Category talk:Music theorists of the medieval Islamic world

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@Aza24: why would medieval music be limited to western Europe? Middle ages is a period, not a region. Marcocapelle (talk) 21:26, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

@Marcocapelle, Medieval music refers to Western European music in all standard scholarship (my edit summary quotes the Medieval music page which sources this definition). If you pick up any book labeled "Medieval music" you'll only hear talk of Europe, since it is a seen as the earlier incarnation of Renaissance music. Indeed the "Middle Ages" may mean a wider scope in other contexts, but things like Byzantine music and medieval Islamic music are distinct and never called simply "medieval music". This is why, for instance, the List of music theorists says "6th–14th centuries" instead of "Middle Ages"; I had suggested "Post classical" there, but others judged it too niche of a term (which is probably true).

This is a kind of Wikipedia conundrum that results from music scholarship not being global enough to address this discrepancies. A similar problem lies at Byzantine literature, which is defined by scholars as all Greek literature during the Middle Ages, generally excluding non-Greek literature written by Byzantine people, and including Greek literature written by non-Byzantine people. For a similar reason: it's the middle of Ancient Greek and Modern Greek literature. Aza24 (talk) 22:05, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

• @Aza24: in that case, would it be helpful especially for the category name but perhaps also for the article name, to contain a "(western Europe)" disambiguator? Note that editors do not always read category pages when categorizing articles so a category name should be as self-explanatory as possible. Marcocapelle (talk) 05:39, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

  @Marcocapelle, I doubt we could ever rename the actual article; scholars have not even seemed to notice that Medieval music is defined as Western European, but the term "Medieval Islamic World" is still used. We probably need some kind of parent category for all of these: Post-classical musicians would work, but then again it's a niche term.

  We could potentially create a Western medieval music category and have that category, alongside the music of medieval islam, of the medieval china etc in an overarching "Medieval music" category. This still leaves some problems (notably that the Medieval music article would be the main article for "Western medieval music", not "Medieval music"). I'm wondering if Post-classical is the safest bet; it's at least used in some disciplines. Aza24 (talk) 06:12, 27 July 2024 (UTC)