Talk:List of musical events

Some of the dates labeled for "musical career begins" I know were wrong. For example: 1923 was the year Bessie Smith first made commercially issued recordings, but she'd been a professional singer for some years before that. 1922 was the year that Louis Armstrong moved to Chicago to join King Oliver's band, but he'd been a professional musician since 1919, but wouldn't record until '23. Also, the Memphis Blues most certainly was not the first Blues published ("I Got The Blues" for example predates it by some 5 years). -- Infrogmation 18:14 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

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There are now a lot of "X's musical career begins" or "Y forms" entries on the Years in Music pages. Should there be a separate heading for these type of entries? Group Beginnings perhaps or something similar? What say ye?
-Tubby

I think these fit fine under "events", but I could handle a separate section for "group beginnings" (I don't really like the name but can't think of anything better). It might be useful, but I don't think it would be worth the effort of changing the format for such little gain. Tokerboy

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I've been finding lots of pop tunes in the Hits section (for the years in the first half of the 20th century I've been working with) have in the credit of by just the name of the lyricist but not the composer of the tune! Were these imported from some other list, but only the first name listed included? Wondering simply, -- Infrogmation

I never did get an answer on this, but have been bit by bit cleaning them up; much remains to be done. --Infrogmation

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On checking, it seems that for years 1935 in music and before the "by" lists composers, and from 1936 in music on it lists the best known recording artists. Perhaps we should always use "composed by" and "recorded by", never simply the ambiguous "by". --Infrogmation 23:36 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

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Uh, 64.175.250.205, why do you think those commercial links are relevent to this page?

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Sorry but I changed the wording about Pictures in 1874 - in general I don't think "releases" is the right word for a piece like this, it being a verb that sounds to me tied to the world of recordings. I can see it's a problem - for example you can't say "composes" because it might have taken him the previous 10 years to do that, you can't necessarily say "publishes" because that might not be precisely what happened. Maybe it needs checking - was it publication, 1st performance or what? - and maybe for the time being the way I have put it will have to do pending someone thinking of something better. I suppose it exposes a general problem with classical music dates where it is sometimes difficult to nail down precisely what the date is - if someone says Bach's Foo Bars of 1721 it doesn't really tell you what it was that happened then, other than that it was a key "1st" of some kind for the pieces. Also this is not in any way to impugn the work of Dwheeler in adding another early event to the list, something I was delighted to see. :) Nevilley 08:32 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

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Just a note: I don't know what you guys are using for a source for these events but be careful if you are using any online "history in review" webpages. I've found that many of these events are flat out wrong or at least very misleading or misplaced (this is a sytemic problem that I've seen with every one of these types of webpages). These websites seem to copy each other back and forth and mistakes accumulate (this is worse than playing telephone). So each day I check the accuracy of every event I would like to list that is on the day page of my source (OnThisDay.com). I do this by performing a Google search on the month name, year and the subject of the event. If I get a bunch of hits on non-"history in review" websites then I can be reasonably sure that the event and its date is correct. But much of the time the only hits I get are 'history in review' webpages. So I don't use those events. --mav

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Okay, replacing the sudden unexplained change of "Top Hits" changing from published sheet music to recordings in 1935, I gave all the years from 1916 in music through 1935 in music seperate "Top Hit Songs Printed" and "Top Hit Recordings" categories, which seems to reflect the gradual shift in the driving forces of the music industry. More work needs to be done, and I'd like to extend the "Hit Records" category back a few more years if I can find decent data. I'm still gradually cleaning up the categories. -- Infrogmation 20:29 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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I was wondering why wikipedia has this great Year in Music pages, but no Year in Art pages? They could include births, deaths, major works, exhibits... There could also be a similar listing for architecture, of years that buildings were completed. I suggest a set of Year in Art and Architecture pages. Astarte

As is usual here, Wikipedia has pages because someone has bothered to create them, and doesn't because noone has yet. If you have ideas for good pages about art and architecture, go for it! -- Infrogmation 19:18, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

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Does anybody find this page useful and/or think that the captions have a hope of being neutral in this format? I don't want to rehash the old argument now located at Talk:Timeline of trends in music, but I still don't like this page. Tuf-Kat 08:03, Nov 23, 2003 (UTC)

If we're going to have "year in music" articles, I think a page listing them is usefull. The captions for individual years are certainly going to have to be judgement calls. I think in concept they're defensible as a sample of the type of thing going on in particular eras. -- Infrogmation 15:44, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

That's the point of having e.g. 1969 in music - to explain what was going on in a particular year. Could we at least delete the captions until someone comes up with a neutral way of selecting which events to include? Tuf-Kat 03:46, Jan 8, 2004 (UTC)

Hm, I don't know that there is such a thing as a strictly neutral way of selecting them. While they're bound to be imperfect I think they're okay for this article as I stated above. I think we should have a sampling of significant events, not too oriented towards particular styles or artists over a period of many years except to the extent that they were particularly dominant. Other opinions? -- Infrogmation 18:15, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)

In all honesty, these ARE a bit biased. Some of them (The Beatles stuff, Michael Jackson, Woodstock) are obvious--but was Simon & Garfunkel's album release really the most important musical event of 1970? --FuriousFreddy 15:22, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)