Title vs. Tune Name

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Tue, 10/02/2012 - 12:57 — Haruo

Particularly in oblong (generally shapenote) tunebooks, it often happens that what I think should be treated as the Tune Name is printed at the top of the page where in my roundnote Baptist upbringing the Title ought to be, or if I were an elderly Episcopalian, the Topic or Liturgical Use. Please take a look at my entries in An American Christmas Harp (third ed.) and advise whether you prefer the approach I took for the first five, where I entered the word(s) at the top (which are in Boldface Small Caps followed by a Meter abbreviation) as the Title, and used the bracketed first line for the tune name, versus those that follow, where I used the words at the top both as Title and, in ALL CAPS, as TUNE NAME.


Comments

Wed, 10/03/2012 - 08:56 — dianneshapiro

It is hard to know in some hymnals whether the "title" is meant to be a title or a tune name. My rule of thumb is that if it has a meter after it, then it is meant to be a tune name. If it looks like a shape-note type hymnal, what looks like titles are tune names. For this hymnal I would treat the titles as tune names - so all caps in the Tune Name field. You may or may not want to also use the tune name as the Title. You do not need a Title.

Wed, 10/03/2012 - 10:59 — Haruo

I suppose what I'll try to do as a rule of thumb is use the tune name also as a title when it is related to the text, especially First Line or Refrain, and leave the title field blank otherwise.

Then there is the question of the line (if any) between Title and Original Language Title in Ador1971; I also uploaded some page scans there to use as illustrations of my question (though the scan quality is quite poor and I would definitely redo them before trying to outfit the entire hymnal with page scans. "Adoru kantante" consistently puts the Original Language Title at the top, although all of the texts are in Esperanto. If it is known that the translator based the Esperanto translation on a prior national-language translation, the underlying translation's title is in parentheses beneath the OLT. So far I have been entering this as "Title" and have not yet filled in the "Original Language Title" column of the spreadsheet. But I think probably the preferable treatment is to enter this information only as "Original Language Title (Intermediary Language Title)" and leave "Title" blank. What do you think? Can the search engine handle finding "German" if the "Original Language" field reads "German (Dutch)"? More advice always welcome! ;-)

Haruo

Thu, 10/04/2012 - 12:08 — dianneshapiro

The Original Language field can only handle one language. In looking at "All Creatures of our God and King" I would put in "All Creatures of our God and King" in the Original Language Title field (even though it was originally written by St. Francis Assisi in Latin and then translated into English by Draper and then apparently translated from the English into Esperanto by Downes) because that's what the hymnal gives you. Be sure to indicate behind Draper "Translator (into English)" and behind Downes "Translator (into Esperanto). On the next hymn, it looks like it is translated from the German into Esperanto, so use the German in the Original Language Title.

Thu, 10/04/2012 - 12:18 — Haruo

I assume that "Translator (into English)" has to be done with "Other". On a related note, I have been putting "Compiled by" in as "Other: Compiler", but I know that early on in my editing I was routinely calling "Compiled by" "Editor" because I thought they were synonymous enough not to matter. When I see such cases should I bother to correct them? A lot of the smaller collections have "Compiled by" or (rarely) "Compiler", where the larger, denominational or academic hymnals, especially of the mainstream churches, tend to say "Edited by" or (frequently) "Editor"...

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