Talk:William Walton

message: Aaaar, mateys! For whatever reasons, there is no current image of Walton. Oddly enough, the image labeled William_Walton.jpg is of William Wilton, and appears at the article on William Wilton.  Did Walton's image get bumped for this wrongly named image? Signinstranger 17:04, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Image

message: I've reviewed this article for the Composers project.  You can read it on the Comments page.  If you have any questions, feel free to comment there, here, or on my talk page. -- Magic♪piano 17:40, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Composer project review 

message: I added the image of Hindemith.  See if the image experts are happy with it. -- Ssilvers (talk) 01:25, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Hindemith photo

message: I would suggest that the introduction be edited to include British coronation works – 'Orb and Sceptre' and the 'Crown Imperial' coronation marches are more well-known than the examples given.  Surely his Viola Concerto is also, equally famous.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.195.191.50 (talk) 16:49, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Introduction: Best Known Works

message: The article needs one in spite of the consensus reached among the small percentage of total Wikipedias who frequent the Composer wikiproject. Night Ranger (talk) 00:22, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This has been very thoroughly discussed, and reviewed and confirmed, already. Tim riley (talk) 09:24, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yep but they're wrong. Night Ranger (talk) 13:54, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  Totally agree with Night Ranger; he's right and the rest of the world is out of sync. Eisfbnore (下さいて話し) 14:29, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  What's funny is how 4 or 5 people on a Wikiproject consider themselves the entirety of the Wikipedia community, or in this case, the entire world. Night Ranger (talk) 02:40, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Infobox 

message: An anonymous editor changed "cantata" to "oratorio" in the text. I have changed it back again. The work has from the outset been categorised as a cantata: see Howes Frank "The Leeds Festival", The Musical Times, Vol. 72, No. 1065 (November 1931), pp. 991–992 ; Latham, Alison (ed). "Belshazzar's Feast", The Oxford Companion to Music. ; and Kennedy, Michael, "Belshazzar's Feast", The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. . Tim riley (talk) 10:29, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Belshazzar's Feast 

message: It's common for people to take mention of a "complete works edition" at face value, but as usual Chandos's marketing is a bold faced lie. The source cited, , even contradicts itself -- if "complete works of Sir William are available on Chandos Records." then how could "the last major work of Sir William’s to be recorded", "be released next year"? (especially telling is that said 'complete works' were done by 1996 ). 
But more importantly, there are a number of works that HAVEN'T been recorded, or at least released on CD as claimed: , , , , , and  for starters. Not to mention, the ONLY complete version of any of his film scores actually released away from the film itself was, ironically, Battle of Britain -- everything else has been an arrangement by someone else.
Now MAYBE this could all be construed as WP:SYNTH (plus WilliamWalton.net is gone and the Archive.org archives are from 2010 with some of the pages needed to go back to 2008), but I certainly didn't remove the sentence 'in error'. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:21, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I really don't know what to do for the best here. I understand what you are saying about the fanfare etc, and however reliable a "reliable source" actually is or isn't one wouldn't want to perpetuate misinformation. I suppose one could say something like "all but a handful of minor works". What think you? Tim riley (talk) 14:34, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: 'The majority' seems like it'd be a perfect compromise. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 15:22, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Can I persuade you that "almost all" wouldn't be stretching it? Tim riley (talk) 15:52, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Fwiw, "almost all" was my thought too. —MistyMorn (talk) 16:13, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: That works. Done (with a couple other fixes too). ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 18:14, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks to Melodia and MistyMorn for a brisk resolution without bloodshed. Tim riley (talk) 18:47, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  All works of Walton released on CD? Hardly 

message: Under "1930s" it is stated that Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the US Premiere of Walton's First Symphony. In his programme note for a performance of the work given in 2005 by the National Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin, Richard Freed stated that the US Premiere was given by Sir Hamilton Harty and the Chicago Symphony on 23 January 1936. (See the full text on-line in the Kennedy-Center org website.) Can the date of the Ormandy performance be verified, so as to clarify who was in fact the first in the US to conduct the work's premiere there? Philipson55 (talk) 14:07, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I can get access to the archives of The New York Times at the British Library, and will check this tomorrow. Thank you for raising it. Tim riley (talk) 14:50, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The note at the Kennedy centre's site is spot-on. The reference in The New York Times headline of 17 October 1936 to the work as "new here" referred only to Philadelphia, and not to the USA as a whole. The NYT's archive has a brief article dated 20 January 1936 (p. 22) that confirms that Harty and the Chicago SO gave the American premiere. Thank you so much for spotting this, which I shall correct forthwith. Tim riley (talk) 14:02, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks for doing the research. Although it's probably not relevant to the article, a one-time employee of the local Chicago radio station has related that because the reviews of the Walton US Premiere were so "savagely antagonistic," Harty decided against playing it again for the remaining three scheduled performances that followed the first one, and substituted Dvorak's 'New World' Symphony instead! Philipson55 (talk) 15:03, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Good grief! Another clanger narrowly averted. One of the NYT cuttings mentioned that Harty was going to do the Symph three times, and I toyed with the idea of mentioning this in the article. If he ducked out of giving the two later performances it's just as well I refrained. Put not your trust in press cuttings! Tim riley (talk) 15:20, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  US Premiere 

message: An editor keeps inserting multiple links to the same articles. See the Manual of Style which states: "Generally, a link should appear only once in an article, but if helpful for readers, links may be repeated in infoboxes, tables, image captions, footnotes, and at the first occurrence after the lead." Sound advice, and I am reverting accordingly, bringing the article back into line with other composer FAs. Tim riley (talk) 16:10, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Persistent attempts to [[WP:OVERLINK]] 

message: It is getting on for five years since I took this article through FAC, and looking at it again I think it could do with a little refining to bring it into line with more recent composer Life-and-Works articles. Would anyone object to my separating explanatory footnotes from the general citations, as in more recent FAs such as this one? Tim riley talk  21:15, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: While I certainly have no objection, it is my belief that explanatory footnotes should seldom if ever be necessary in a well-written biographical article. Perhaps you can point to an example here of an explanatory note that both contains essential information and at the same time cannot reasonably be incorporated smoothly into the main article text.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:39, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like a reasonable improvement to an excellent article. Some side items of interest and detailed explanations are appropriate for footnotes, and separating the references makes it easier to skim or read them as desired.  Reify-tech (talk) 21:44, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Jerome, You are not alone in your doubts about footnotes (Noël Coward said that having to read footnotes is like having to go downstairs to answer the door when one is in the middle of making love) but others – and I am relieved to see from  Reify-tech's comment that I am not alone – feel that there is a place for interesting, relevant but not core information that readers can look at or not, as they wish. Examples in this article are the existing notes 15, 16, 22, 34, 42, 83 and several others, plus a recent interesting but not core addition about a godson. I'm not proposing to add a lot of extra explanatory footnotes, but chiefly to separate them from the citations: a section, in short, of "You may be interested that…" and then a section of just "This is where we got the information". Most composer FAs have this dual form of noting, and I am seeking to bring Walton's article into line. – Tim riley talk  22:06, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: There being no votes to the contrary, I'll put this on my to-do list. Tim riley talk  19:03, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: And now done. Tim riley talk  12:00, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notes and references 

message: Substituted at 10:43, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: The problem with hidden comments along the lines of "Don't add an infobox because a WikiProject doesn't like them" is that it has a chilling effect on editors who don't understand that Wikiprojects have no standing to demand that an infobox may not be added. The decision on having an infobox or not is a matter for consensus on each article, and that is policy. If there has already been a discussion on a particular article, and a consensus reached not to have an infobox, then it is helpful to have an html comment drawing the editor's attention to that (possibly archived) discussion, and I'd be very much in favour of maintaining such notes. It is not acceptable to have a note which effectively prevents any consensus from being discussed, as if the matter were already settled by fiat of a single editor or Wikiproject. We build this encyclopedia by allowing people to edit, not forbidding it for no good reason.
:First we were told that failure to have a hidden comment made it hard for editors to know not to add an infobox.  Now you say that the hidden comment has a "chilling effect."  The fact is that you just want to have a pile of code at the top of every article containing redundant infobox information, even in these arts biographies, usually riddled with errors and always emphasizing unimportant factoids at the expense key information. -- Ssilvers (talk) 19:55, 30 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hidden comments 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 3 external links on William Walton. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Basil was an influence on Walton's early musical career and his first piano teacher  Walton's great fortune at Oxford was that the music staff with whom he came into contact were open-minded and did not discourage individuality. There was no beating him into conformity. One of his first teachers at Christ Church was the assistant organist Basil Allchin who gave him piano lessons. (He was never to become an accomplished pianist – Alan Frank, of Oxford University Press, went so far as saying that he played 'excruciatingly badly', and he was to write very little for that instrument - but an early surviving manuscript is of an 89-bar Valse in C minor dated 2 February 1917.) Walton would sometimes show Allchin reams of manuscript paper covered with notes, mostly cast in the form of elaborate motets for double choir with unor- thodox part writing. Beyond pointing out the unorthodoxy of these youthful efforts, Allchin to his credit was not discouraging. Cmadavis (talk) 22:29, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Allchin receives a single passing mention in Kennedy's 350-page biography of Walton, a single one-off mention in Stephen Lloyd's 332-page biography, and an even shorter single mention in Neil Tierney's 310-page biography, and is not mentioned at all in Stuart Cragg's book about the composer. Allchin was assistant to Henry Ley, who is mentioned more extensively and might possibly be worth a sentence in the article, but in an encyclopaedia article of a few thousand words we must concentrate on the important facts. The fact that Ley's assistant taught Walton to play the piano badly and did not discourage him from composing does not seem to me among the important facts. But if others disagree with me we can make the proposed addition. Views, colleagues? – Tim riley talk 09:26, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Because I am such a William Walton 'fanboy' (note my Wikipedia handle!) I might tend to support any additional information for its own sake. But necessarily putting aside that non-neutral POV, I agree with Tim riley that this information is not notable enough in an encyclopaedia article of limited length. Walton22 (talk) 23:12, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: A further attempt has been made to add mention of Allchin, falsely claiming that it is cited in the ODNB article (which it isn't, nor would one expect so trivial a detail to be). Tim riley talk 12:06, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Basil Allchin