Why is it challenging to search for music and for resources about music?
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Musical recordings are found in a variety of different formats. Many are no longer in common use. There may be cases, however, in which the piece or work you are looking for can only be located in one obsolete format.
Audio formats include:
Video formats include:
A particular musical work may manifest in different forms. In these cases, scores for that work will look very different from each other!
Consider the differences between:
All of these serve different purposes. A conductor needs a full score, not a set of parts, to lead an ensemble. Similarly, individual musicians need their part, not the full score, on their music stands.
A musical work may appear in arrangement, in which its music has been adapted for rehearsal and performance by instruments/voices different from those it was composed for originally. Often, the arranger may change the key of the music, add or remove portions of the work, and edit other elements at their own discretion.
Some musical works might be part of a larger work. Examples:
Smaller works often hide in collections with generic titles (e.g., 24 Italian Songs & Arias; The Best Jazz Standards Ever), which may be the only places in which you can find them!
Titles present their own problems for searching. For strategies on working with these problems, see "Searching for Musical Works."
Many musical works do not have unique titles, and are instead named by genre, form, or style, with a publication number, musical key, and catalog number added in. Sometimes users stumble over whether to search for the full title, or just a portion of it.
For example, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491 might also be known as:
Some works are known by a nickname.
Consider works that are known by both their original titles and their titles in translation in multiple languages.
Music is full of names: Of works, composers, artists, characters, places, and more. Many of these names are in translation.
Here are some details to consider whenever you encounter a name, especially a non-English name:
Diacritical marks, or diacritics, are symbols added to an alphabetical character to convey some aspect of pronunciation in a certain language. They are sometimes called "accent marks."
Library catalogs can typically search for names and words that contain diacritics without the user having to enter them as such, but this isn't guaranteed. Moreover, some publications may eschew diacritics entirely in favor of an alternate spelling. In cases like these, it helps to know about other variants of the same name.
Transliteration refers to the way in which words originally written in a script other than the Roman alphabet (the alphabet in which English is written) are re-written in the Roman alphabet. Examples include Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Cherokee, and many Asian scripts (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Devanagari, Tamil, Sanskrit). They are not always consistent!
Also, be aware of instances in which a name may have been changed.
Musicologists past and present have attempted to organize the works of different composers into catalogs that detail their chronology and assign each work a unique catalog number. Well-known catalogs include the Köchel catalogue, detailing the works of Mozart, and the Hoboken catalogue, detailing the works of Haydn.
When multiple catalogs exist, there may be discrepancies between catalog numbers. This is often the case with the works of Antonio Vivaldi and Domenico Scarlatti.
Make sure you know what you are looking at!