[Bazile]

Hi Folks;
 
I'm looking for suggestions on how to list the year of a classical piece. The year recorded or the year written? Thoughts and thank you in advance.

 

[Eternal Phoenix]

I go with the year recorded as when you happen to then get two (or more) versions of the same piece, it makes it easier to sort, for my system at least.
 
I know you can otherwise delve into which conductor the orchestra is using at the time, but I have versions of the same piece by the same orchestra recorded at different times.
 
Not to mention that recording age also gives you a slight insight into some of the perceived sound you're going to get.

 

[Bazile]

I've always used year recorded also, but I've started to listen to music by year.  Beach Boys/ Monkees/ Beatles make perfect sense in say 1965 but Beach Boys/ Solti (Beethoven) /Bernstein (any) doesn't. Have I been under estimating Genre perhaps? Thanks again.

 

[Roseval]

In general year is the year of the recording.
You might decide to populate it with year composed but the moment you do an internet lookup your values will be overwritten.
 
I use a custom tag CHI_Year
I use the musiCHI tagger to populate this tag as looking up all the compositions and enter the year composed manual is a substantial job.
It also populates another important tag: composition.
http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Players/MusiCHI.htm