Hi CC,
thanks for your recent Holst typesets – are your various Mozart offerings under revision (and will they resurface)?
My view on this subject is probably well-known as well: some templates were initially nothing more than a laundry list of the work titles, which themselves were of little help in navigating to a specific work in the set, seeing as the page names for standard types (symphonies, sonatas, concertos etc) have often been lacking. (For examples of this, vide first edits of the Mozart piano concertos template and the Beethoven piano sonatas template.)
Since the category page is limited to the titles of the work pages, which often lack important information (such as the correct catalogue number; or the key; or a “sobriquet” by which a well-known piece is often referred to), the templates are sort of a stop-gap solution: e.g. you might have found yourself on the wrong page of a set of works, say the one which is in G minor instead of the one which is in A major, but instead of having to search every single page title, the template acts as a key with all of the extra nitty-gritty info to help you find the one you want. (Again to use an example, if you were looking for the Mozart symphony with a catalogue number of "173dB", you would certainly not find it listed that way on the Mozart category page.)
My view is that under this remit, each template should include a maximised quantity of helpful detail in as concise a form as possible, and be self-consistent in the way it is formatted: I don’t see that this implies that each template has to feature exactly the same type of information and the same formatting (though some common features are obviously desirable). In other words, I am happy for each template to be slightly different, all the better to easily present the salient distinguishing features of each body of works, provided that the information in the template itself is presented in a self-consistent fashion.
An example of this would be, yes, the way key signatures are displayed. In Haydn’s 107 symphonies there are only eleven minor key works; and only two in Mozart’s 50-odd. So for obvious reasons, the word “major” has dropped out of each template rather than have 150 repetitions of the word. I don’t think this is particularly controversial in the case of Haydn: the works with sobriquets and unusual key signatures are quite obvious to the eye. With Mozart, the situation is a little less happy, because the Köchel catalogue is unfortunately rather messy and almost half of the works go under more than one number, and the result is cluttered. The two minor key works are often called the “Little” and “Great” G minor symphonies, so the template used the lower-case convention (“g” = G minor, as opposed to “G–”) rather than repeat G minor twice on each line. Other differences may be noted: the Haydn symphonies are strictly in Anthony van Hoboken’s catalogue order – which is far from being strictly chronological, unlike the sixth Köchel catalogue (which is still “not quite right” either).
Outside the classical period, it makes rather less sense to assume either a major tonality as representing the majority of works, or to assume the composer has insisted on a central tonality – for six of Mahler's nine symphonies it is foolish to define the work by a single key centre such as C minor or D major. Should there be an attempt to resolve this by some system for describing axial tonality (where two keys work in alternation or opposition, like Nielsen’s 5th) or progressive tonality (a planned journey of two or more keys, as in most of Mahler’s)?
Anyway, that’s all I want to say for the moment on templates: in terms of what is displayed on the Work page in the General information box, there’s better scope for lengthy key information. The capitalisation of "Major" or "Minor" should be unequivocally removed when it’s found, but the trouble is with so many thousand pages and numerous contributors filling in the information about works, to ensure complete consistency is a hair-tearing exercise best left for robotic minions to straighten out.
Regards, PML
