Talk:List of classical composers

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The lists of composers are all over the place. There is already a huge list in composer, as well as sporadic duplicate lists in Baroque music, Renaissance music, and so on. Anyone have a good organizational suggestion or scheme? --Amillar

The classical guys at composer should probably be moved here. The lists at baroque music and so on are probably OK, at least until we have better written articles there which explain the specific contributions and importance of each composer. I'll move the stuff from composer later tonight if nobody else does. --Camembert
Ahem... classical has probably more than one meaning: classical as opposed to popular and classical as style epoch (i.e. Haydn to Schubert, more or less). What is this article supposed to be about? If it´s the latter, it might be better to rename it something like composers of classical music and divide it into epochs (where the absolute minimum would be: middle ages, renaissance, baroque, classical sensu strictu, romantic, 20th century.) Kosebamse 15:10 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC)

I agree that moving the composer page entries to a "List of..." page is a great idea. However, a few things come to mind that would be worth some more discussion. (I'm honestly not trying to be argumentative, just start some discussion and see what ideas people have.)

  • In the Wikipedia music hierarchy, "classical" seems to connote two different groupings: (1) anything that isn't folk or popular music, which covers Medieval through 20th century, or (2) a specific "Classical" era between Baroque and Romantic. Which would this page be?
  • Even with the broader definition of classical, where do we put modern composers that may or may not be considered classical? Brian Eno is unlikely to be considered classical; what about John Williams?
  • What strategies should we take on syncronizing the other pages? Should Alessandro Scarlatti be listed on List of classical composers, Baroque music, and List of Italian composers? How do we keep them in sync?
  • Should there be one master list that is all-inclusive in addition to the other pages, or should all the lists be exclusive, or should they all be ad-hoc like now? I don't think exclusive will work, especially given genre and nationality lists.

This is where I think Wikipedia would really benefit from some kind of metadata system, instead of pure freeform text. I'd really love to be able to add a composer to a table with some columns of data like genre, nationality, birth and death dates, and see appropriate related lists updated/generated automatically. An external bot might be able to do it, but that's always a little shaky. Perhaps it is time for Wikipedia:WikiProject composers. --Amillar

I've moved composer to list of composers (it was little more than a list anyway). If we decide to break of classical composers later, then we can, but there's no point in having two lists of classical composers, so I've redirected this page to list of composers for now. What we do from here, I really don't know. I'm going to edit list of composers a bit and see what happens. --Camembert