Music Presentation Format: Toward a Cataloging Babel?

This case study on cataloging notated music focuses on music presentation format, and the use of controlled vocabularies in a multilingual context, when concepts do not have corresponding terms in one or more languages, and when common language terms are mixed with technical terms in a specialized context. Issues concern the terminological correspondence among different languages, and the consequent risks if only one language is taken into account or the meaning of one word is arbitrarily altered; English linguistic pragmatism may lead to wrong conceptual results when it points directly to the result of a process, while other languages focus on the process needed to obtain that result. Considerations on the use of codes in MARC formats and on how music presentation is treated in Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) are included, and numerous illustrated examples, understandable even by non-music experts, support the article.