IMSLP Forums

The sorting can be problematic, especially with titles beginning with French contractions such as Saint-Saën's L’Ancêtre, or if the first sorted character contains an accent, it apparently gets its own category.

The LC uniform title is just "Scènes de Faust". They avoid having any numbers at the start of the title wherever possible!

(My brain went on holiday years ago, and it didn't have a return ticket...)

Massenetique wrote:We need to conform to a standard in capitalizing French titles.

Indeed! But:
Despite I have a great respect for the Grove et al., I'm afraid they are quite wrong, regarding French capitalization.

The rules for French titles are well explained in the Lexique des Règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie Nationale (Paris, 1990 - pp. 168-171), and can be found online on Wikipédia and on the Université Laval (Québec) site (see §3). Unfortunately, I don't know why English sources doesn't translate it properly.

One problem is that in French 19th scores the work title was usually printed in capitals, so one can hardly see what is in upper/lower case.
One solution is to look at old musical newspapers (like Le Ménestrel...) - they can know be read and searched on Gallica (the BnF's online library).

Here is an example, about a recently added score: http://imslp.org/wiki/L%27oeil_crev%C3% ... v%C3%A9%29
Looking in Gallica's documents:
score: "L'ŒIL CREVÉ",
newspaper: "L'Œil crevé"
books (1, 2): "l'Œil crevé" (within a sentence)

So, the correct title in ISMLP shound't be (IMHO!): "L'oeil crevé (Hervé)",
nor: "L'Oeil crevé (Hervé)",
but: "L'Œil crevé (Hervé)".

@Massenetique: you see, I refrained. I'm just arguing .
(Last year I was arguing against over-capitalization, now against under-capitalization! That's quite funny.)

OK, so I realize this conversation is 4 years old, but it continues to be an issue and I was going to upload some scores, but the server is down. I think the issue is mostly settled within IMSLP, but I thought it warranted some finality.

Regarding pierre.chepelov's last post and the French Wikipédia link to the "Lexique des Règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie Nationale": if you look just below the section "Règles traditionnelles" (traditional rules), you will see "Règles simplifiées" (simplified rules) which says that a simplified method for capitalization is also in use and acceptable, and those rules amount to the standard I promote: what is often referred to as "sentence capitalization".

Rather than try to adhere to that set of traditional rules, which are convoluted and require the ability to identify parts of speech, it seems much simpler and more elegant to use the simplified standard. Sentence capitalization works this way (sorry if this is redundant): Only the first word of the title is capitalized (even if it is an article), as well as proper nouns. This standard is also applicable to Spanish and Italian, I believe.

Any thoughts?

That seems reasonable, and it isn't too differentfrom the system we came up with back in 2010 (have we been here that long? )

You made a very good point at the time:

I think because IMSLP does not consider the number part of the title and pieces are alphabetized as such (ie. 6 Morceaux is under "M", not "S"), then perhaps we should capitalize the word behind the number, treating it as first word of the title?

Would you still advocate that? I think we usually observe this rule in most languages, except sometimes with German.

Davydov wrote:Would you still advocate that? I think we usually observe this rule in most languages, except sometimes with German.

Yes, definitely -- and that's how I have been treating my submissions, along with using "sentence capitalization" rules -- I find work pages that do not fit that standard pretty much daily, and I move the pages immediately.