Work and instantiations in the organization of musical information: study of the adequacy of the FRBR conceptual model

Abstract

The theme of this research is to explore the bibliographic universe of music, and is delimited by the understanding of the entity work and its instantiations in the organization of musical information, under the bias of the premises of the conceptual model Functional Requirementsfor Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the contribution of the discourse of the Philosophy of Music on the notion of work. The aim was to establish connections between these discourses in order to develop ideas and definitions that contribute to the production of knowledge about the organization of musical information and provide support for improving the practice of bibliographic representation of musical documents in information retrieval systems. The object of the study was the organization of information with regard to the musical work and the bibliographic relationships of its instantiations. The discussion of musical works within the domain of music, in the philosophical and musicological fields, is necessary for understanding the practical activities of cataloging musical documents and has the potential to improve the practice of creating bibliographic records. The research was also associated with the perspective of the intentionality of bibliographic activities related to a musical work, especially the activity of describing musical documents, from the point of view of their role in the information cycle. This qualitative research involved descriptive procedures and empirical research. The first stage was based entirely on bibliographical research of Brazilian and foreign documents of interest in the area, to establish the theoretical framework of the research and the state of the art in the application of the FRBR model. The second stage proposed the use of the Scherzo Music Discovery System, a product of the Variations/FRBR project: Variations as a Testbed for the FRBR Conceptual Model, at Indiana University in the United States, to analyze the bibliographic relationships between musical works and their instantiations. The approaches to the conceptualization of a musical work, both by the authors who examined the subject from the point of view of ontology and musical analysis, and by the authors who considered the work from the point of view of information retrieval, pointed to the ambiguity in the definition of the term and the difficulty of drawing up a definition that takes into account the varieties of instantiations of the musical work, while addressing the multiple dimensions of written notation, live performance and recorded sound. The results showed that the Scherzo System is not yet designed to accommodate all the bibliographic relationship structures and complex sets of entities emerging from the FRBR model, by means of a graphical display.