Find a composerLook up one composer by name and get their dates, the period they belong to, a portrait, the kinds of music they wrote, and whether they are among the best known. Use it to turn a name from a form, an email or a spreadsheet into a real composer before the next step asks for their works. A surname is enough, capitals and accents do not matter, and a misspelling comes back with the names it nearly matched rather than with nothing.
List composersList composers from the whole catalogue, around 220 of them, narrowed by period, by the letter their name starts with, or to the best known or the essential ones. The three narrow together, so 'the famous Romantics' or 'everyone Baroque under B' is one step rather than three. Use it to build a programme, a quiz, a newsletter series or a picker of your own.
List a composer's worksList what one composer wrote, narrowed to a kind of music, to the popular or essential pieces, or to a word in the title. This is the action behind 'give me five Mozart piano pieces' or 'every Bach cantata'. The genre list beside the field holds only the genres that composer really has works in, and every piece comes back with the id the other actions take.
Search for a composer or a pieceSearch the whole catalogue at once with whatever someone typed, and get the composers and the pieces that match back separately. This is the action for a search box, a chat message or a subject line, where you do not yet know whether the words name a person or a piece: 'four seasons' comes back with Vivaldi and with three different works called that.
Get a pieceGet everything the catalogue holds on one piece from its id: the full title, the subtitle, the kind of music, the catalogue number it is known by, whether it is popular or essential, and its composer's dates and portrait. The id comes from any of the other actions, so this is the step after a search or a list when the whole record is wanted.
Find a piece by nameTurn the name someone calls a piece by into the real entry for it. It handles the three ways a title is usually written and the catalogue is not: a nickname ('the Moonlight Sonata'), a shorthand ('Symphony no 9'), and the title in another language ('Le sacre du printemps' is filed as The Rite of Spring). Use it to tidy a playlist, a concert listing or a spreadsheet of titles into pieces you can look up.
Suggest pieces to listen toDraw pieces at random from the catalogue, narrowed to a period, a kind of music, particular composers, or the best known corner of it. Every run returns something different, which is what a daily listening pick, a weekly newsletter, a radio-style rotation or a quiz needs. Ask for one piece or up to forty.
Look up performersSay what each performer on a list does: the instrument they play, whether they conduct or sing, or that they are an orchestra rather than a person. Hand it the credits from a recording or a concert listing and get back a row per name, with the ones the catalogue does not know flagged rather than quietly dropped.
