ragbag:

how to format various music titles

i’m writing an article about music for a certain lifestyle magazine to which i subscribed in undergrad but now only read while waiting in line at my favourite tattoo parlour. because the piece references all types of music (from glam rock to obscure sonatas), i figured that i would take some time to understand how to format various titles. never in a hundred trillion years did i think for a minute picosecond that the style for formatting different music pieces was this specific.

for the record: an opera is italicised, a popular song gets quotation marks, a classical piece that is not a tone poem nor short receives neither quotation marks nor italics.

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source: lauther’s complete punctuation thesaurus of the english language (1991).

Hmm… I had picked up on most of these, but distinguishing between a tone poem and any other form of classical music (concerto, symphony, lied, etc.) seems to be splitting hairs.