Talk:Publications listed in chronological order

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Medieval sources

Barry, the displayed page name (Publications listed in chronological order – Up to 1599) is a bit confusing, perhaps needlessly.

I noticed that Category:Renaissance choral collections doesn't have a medieval equivalent and tried to add a link here from Category:Medieval music. It occurs to me though that with publication dates we have a list of 'sources' rather than 'collections', and that there might be a future need for "Anthologies of … music". What are your thoughts on categories vs. this rather clever hybrid list format? Richard Mix (talk) 22:59, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi Richard, These four pages were modeled after other multi-page automated lists (e.g., ChoralWiki:Score catalog), but these four are different in their code structures. The breaks between the pages (1600, 1800, 1900) are dependent not on musical eras but rather how many publications appear on each – which has to be fewer than 200, since that is the maximum number of dpl calls on a page; there are several other limitations as well, and the four pages are dependent on the four templates {{PubYears}}, {{PubYears2}}, etc. I have tried to set this up so there is room for expansion as more publication pages are created, but every 10 months or so I have to adjust these breaks. — Barry Johnston (talk) 03:29, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
The Category:Renaissance choral collections must be manually added to each relevant page. A similar category could be created for Medieval collections. But any of these era designations suffers from the well-known ambivalence: time (publication date) is not the same as musical style. I learned that in the long discussion of what is "classical". Long ago it was decided that every composer belongs to an era, so all the works of that composer would be automatically assigned to that era, in spite of the many composers that bridged eras stylistically. They have not all looked to the future, but some to the past – as in the dozen or more projects to recover older church music. Is "Medieval" different, though? Is it really just a time period but not one style or cluster of styles?
I created these four pages for the purpose of historical comparison: what music was being published during the same decade or two? I think these lists show some very interesting things, and so I would like to keep them as they are for now. But you have raised some good points. As you know, I have been trying to decide for some time what to do with collections (or anthologies; what is the difference?). The categories you propose seem like a good idea, but I don't see how they could be automated. — Barry Johnston (talk) 17:40, 1 October 2022 (UTC)