posted
I am writing a story that features quite a lot of music. What's the proper way to refer to the titles of songs within the story? It's just classical piano tunes, Moonlight Sonata and Fur Elise and that sort of thing.
Are they done just as proper nouns? (Each first letter capitalized) Italics? (which I know in proper manuscript format would be underlined.) All Caps? Some other mechanism I haven't thought of?
quote:Titles of operas, oratorios, tone poems, and other long musical compositions are italicized and given standard title capitalization. Titles of songs and other shorter musical compositions are set in roman and enclosed in quotation marks, capitalized in the same way as poems.
(Poems are capitalized in the usual headline style when referred to by title, and in sentence style when referred to by first line.)
Examples from CMS:
quote:“La vendetta, oh, la vendetta” from The Marriage of Figaro the “Anvil Chorus” from Verdi’s Il Trovatore Handel’s Messiah Rhapsody in Blue Finlandia “All You Need Is Love” (a song by the Beatles) “So What” (a composition by Miles Davis) “The Star-Spangled Banner” “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” from Oklahoma! “Wohin?” from Die schöne Müllerin
[This message has been edited by Grayson Morris (edited January 22, 2011).]
posted
Oh my. My musical knowledge doesn't extend to knowing whether Beethoven's Minuet in G is a song or a "long musical composition." (nor as compared to Moonlight Sonata or Pachelbel's Canon in D...)
New version of same question - can anyone see any problems if I consistently treat all song titles the same way. My strong feeling is to put them in italics (which will be underlined in my manuscript) because they'll come close to dialog and I don't like all those quotes all messing with each other...
posted
My guess is something consistent and reasonable, even if not technically "correct," will not stand in the way of getting accepted, and the magazine's copyeditor will fix to taste. :-) Of course, I've never been published (or even rejected), so I may be off the mark.
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posted
I defer to those who have done their homework. But yeah if you are going to be wrong at least be wrong consistently.
Also one caution Grayson: I've heard rumors that Chicago is remarkably sensitive when it comes to actual lines out of their book, of any length. (There is a fair use conversation here, but it's not a pleasant one to have in front of a judge.)
posted
Pyre Dynasty, thanks for the heads-up. That's a real shame...they're so marvelously down-to-earth about all things linguistic. I guess from now on, I'll have to do the work of paraphrasing them rather than quoting them. Sigh.
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