User:Del arte

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I served in the United States Marine Corps. Now I attend Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. I read about Wikipedia in Discover magazine.

Given my interest in lesser known orchestral music, I consider myself qualified to start writing articles on obscure composers such as Kurt Atterberg, Franz Berwald, Augusta Holmès, Tikhon Khrennikov, Joseph Martin Kraus, Albéric Magnard, Hans Rott, Vadim Salmanov, Simon Sechter, Francesco Maria Veracini and Robert Volkmann, as well as American composers such as Walter Piston and Harold Shapero and better known composers such as P. D. Q. Bach and Franz von Suppé. (Some Wikipedia users look down on listing pages you've started in your user page, but I find it to be an useful substitute when the watchlist is down).

With the Volkmann article I learned the hard way that even if you're the original author of an article you might still have to explain the copyright situation. That article was a nearly verbatim copy of a webpage I had written and put up on a free webhosting provider a few years ago, and a couple of search engines had indexed it. I put it up here on Wikipedia, but I forgot to log on, so it was attributed to an IP address rather than to me. So the day after I put it up, it was flagged as a copyright violation. I had to explain that I had written the article and that I approved of its being on Wikipedia. But the Volkmann article is also a good example of the potential of Wikipedia: after the copyright issue was cleared up, other Wikipedians have edited and improved my original, and I have learned a few things about the geography of Volkmann's birthplace.

I have also added to existing articles on composers such as Leroy Anderson, Anton Bruckner, Carlos Chávez, Vasily Kalinnikov, Carl Nielsen, Leopold Nowak, Antonio Salieri and Robert Simpson, and musical instruments such as the Wagner tuba. I've started stubs on Edward MacDowell, Tan Dun and Giuseppe Tartini, but admittedly, I don't know much about them.

Concerned by the inaccuracies in articles based off the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, I sometimes seek out such articles on composers and compare them against a newer source, such as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, in order to correct mistakes copied from the 1911 EB. So far I have done that with Johann Christian Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach and Carl Maria von Weber, and I intend to do the same with Daniel François Esprit Auber, Domenico Cimarosa and others as I come across them.

[edit] Links for my Convenience

[edit] List of National Mozarts