neutral is wise in this case. Otherwise, we would be forced to choose Musical scale instead of Scale (music), on which we reached consensus in an official RM. Maybe you can help me to see what's the problem in being neutral. See what I wrote to the arbitrator who closed the RM in Talk:Scale (music):

• User talk:Jenks24#"Natural" disambiguation is not always natural