The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Grove/Macmillan, 29 volumes, $4850.

Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, first edited in 1878 by Sir George Grove, has been the Encyclopædia Britannica of classical music, the most extensive musical reference work in English. On top of the filing cabinet next to my desk I still have my copy of the 10-volume paperback reprinting of the Fifth Edition (which was first published in 1954). It’s always delightful to dip into, but it was out of date even before I bought it, in 1973. The history of music is constantly changing: new scholarship, new music, new composers, even new subjects. In 1980, the so-called New Grove Dictionary appeared, edited by the British musicologist Stanley Sadie, who doubled the size to 20 volumes. Many of the articles — pieces on Haydn, Schubert, and Wagner, for example — were really small books and extremely well-written, with superb bibliographies and, crucial to any research, lists — sometimes pages and pages — of composers’ complete works.

Now there’s a second edition to the New Grove — 28 huge volumes plus an entire separate volume for the index. The set now actually looks like the Encyclopædia Britannica. There are many new entries: the Americas, feminism, gay and lesbian music (undreamed of as a subject two decades ago), plus expanded sections on jazz, rock, and a variety of ethnic music — 29,500 entries in all, by 6000 different writers, with 5000 illustrations, and 900 new articles on contemporary composers alone. It’s overwhelming — very few people will ever read it all.

Some of the best articles have been updated; some have been replaced. Pianist Charles Rosen, one of the few persons qualified to evaluate the entire set, has a fascinating review in the June 21 New York Review of Books admiring the results yet pointing out various inconsistencies; he laments the excision of the previous article on Wagner’s music, for example, while praising the new one, and he repeats his 20-year-old complaint about the definition of the term " characteristic music " (which means unorthodox or eccentric, not, as Grove has it, typical).

I’m not a musicologist — which is one of the reasons I need the New Grove. But I know it doesn’t always have all the information I want. I recently had to look up two operas — Lully’s Thésée and Verdi’s Macbeth — for reviews I was writing, but I had to go to Grove’s Dictionary of Opera for the details I needed. In the article on songwriter Lorenz Hart, I discovered that his middle name was Milton, but there’s no reference to the very last show he worked on, a 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee, to which he added some of his most brilliant lyrics. How can this be a musical Bible if the Word of God can’t be entirely trusted?

But this is the age of miraculous technology. The Second Edition of the New Grove is now also on line. If you — or your library — can’t afford the $4850 price tag, there’s a cheaper alternative. For $295 a year, you can have Internet access, which has marvelous electronic links to other Web sites, with pictures and audio examples. And you won’t have to wait 20 years for corrections, or for new material to be added. The printed volumes may already be more obsolete than the on-line version.

But I still relish opening a book, turning the pages — like browsing through the dictionary. So though I didn’t find much about Verdi’s Macbeth, in the same volume ( " Twelve-note to Wagner tuba " ), I did found fascinating information about music from Uzbekistan. I found that the name originally given to the movie-theater organ was the " unit orchestra " ; that Van Halen were originally called Mammoth; that there’s an obscure Venetian composer named Giovanni Varischino who wrote only two known operas; that the Bulgarian city of Varna is known for its operatic activity; that the ancient Roman scholar and poet Marcus Terentius Varro wrote an eloquent defense of music; and that there’s a 19th-century French dance called the Varsovienne. I found a wonderful photograph of the legendary 19th-century soprano Pauline Viardot, and pieces on gospel composer James Vaughan, Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, as well as entries on valves, vamping, varnish, vaudeville, vibrato, the vibraphone, and variations (a 42-page double-columned article that’s one of the pieces Rosen singles out for high praise).

I don’t need most of this information, but it’s mysteriously gratifying to have access to it. I remind my students that learning is about discovery. Sometimes I need to remind myself.



Issue Date: August 2-9, 2001