Good online resource for info on classical music?

Cafe Society
1

Hello dopers,

Lately I’ve been slowly correcting the metadata of my massive MP3 collection ripped from CDs over the past 10 years or so.

I’ll admit, I’m a little fussy about it. Full track, artist and album names (none of this ‘Track 4’ by ‘Unknown Artist’ nonsense for me…) etc. Single universal renderings of artist names ( ‘The Beatles’, not ‘Beatles’, ‘beatles’, ‘thebeatles’ and ‘Beatles, The’) and so on, but I digress.

One of the things I like is to make sure the year is correct. For me, the ‘correct’ year should be reflect either (preferably) the year of composition or failing that then the year of public release (ie: first performance or first release to radio stations/charts or first appearance on a single/album).

The 20th/21st century stuff is, obviously, easy to find online information on. But I have a pretty wide-ranging taste in music and have a reasonable-sized collection of classical material alongside the rest of it. When it comes to this, I really like to know the year of composition if possible but failing that am happy with the year of the first performance of the work. This is the case even if the recording I have is by more modern musicians. The only exception to that would be if said musicians were performing a radically different musical interpretation of the piece - that would warrant its own year (See what I mean about the fussy?).

Clearly, some things are easy. Well-known, well-loved stuff is a cinch. I can get the year for Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ with no trouble. And for some stuff, the relevant years are printed in the inserts of the CDs I got them from.

However some CDs I no longer have or they simply don’t have the information. And some stuff is just proving difficult to find online. I wouldn’t call anything I listen to truly obscure, but while there are lots of musical resources, I can’t seem to find anything that would give me, say, years for every Vivaldi piece for which the year can be known or otherwise estimated. Is there anything like that out there?

I always try googling the specific piece and any variations on its name I can think of, as well as its ‘number’ in cases where the works of particular composers have been assigned a code and number as a universal reference (I don’t know what that practice is referred to as, sorry). This works for some things, but far from all.

Also by googling, I’ve come up with a number of different classical music databases, but while these are very informative in other regards, they often simply list known works and/or give biographies of the composers.

If there is really nothing online, I would consider buying* a good reference book if anyone could recommend something.

I realise I’m asking for something quite specific, but I’m grateful for any advice offered. Thanks!

*when I say buying, I of course mean asking for it for my birthday.

2

I use allclassical.com or Grove Music Online. The latter requires a subscription though.

3

Wikipeida can help a lot, including with the standard catalogues of Mozart, Bach, Handel, Schubert and others, or links to them, particularly useful if you already know the BWV/K/etc. number of a work. In some other cases there’s a particularly detailed article including a full list of works, Shostakovich being a good example.

For those pieces this doesn’t help with, somebody here might have access to Grove and is prepared to check what the details are in there rather than you going to the cost of a subscription - I don’t have online access but will quite happily take a list along to my local library, which has the hard copy.

In many cases, however, you are likely to need to turn to reference works for individual composers, so what I’d suggest is making use of the collective knowledge and resources of people here - post a list of works in question, and I’m sure that we can make light work of it :slight_smile: (I hope!)

4

I found allmusic to be invaluable resource for this. I’m also a little particular about my metadata although I don’t have a giant classical selection.

For classical tracks, you can typically search for the CD. Then each track is clickable. Many times the detail information has ‘first performance’ listed along with other interesting information.

5

Are you sure you’re not overlyverbose in disguise? The OP could have been expressed in a sentence or two.

6

Thank you very much for the replies guys, I will check out these resources tonight. So far, they are looking far more helpful than anything I was able to find. Thank you.

GorillaMan - I thought about asking straight out for specific pieces, but was wondering how many “Can you not use Google by yourself?” responses I would get :smiley: . If anything proves fiendishly difficult however, I will be pleased to ask the Dope for more help.

You could have stopped reading after a sentence or two. But thanks for the rather petty and aimless contribution.