Cataloging and numbering music collection

[struth]

i sort mine by cd box colours

[Barry]

How did those medieval names work? I can't imagine that Herman of Salzburg was the only Herman in Salzburg at the time. Must have led to a lot of cases of mistaken identity.

True, but he was probably the only Herman in Saltzburg who was composing music at that time. Much like Gerald of Wales was probably the only chronicler in Wales at the time, or at least the only one we know of whose writings are known to us.

[Barry]

All the CDs have their years of birth and death on the back (if known) so it's not that difficult, but country of origin will usually override exact year if they were born again within a few years of one another.

That way if I fancy some music from the Notre Dame school for example I can go straight to that section and pick what I want. (I've only got a couple of albums of that btw, I was introduced to it through David Munrow's excellent album "Music of the Gothic Era".)

Bach and Handel caused an issue both being born in 1685 but as Handel lived longer, and I find his later music adapted more with European musical development over the period then Bach, then I found it an easy decision to put Bach first.

I also found when I was young that doing this sorting helped me put the music into its historical context and appreciate it all the more.

Haha - some of those names I cited were taken from a boxed set of Medieval music directed by the late David Munrow. I like the idea that if the exact birth year is unknown, musicologists will often use the term "fl." meaning 'he/ she flourished', denoting a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active.

I would file Bach (and his sons) before Handel, simply because "B" comes before "H" (and in connection to the above: Handel would come before Hildegard of Bingen). Whilst I admire your method of cataloging, and admit doing so on a historical basis means that if you are in the mood for some, say, Medieval music you would go to those records filed under the 12th and 13th century; or if Mozart you would look under 18th century, it wouldn't work for me!

A friend at University tried to do something similar with his record collection; putting 'similar' music next to one another. It didn't work of course as 'similarity' is not linear, and he would have had to have some sort of 3-dimensional system. Even then, it wouldn't work physically, but I suppose with an electronic filing system one could apply 'fuzzy' logic, so that if after playing a record you wanted to hear something similar, you would type in the title of the record just played and the system would suggest a few titles that were in some way musically similar.