It’s a Bibframe vocabulary question and also a syntax question. I want to refer back to something Karen Coyle discussed in 2009, responding to Martha Yee ( http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2009/07/yee-questions-9-11.html ). I’m calling it the “two oboes and three guitars” problem, but I’ll reduce it down to just the 1 oboe and 1 guitar problem.

For some music resource with an instrumentation of oboe plus guitar, we might have, in MARC:

382 0  $a oboe $n 1 $a guitar $n 1 $s 2 $2 lcmpt

But in Bibframe, the following would be inaccurate:

<piece for oboe and guitar> a bf:Work ;
            bf:Title “Title of this piece for oboe and guitar” ;
            bf:[?property] <http://id.loc.gov/authorities/performanceMediums/mp2013015507> ;
            bf:[?property] <http://id.loc.gov/authorities/performanceMediums/mp2013015306> ;

because the medium of performance is not oboe and it’s also not guitar; it’s oboe + guitar. Is there a syntax that can “wrap” these two separate statements together so that we’re making one assertion about the work’s medium? Alternatively, and especially since no such bf property currently exists (have I missed it?), is this a case where it is expected that we will use a non-bf vocabulary? (bf:musicMedium is included in category “Title information” and corresponds to MARC bib 240 $m or auth 1XX $m.)

Thanks for any insights, clarifications, or corrections.

Kirk-Evan Billet