Specifying CWR instrumentations in MWN 1.3

When describing a musical work, the Common Works Registration format (CWR) provides elements for specifying an ensemble or individual instruments or a description of the instrumentation, and in addition elements such as the number of voices or players. While MWN 1.3 provides an element TargetInstrument that has been designed for individual musical instruments listed in the InstrumentType AVS but not ensemble types, it does not have a tag to communicate instrumentation information.

To communicate such data in MWM 1.3 it is recommended to express instrumentations, e.g. ensemble types for which the musical work has been written, as user-defined values in the repeatable TargetInstrument element using values from the ArtistType AVS provided by DDEX for some of its standards, as described here for a string trio:

<TargetInstrument Namespace="DDEX:ArtistType" UserDefinedValue="StringEnsemble">
  UserDefined
</TargetInstrument>

<TargetInstrument Namespace="DDEX:ArtistType" UserDefinedValue="Trio">
  UserDefined
</TargetInstrument>

Using CWR instrumentation values

CWR provides a lookup table with values and codes to be used for instrumentations, see CWR22-0145. The values defined in that table are more granular than the ones in the ArtistType AVS, and a string trio, which has the code SGT, can be expressed as a single value as follows:

<TargetInstrument Namespace="CWR:InstrumentationCode" UserDefinedValue="SGT">
  UserDefined
</TargetInstrument>

DDEX recommends using values from the ArtistType AVS to express instrumentations. CWR codes should only be used when an equivalent ArtistType value or combination of ArtistType values is not available. In such cases users should reach out to DDEX with a request to add a value to support the instrumentation.

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