Xref: rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu rec.music.classical:121382
rec.music.classical.performing:7427 rec.music.classical.recordings:2967
rec.music.early:17630 rec.music.compose:15492 rec.answers:9736
news.answers:36519
Path:
rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!faqserv
From: Sandy Nicholson
Newsgroups:
rec.music.classical,rec.music.classical.performing,rec.music.classical.recordings,rec.music.early,rec.music.compose,rec.answers,news.answers
Subject: Which Classical Music Newsgroup? (FAQ)
Supersedes:
Followup-To: poster
Date: 7 Feb 1995 19:33:59 GMT
Organization: Dept of Mathematics and Statistics, Edinburgh University,
Scotland
Lines: 189
Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu
Expires: 7 Mar 1995 19:29:46 GMT
Message-ID:
NNTP-Posting-Host: bloom-picayune.mit.edu
Summary: A fortnightly posting, aiming to help those interested in
classical
music best decide which newsgroup suits their requirements.
X-Last-Updated: 1995/02/01
Originator: faqserv@bloom-picayune.MIT.EDU
Archive-name: music/classical/newsgroups
Posting-frequency: fortnightly
Last-modified: 11 January 1995
Version: 0.3
W H I C H C L A S S I C A L N E W S G R O U P ?
This fortnightly posting is intended to guide those wishing to post
to
the various Usenet newsgroups dealing with classical music. It aims
to
help the potential poster select the right newsgroup(s) as well as
alerting them to various aspects of general Usenet etiquette
(commonly
referred to as `netiquette'). I hope that it will also prove helpful
to newcomers to Usenet in selecting appropriate newsgroups to read.
So - you have an article which you suppose would be of interest to
people who enjoy listening to classical music or to performers of
classical music or to composers of classical music, or perhaps you
have a question which you would like to put to one of these groups of
people. Which newsgroup or newsgroups should you post to?
Start here!
-----------
|
V
+---------------------+ +-----------------------+
| Is your article | | You should probably |
| strictly concerned | | consider posting to |
| with composition, | YES | rec.music.compose, |
| e.g., writing of |--------->| a newsgroup specially |
| music, harmony, | | for composers, though |
| orchestration etc.? | | not only classical. |
+---------------------+ +-----------------------+
|
NO |
|
V
+---------------------+
| Is your article |
+---------------------------------+
| strictly concerned | | You should probably consider
|
| with performance | YES | posting to the newsgroup
|
| issues, e.g., vocal |--------->| rec.music.classical.performing,
|
| or instrumental | | a newsgroup dedicated to
|
| technique, hire of | | performing issues.*
|
| sheet music etc.? |
+---------------------------------+
+---------------------+
| * The group rec.music.makers.piano
| may also be worth consideration
NO | by pianists, though it is not
| a classical newsgroup.
V
+---------------------+
| Is your article |
+---------------------------------+
| strictly concerned | | You should probably post to
|
| with recordings of | YES | rec.music.classical.recordings,
|
| pieces of classical |--------->| a newsgroup dedicated to
|
| music and/or their | | reviews, recommendations and
|
| relative merits? | | other recording-related issues.
|
+---------------------+
+---------------------------------+
|
NO |
|
V
+---------------------+ +-----------------------+
| Is your article | | You should probably |
| largely concerned | YES | consider posting to |
| with music written |--------->| rec.music.early, a |
| before about 1685, | | newsgroup devoted to |
| i.e., pre-Baroque?* | | discussion of so- |
+---------------------+ | called `early music'. |
| +-----------------------+
|
| * The cutoff date is the birth-year of J. S. Bach.
NO | It should not be regarded as absolute. Besides
| which, in rec.music.early, discussions of
| Baroque and even later music are not uncommon.
V
+----------------------+
| Is your article | +-----------------------+
| strictly concerned | | You should probably |
| with listening to | | consider posting to |
| classical music in | YES | rec.music.classical, |
| the concert hall, or |--------->| the general-purpose |
| music history, or is | | classical newsgroup.* |
| it, in some sense, | +-----------------------+
| of general interest? |
+----------------------+ * If your article is concerned with
| music for film or television, you
NO | may wish to consider the group
| rec.music.movies instead.
V
+---------------------------+ +---------------------------+
| Does your article fall | NO | You probably need to look |
| into more than one of |-------->| elsewhere on Usenet. You |
| the preceding categories? | | may even have to start |
+---------------------------+ | your own newsgroup! :o) |
| +---------------------------+
YES |
|
V
+----------------------------+
| Can you split your article |
| into separate articles, | YES +--------+
| each fitting into one of |--------->| Do it! |
| the above categories? | +--------+
+----------------------------+
|
NO |
|
V
+----------------------------+
| You may need to consider |
| cross-posting your article |
| (see below). |
+----------------------------+
Now that you know where your article should go, it is worth making
sure before you actually go ahead and post it that you do so in
accordance with Usenet `netiquette', a loose body of rules which have
been developed over the years to prevent posters wasting readers'
time, causing undue offence or abusing the network resources.
First of all, you should make sure that your article is clearly
written and pitched at the right level for the intended audience.
This can be a tricky exercise as Usenet newsgroups are read by a
diverse group of several hundred thousand people worldwide. It is,
however, worthwhile taking the time to read through your article and
check at the very least for spelling mistakes, simple grammatical
errors and ambiguous or difficult-to-read sentences. In particular,
try to avoid the use of local idiom and colloquialisms as these may
be misunderstood by people in other parts of the world and may even
cause offence where they have different meanings to different people.
Do take the time to capitalise the initial letters of sentences and
proper names but do not write your entire article in block capitals!
Choose an appropriate title for your article, to be included in the
`Subject' line. This is the first point of contact readers have with
your article and should be sufficiently informative that they can
decide whether or not it will be worth reading, on that basis alone.
If your article is a reply to an existing `thread' of articles, make
sure that you change the subject line appropriately if the thread
has strayed from the original topic, as often happens. Also, when
replying to articles, make sure readers can understand your article
without having seen preceding articles; on the other hand, do not
quote excessively from other articles.
Do not post the same article to more than one newsgroup. In the event
that your article crosses newsgroup boundaries in its scope but there
is no way of dividing it to eliminate this problem, you should
cross-post the article by including two (or very rarely more than
two) newsgroup names in the newsgroups line. They should be separated
by commas (and no spaces), e.g.,
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose,rec.music.classical
This way, use of network resources will be lessened and readers of
more than one of the newsgroups to which you cross-post will only see
your article once, in the first newsgroup they happen to read.
If your article is of interest to a geographically-limited audience,
consider using a distribution restriction so that, for instance, an
announcement of a concert in the United States is not read by people
in Finland. Unfortunately, distribution restrictions don't always
work exactly as intended.
If your article puts a question to the readership of a newsgroup,
make sure first of all that your question is not one of the group's
frequently-asked questions. To do this you should refer to the FAQ
(frequently-asked questions file) for the newsgroup, where it exists.
There are general FAQ's for the newsgroups rec.music.classical and
rec.music.classical.performing. All FAQ's are posted periodically
(usually monthly) to the newsgroups in question. If your system does
not retain periodic postings during that time, you can also obtain
FAQ's by anonymous FTP from a number of sites around the world. Ask
a local system administrator how to do this. The article you are
reading just now can be obtained in the same way.
Finally, the best guide to netiquette is simply to read newsgroups
for a while before attempting to post at all. Six months is probably
a reasonable time to become suitably familiar with Usenet procedure.
I would also strongly recommend reading articles in the newsgroup
news.announce.newusers. These cover far more of netiquette than I
have sketched here and a lot more besides.
--
Sandy Nicholson (S.Nicholson@edinburgh.ac.uk)
URL: http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/people/anich/music/ ...for classical
music