When the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians was published in 1980, its 20 volumes were packed with 22,500 rigorously scholarly articles by 2,400 contributors from 70 countries.
Two decades later, the day of a new New Grove is dawning, and the statistics are even more daunting. The second edition of the New Grove Dictionary — or New Grove II, as the editors are calling it — has swelled to 29 volumes (including index) that take up roughly 4 1/2 feet of shelf space. The number of articles has grown to more than 29,000, representing the scholarship of more than 6,000 contributors from 98 countries. More than 5,600 of these articles are entirely new. Weighing nearly 119 pounds, the dictionary does not come with a forklift.
Stanley Sadie, the courtly Handelian scholar who has edited Grove since 1970 and did the bulk of editing on New Grove II, says that a rapidly expanding musical universe created the need for a New Grove for the new millennium. “The 20 years between editions have seen an unprecedented growth in music studies, partly provoked by Grove itself, and in musical activity of all kinds,” observes Sadie, who turned 70 in October. That growth is reflected not only in the dictionary’s increased size but in an increased editorial awareness of the larger world to which music belongs.
To be sure, New Grove II continues to uphold the tradition associated with the world’s leading musical reference source since 1878, when it was first published by Sir George Grove, a London musician, editor and founder of the Royal College of Music. The tradition combines readability and accessibility — serving all who have an interest in music — with scholarly accuracy, authority and thoroughness. Within the tradition, however, the dictionary has undergone a significant makeover in the hands of Sadie and his team of assistants that eventually grew to 60.
The largest area of expansion was the coverage of 20th Century music. Sadie estimates that some 3,000 articles on composers of our time were newly commissioned, and most were significantly expanded: Philip Glass, who rated only half a column for his entry in 1980, now commands eight columns, reflecting the omnipresence of his music throughout the world.
And while most of the biographies of composers and performers have been rethought — indeed, freshly rewritten in the case of Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner, Bartok and Stravinsky — there now is a much greater emphasis on popular and world music. Grove has never discriminated between high and low culture. That’s why the Beatles (six columns, including a complete song list and detailed bibliography) sit cheek to jowl with Beethoven, Handel with hip-hop, aboriginal music with Girolamo Abos (Maltese composer of Spanish descent, 1715-1760).
Of course, this doesn’t mean you will find articles about every composer who ever lived, or every rocker who ever managed to land on the pop charts. “Grove cannot be a directory of composers, just as it cannot be a listing of performers,” says Sadie. “There are plenty of entries in the previous Grove that seemed important then but don’t now. We have to recognize that some reputations come up while others go down rather quickly.”
Much the same editorial philosophy governs the pop end, says publishing director Laura Macy, one of two editors who replaced Sadie late in the book’s gestation.
“We are not so much concerned whether a performing artist or group is going to last — because we don’t know — as we are about whether they are important now and how they influence today’s musical life,” says Macy, a former early music director and assistant professor at Penn State University. “We had quite a lively internal debate about whether to include the Spice Girls. Stanley felt they deserved to be included, but I finally decided against it. My feeling is that their impact has been very much a marketing one. Rather than an article on the Spice Girls, maybe we need one about pop groups that are invented by marketing people.”
One of Sadie’s innovations before departing Grove a year and a half ago was a series of articles on attitudes and ideologies, showing the relationship between music and historical and societal changes. Feminism, postmodernism, deconstructivism and Nazism all are represented, and the outspoken Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin weighs in on nationalism.
The article on gay and lesbian music gave Sadie a lot of problems, the editor admits. “I worked quite hard on that article — by a male Brit and an Australian female — to make it balanced and appropriate, in my view, to the dictionary. I didn’t feel as if I had to make a cris de coeur (cry from the heart) on behalf of everyone. The authors wanted to list gay and lesbian composers, and I said you can’t do that without specific permission while they’re alive, and I didn’t like it being done if they were dead.” He nixed the recent contention that Schubert was gay. “The evidence is non-existent, but you can’t say that in America without being branded a homophobe.”
The fall of communism meant that scholars in former Soviet bloc countries finally were free to write the truth without fear of censorship or official reprisal. “Twenty years ago they weren’t allowed to sign contracts with Western publishing firms, and some would write articles for us only on the condition we would publish them anonymously,” Sadie recalls. Among the subjects that come in for reappraisal in the new edition is experimental music in Russia during the ’20s and ’30s, which the Soviets once were eager to disown.
But what is really and truly new about the New Grove II is that you can access all 25 million words of it, for the first time, on the Internet.
The New Grove Online — accessible for a fee at www.grovemusic.com — not only includes the entire text of the print version but also carries several unique advantages. A search engine allows you to scan the entire contents; it also allows quick cross-referencing and links to the Web. Moreover, the online version boasts rotating 3-D illustrations of musical instruments and has begun to replace score excerpts with “sound illustrations,” via partnerships with recording companies and other commercial Net sites.
With its extensive scholarly resources, the New Grove Online promises to become the most reliable and comprehensive music site on the Web. Unlike the print Grove, the cyber-version will allow Macy’s editorial and research team to review and update articles, as needed, on a quarterly and annual basis. “When we commission a new article to replace an old one, the older ones will be archived, so you can see previous versions as well as the new one,” she explains. Macy already has drafted plans for Grove’s first update in April.
The dictionary’s long-proven integrity gives it a vast edge in credibility over the untold thousands of music sites on the Internet, many admittedly of dubious worth. One of Macy’s central objectives for the online Grove, she says, is to “sift the Internet for our users and be a reliable access to musical sites on the net. Whatever site Grove links you to, you can rely on that site in much the same way our bibliographies do for literature.”
Still, she worries that this powerful electronic super-reference tool might eventually suffer an identity crisis as it reaches ever further into the infinite reaches of cyberspace. “If you can write it all down and publish it in (29) volumes, that feels definitive. But the Internet just points out the elusiveness of what we think of as definitive.”
Even Macy must admit there are early glitches in the New Grove Online. Its failure to provide but a handful of sound illustrations is perhaps the most glaring. There are as yet relatively few external links to other Web sites offering musical examples.
You simply cannot get as sophisticated a combination of text, graphics and sound in cyber-version of New Grove II as you can at, say, the best and most established composer Web sites.
Otherwise, the New Grove site is fast, easy to navigate and user-friendly. Click on the hefty article on Mozart, for example, and you are given a long list of related articles. There you can find cross-references to every article in New Grove II that mentions Mozart, also the names of every musical theorist who has written about Mozart in the dictionary. Click on the “Masonic music” link in the chapter on Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and you’re off on another adventure. So it goes. So many words, so much music, so little time.
Once the editors get in step with the rest of the online world with respect to sound, the New Grove Online should be an unbeatable source of musical information.
It’s understandable that, at the end of a concentrated seven-year period of commissioning, editing, illustrating, organizing and publishing, New Grove II cost the publisher $33 million. Macmillan is passing that cost on to the consumer: The print version carries a whopping price tag of $4,850, which puts it beyond the budgets of all but lavishly funded scholars, libraries and music-loving laymen with deep pockets.
But the cost of accessing the online dictionary is comparatively cheap. For a subscription of $295, you can enjoy unlimited access for an entire year; a month’s subscription costs only $30. Rates for hourly access — also rates for libraries, schools and other institutions — will be announced shortly.
Still, when you get right down to it, the New Grove is a historic monument in music publishing whose importance is beyond price. We may never see its lavish likes again. The only thing that troubles me about it is whether my groaning bookshelves will be able to support all that weight.
NEW GROVE II: BETWEEN THE COVERS
Some gleanings, sidelights and/or trivial information from the worlds of high and low culture one may derive from perusing the 29,499 articles — that’s roughly 25 million words, if you’re counting — in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition:
Size matters
Number of columns devoted to various entries:
Mozart: 132 1/2
Beethoven: 124
Stravinsky: 63 1/2
Popular music 58 1/2 (7 1/2 in 1980 edition)
Schoenberg: 47 1/2
The trumpet: 23
Leonard Bernstein: 10
Philip Glass: 8 1/2 (1/2 column in 1980)
The Beatles: 6
John Lennon: 3/4 column
What’s new in II?
Marxism, Nazism, nationalism, Postmodernism, gay and lesbian music and Gangsta rap
In: Pop musicians who made it . . .
Barry Manilow
Bjork
Madonna
Meat Loaf
Prince
Ricky Martin
(Passing reference in the “USA” article)
Eminem
Dr. Dre
Puff Daddy (Glancing mentions for all three in articles on “Seattle,” “Dance music”)
Thomas Ades (Young British composer)
Out: . . . and those who didn’t
Spice Girls
Britney Spears
Julio Iglesias
Ol’ Dirty Bastard
Frederick Stocken
(Young British composer whose “Lament for Bosnia” was No. 1 on Tower Records chart.)
