Hello everyone.
Bach is a composer from the Baroque era, but when I use the “Focus” feature in Roon to filter composers by “Periods,” he appears under three categories: Baroque, Romantic, and Contemporary. I would like to remove him from the Romantic and Contemporary categories—how can I do this? There is no “Periods” setting in the composer editing options. What specific composer information does the “Focus” feature use to determine these “Periods”? It does not appear to be based on dates of birth and death.
It would be interesting to click on one of the incorrect periods and see which albums show up.
If you go to “My Compositions” instead of “My Composers” you will see what is going on. Mostly this is due to the large number of Bach transcriptions and arrangements by classical, romantic and contemporary composers (literally everyone from Mozart, Beethoven, Busoni, Villa-Lobos, Walton etc.).
Roon is not very consistent how it attributes different composition roles and sub roles, such as transcription, arranger, orchestrator etc. If an arrangement or a transcription has a dual composer attribution then this will bleed through into multiple composer “periods” that don’t make any sense. Personally a modern arrangement or composition based on a theme by Bach or in the style of Bach I would probably categorise as “Contemporary”, so that makes sense. Those many cases are sort-of Baroque but not quite. There will usually be a mix of Baroque and more contemporary “reimagining”. That is usually the composers intention. Vivaldi is another Baroque composer famously reimagined by Max Richter with the same effects in roon.
The problem here is that composition attributions should be distinct from composer attributions and not mixed like this. Roon has many loose ends-like this that it views as edge cases. Except it’s not really an edge case with seminal composers like Bach and Vivaldi. My experience is there is no real manual fix as removing dual composition attributions like this just causes a worse problem in that compositions will then unidentify.
Thank you for your comment. I understand that since period information is associated with the Composition and reflected in the Composer’s periods, this kind of situation can arise when dealing with multiple composers. It appears possible to change the periods in the Composition Editor, but I think I will leave them as they are to avoid confusion later on. Even when selecting a composer while filtered by period, all albums are displayed, so it seems the only way to handle such cases is to search within “My Compositions.”
Good stuff. Linked from Users' Greatest Roon Tips - #76 by DDPS