Talk:List of Australian composers

This is a pretty watery attempt

What are the criteria for inclusion? Who is Professor Ratbaggy? (I didn't bother looking at the external link). The list needs serious auditing.

And who has been adding sentences such as "In July 2004, he denied that he is gay, after purportedly being "outed" by Rodney Croome. Croome immediately withdrew his claim and publicly apologised." I've seen this in a number of articles on Australian artists.

Who f.... cares? What a silly thing to insert. WP is not a gossip collumn. Tony (talk) 09:17, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

There has been some discussion of this @ User talk:JackofOz#Gay allegation then denied?. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 11:30, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

My remark above looks intemperate: sorry for that. It's just that I have strong views on privacy and the avoidance of constructing homosexuality as something "marked", different, negative. Tony (talk) 14:18, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

I share those same strong views, Tony. I hate what Rodney Croome wrote about Graeme Murphy, Peter Sculthorpe and a few others. Even if he was 100% correct, which he wasn't, he has no business outing anyone but himself. It's to his credit that he apologised for mislabelling them; but he has yet to apologise for labelling them at all. That's all one issue.

On the other side of the ledger is the undeniable fact that this is Wikipedia. We report notable occurrences in subjects' lives, regardless of our personal feelings about those occurrences. To take a purely hypothetical example: if Peter Sculthorpe had outed himself at some stage, do you think it would be OK to make no mention of this in his article? Of course it wouldn't be OK. We could hardly call ourselves a credible encyclopedia if we adopted that policy. I take the same line when prominent gay activists, who would generally be considered to know what they're talking about when it comes to gay matters, purport to out notable citizens who had not been known to be gay. That supposed "outing" occurred. Then, at least in Murphy's and Sculthorpe's cases, denials were issued. Then withdrawals and apologies were issued by Gossipmonger-General Croome. This amounted to a scandal; a controversy; an issue; something we cannnot pretend did not happen. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 11:11, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

I do not think it is worth mentioning that they are homosexual or have denied being so, unless it has some meaning in terms of their work or societal/cultural contribution. It is binary thinking: you're gay or you're straight, nothing in between, and you're that way permanently; always have been, always will be, stamp it on your forehead. This is the kind of categorical thinking that perpetuates stigmatisation—the us and them, the rejection of any subtlety, any nuances in the human psyche that defy such a binary. The ultimate "polymorphous whole", as Dennis Altman called it, would be if no one thought it was worth mentioning—too trivial to mention. I have a problem with a categorisation as gay at the bottom of BLPs, unless being gay was a significant part of the person's public life (err ... like Dennis Altman's). When I see Patrick White categorised as gay down the bottom, I cringe for what he'd have said about this fetish for categories. Perhaps I should write a category for "Heterosexuals" and plaster it on every BLP that doesn't have a "Homosexual" tag at the bottom. Tony (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 11:27, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

I acknowledge and respect your view. I happen to disagree with it, and so does the majority around here, who believe that LGBT categories, where they apply, are useful for understanding the wholeness of people. I don't believe we're getting into binary thinking about this. We're simply reporting what reliable sources say about people. You might be better advised to take up the issue with those sources directly, rather than trying to have an encyclopedia be silent on such matters.

You wonder if Patrick White would cringe about such labelling. I doubt it. Here's what he said of the matter: "My homosexuality gives me all the insights that make me a great writer". -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 11:40, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Patrick White would have loathed being classified, all the same. It's against everything he stood for in terms of the rainbow of the human psyche. He inhabited many psyches, male, female, gay, straight, white, black, Jewish, German. He did not want to be classified as one above the others. Tony (talk) 11:49, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, we can debate all day long what he would have wanted. The fact remains that he did publicly associate himself with "homosexuality", and never, to my knowledge, with any other kind of sexuality, including but not limited to heterosexuality. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 11:59, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Embedded links

This article contains lots of embedded links within text space. They look bad in text space. As per Wikipedia:Citing sources# Embedded links, they should be in the refs section.-MangoWong ^ℳ 09:50, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

I agree. I started fixing it (as per this diff), but it's a big job and noone else seemed to be interested. Jowa fan (talk) 13:29, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

I am glad that you to think in the same way. I see that you had done it in a very systematic way. I think doing it will take a lot of time, particularly for someone like me who is not familiar with this article and does not know which links are being duplicated. So, I think I will just start moving them to the refs section. Of course ideally the links should also show their headings and the names of their authors. But that is absolutely beyond my level of patience. What do you say?-MangoWong ^ℳ 15:08, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

I have moved some to the refs section. Before I continue, do you think its OK?-MangoWong ^ℳ 15:56, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi Jowa fan. There is this thing called "Automatic reflinks". It can convert all the bare urls into regular refs in one go. I gave it a try. For it to work properly, it seems that we have to move all the urls into refs section individually. I had moved some of them in twos and threes. The bot did not work there. But it worked for the refs which had single urls only. Doing this should be manageable. Here's a diff of the result of my trial [1]. Should we use this method?-MangoWong ^ℳ 19:11, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

If you try out that tool, please be careful that it can cause you to become logged out temporarily. If you hit the "Save" button while being logged out, that can reveal your IP. I too had become logged out. So, I had copied the code which the tool provided, then backtracked a bit to become logged in again. Then I pasted the code into the edit window.-MangoWong ^ℳ 07:02, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

I have put the article through the "citation bot. This is the result [2]. Do you think it is OK? It seems to have combined a lot of refs which were being attributed to one website, and another which was being used twice.-MangoWong ^ℳ 10:10, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

I didn't like the look of the tool, since there was no documentation (I don't want to click on a button unless I know first what it's going to do). But converting URLs into references is easily done just by pasting the text into an editor such as vi then doing some searching and replacing. Making everything look nice (giving the title of the reference rather than just a number; amalgamating all the duplicates) will take more work, and I probably won't have time to finish the job during the next few weeks. I think the citation bot was helpful; maybe you'd like to run it once more on the latest version of the page. Jowa fan (talk) 10:57, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

Oops, I see that I've broken most of the linked names. Right now the servers are timing out nearly every time I try to upload a new version (it seems that Wikipedia doesn't always cope well with very long pages). So I'll fix the broken links tomorrow. It will only take a few minutes if I can find a time when the servers are working quickly enough. Apologies for the inconvenience. Jowa fan (talk) 11:01, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

I have formatted the refs into four columns for now. I do not understand what you mean by broken most of the linked names. So, I will wait so as to let you fix whatever problem you see. The article certainly looks neater now. I think I will run the citation bot after you find time to fix the links. There is no cause for worry. If things do not turn out right, they can always be reverted easily :-)-MangoWong ^ℳ 11:57, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

I tried clicking on some of the links. The ones which I clicked work.-MangoWong ^ℳ 12:24, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

When I submitted this edit I got an error message, but it looks like the new version got uploaded anyway. So the links are all fixed now. Sorry about the confusion. It's OK for you to go ahead and run the citation bot. Jowa fan (talk) 13:01, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

OK. Instead of putting the article through the citation bot, I had taken a copy to my sandbox and tried running the bot there. The bot can handle only half the article at one time. So, I did it half at a time. Here's the result [3]. The bot seems to have combined some of the refs which were being used repetitively. However, it has also taken off the braces from the bare urls, thus expanding them. Here's the other half [4]. The server refuses to combine the two. Looks like we might have to break up the article into parts. Like List of Australian Composers (A-H), (I-M), (N-S), (T-Z).--MangoWong ^ℳ 07:07, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Famous Australian

THE LIST IS RIDICULOUSLY LARGE AND FULL OF PEOPLE NOBODY HAS EVER EVER HEARD OF. ONE WANTS A LIST OF WELL KNOWN AUSTRALIANS, IF THERE ARE ANY, NOT JUST EVERYBODY. REALLY!!!!!!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.63.202.17 (talk) 14:19, 17 May 2012‎ (UTC)

Yeah, I agree: we aren't interested in knowing the names of every single Australian resident who has tried their hand at composing music - composing doesn't make you notable by definition any more than mowing lawns does.DMC (talk) 07:13, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

To put these comments into perspective.

• “The Australian composer is a most unwelcome visitor at a music publishing house“.
• The average Australian is likely to recall just eight composer countrymen.
• The Australian press sometimes reveal domestic composers have a “day” job.
• Many Australian composers do not get a fair deal.
• Some works are only heard when ″Australian″ repertoire is a criteria
• An Australian composers league was formed to foster opportunities to hear Australian works.
• Australian ears follow American taste.
• ″the price of the movies at one shilling and three shillings and five pence targetted the vaudeville clientele″.
• Market manipulation by global distributors

Tradimus (talk) 15:02, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

References

Size split?

Split - Article is over 100 kB, and should be split. Thoughts? Suggestions?--Jax 0677 (talk) 17:41, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Before wasting a lot of time on this article, I would try nominating it for deletion. Most of the entries do not seem notable, the only reference for many being an index site. If the article survives then, If the list were reduced to blue links, like most other similar articles are then it would probably get cut down to size anyway. If you are really determined to split the article then it ought to be a 1 artcle/letter job. Op47 (talk) 19:08, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree that a split seems in order.--Epeefleche (talk) 15:34, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Now it's reduced to bluelinks, it's quite a bit smaller.Doctorhawkes (talk) 00:42, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Thankyou DrHawkes. I have removed the tags because the original concerns have been addressed. Please re apply the tags if you still think there is a problem. Op47 (talk) 21:17, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

There is duplication at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_list_of_Australian_classical_composers Tradimus (talk) 04:33, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Alternative secondary sources

The updated ACCET Australian Choral Conductors Education and Training (ACCET) does not provide a list of Australian composers or repertoire. My suggestions for alternative secondary sources from reputable enterprise-

• https://opera.org.au/
• https://musicaviva.com.au/
• http://aacta.org/
• Music Collection at the National Australian Library https://www.nla.gov.au/what-we-collect/music
• Composers noted on http://adb.anu.edu.au/
• www.buywell.com/
• www.abc.net.au/classic/
• Major Australian Newspapers
• http://www.det.wa.edu.au/imss/detcms/portal/
• List of composer biographies by Graeme Skinner http://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/
• Book A chronological history of Australian composers and their compositions by Stephen Pleskun
• https://aso.gov.au/people/roles/composers/
• Anything edited by Richard Divall or Peter Sculthorpe

Tradimus (talk) 05:11, 9 September 2017 (UTC)