The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Author(s)	Multiple
Original title	A Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Country	United Kingdom, United States
Language	English
Subject(s)	Music, Musicology, Music history, Music theory, Ethnomusicology
Genre(s)	Reference; Encyclopedic dictionary
Publisher	Oxford University Press Official website
Publication date	1878–present
Media type	hardback, paperback, and online

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, it is one of the largest reference works on Western music. Originally published under the title A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and later as Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, it has gone through several editions since the 19th century and is widely used. In recent years it has been made available as an electronic resource called Grove Music Online, which is now an important part of Oxford Music Online.

[edit] A Dictionary of Music and Musicians

A Dictionary of Music and Musicians was first published in four volumes (1878, 1880, 1883, 1889) edited by Sir George Grove with an Appendix edited by J. A. Fuller Maitland in the fourth volume. An Index edited by Mrs. Edmund Wodehouse was issued as a separate volume in 1890. In 1900, minor corrections were made to the plates as required, and the entire series was reissued in four volumes, with the index added to volume 4. The original edition and the reprint are now freely available online.^[1][2]. Grove limited the chronological span of his work to begin at 1450 while continuing up to the present day.

[edit] Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians

The second edition (Grove II), in five volumes, was edited by Fuller Maitland and published from 1904 to 1910, this time as Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The individual volumes of the second edition were reprinted many times. An American Supplement edited by Waldo Selden Pratt and Charles N. Boyd was added in 1920. This edition removed the first edition's beginning date of 1450,^[3] though important earlier composers and theorists are still missing from this edition. These volumes are also now freely available online.^{[4] [5]}

The third edition (Grove III), also in five volumes, was an extensive revision of the 2nd edition; it was edited by H. C. Colles and published in 1927.^[6]

The fourth edition (Grove IV), also edited by Colles, was published in 1940 in five volumes (a reprint of the third edition, with some corrections). In addition to the American Supplement,^[7] MacMillan also published (in New York^[8] and London^[9]) a Supplementary Volume edited by Colles.

The fifth edition (Grove V), in nine volumes, was edited by Eric Blom and published in 1954. This was the most thoroughgoing revision of the work since its inception, with many articles rewritten in a more modern style and a large number of entirely new articles. Many of the articles were written by Blom personally, or translated by him. An additional Supplementary Volume, prepared for the most part by Eric Blom, followed in 1961. Blom died in 1959, and the Supplementary Volume was completed by Denis Stevens. The fifth edition was reprinted in 1966, 1968, 1970, 1973, and 1975.^[10]

[edit] The New Grove

First Edition[link]

When the next edition appeared in 1980, it was under the new name The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and was greatly expanded to 20 volumes with 22,500 articles and 16,500 biographies.^[11] Its senior editor was Stanley Sadie with Nigel Fortune also serving as one of the main editors for the publication.

It was reprinted with minor corrections each subsequent year until 1995, except 1982 and 1983. In the mid-90s, the set version sold for about $2,300. A paperback edition was reprinted in 1995 which sold for $500. At that point, editors likely decided to concentrate on the second edition rather than continue to correct the mistakes of the original 1980 edition.^{[citation needed]}

• ISBN 0-333-23111-2 – hardback
• ISBN 1-56159-174-2 – paperback
• ISBN 0-333-73250-2 – British special edition
• ISBN 1-56159-229-3 – American special edition

Spin-offs[link]

Some sections of The New Grove were also issued as small sets and individual books on particular topics. These typically were enhanced with expanded and updated material and included individual and grouped composer biographies,^[12] a four-volume dictionary of American music (1984),^[13] a three-volume dictionary of musical instruments (1984),^[14] and a four-volume dictionary of opera (1992).^[15]

Second Edition[link]

The second edition under this title (the seventh overall) was published in 2001, in 29 volumes. It was also made available by subscription on the internet in a service called Grove Music Online.^[16] It was again edited by Stanley Sadie, and the executive editor was John Tyrrell. It was originally to be released on CD-ROM as well, but this plan was dropped. As Sadie writes in the preface, "The biggest single expansion in the present edition has been in the coverage of 20th-century composers".

This edition has been subject to some negative criticism (e.g. in Private Eye) owing to the significant number of typographical and factual errors that it contains.^{[citation needed]} Some of the errors were attributed to the use of students for checking the dictionary,^{[citation needed]} although in fact no students were ever employed as editorial staff.^{[citation needed]} Two volumes were re-issued in corrected versions, however, after production errors originally caused the omission of sections of Igor Stravinsky's worklist and Richard Wagner's bibliography.

Ian Bent was a Senior Consulting Editor from 1971 to 1980.

• ISBN 0-333-60800-3 – British
• ISBN 1-56159-239-0 – American (cloth: alk.paper)

Publication of the second edition of The New Grove was accompanied by a web-based version. It attracted some initial criticism, for example for the way in which images were not incorporated into the text but kept separate.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Grove Music Online and Oxford Music Online

Currently, the complete text of The New Grove is available to subscribers to the online service Grove Music Online.^[17] Grove Music Online includes a large number of revisions and additions of new articles. In addition to the 29 volumes of The New Grove second edition, Grove Music Online incorporates the four-volume New Grove Dictionary of Opera (ed. Stanley Sadie, 1992) and the three-volume New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, second edition (ed. Barry Kernfeld, 2002), comprising a total of more than 50,000 articles.

The dictionary was originally published by Macmillan but was sold in 2004 to Oxford University Press. Since 2008^{[citation needed]}, Grove Music Online has served as a cornerstone of Oxford University Press's larger online research tool Oxford Music Online.^[18] As well as being available to individual and educational subscribers, it is available for use by members of many libraries worldwide.^[19]

Status[link]

The New Grove is often the first source that English-speaking musicologists use when beginning research or seeking information on most musical topics. Its scope and extensive bibliographies make it exceedingly valuable to any scholar with a grasp of the English language.^[20]

The print edition the New Grove costs between $1,100 and $1,500,^[21] while an annual subscription to Grove Music Online as of October 23, 2009 (2009 -10-23)^[update] is $295.^[22]

The companion four-volume series, New Grove Dictionary of Opera, is the main reference work in English on the subject of opera.

Its principal competitor is the Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart ("MGG"), currently ten volumes on musical subjects and seventeen on biographies of musicians, written in German.

Contents[link]

The 2001 edition contains:

• 29,499 articles in total
  • 5,623 entirely new articles
• 20,374 biographies of composers, performers and writers on music
  • 96 articles on theatre directors
• 1,465 articles on styles, terms and genres
  • 283 articles on concepts
• 805 articles on regions, countries and cities
  • 580 articles on ancient music and church music
  • 1,327 articles on world musics
  • 1,221 articles on popular music, light music, and jazz
• 2,261 articles on instruments and their makers, and performance practice
  • 89 articles on acoustics
• 693 articles on printing and publishing
  • 174 articles on notation
  • 131 articles on sources

Humour[link]

Two non-existent composers have appeared in the work:

Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup was the subject of a hoax entry in the 1980 New Grove. Esrum-Hellerup's surname derives from a Danish village and a suburb of Copenhagen.^[23] The writer of the entry was Robert Layton. Though successfully introduced into the encyclopaedia, Esrum-Hellerup appeared in the first printing only: soon exposed as a hoax, the entry was removed and the space filled with an illustration.^[24][12] In 1983, the Danish organist Henry Palsmar founded an amateur choir, the Esrum-Hellerup Choir, along with several former pupils of the Song School, St. Annae Gymnasium in Copenhagen.^[25]

Guglielmo Baldini was the name of a non-existent composer who was the subject of a hoax entry in the 1980 edition. Unlike Esrum-Hellerup, Baldini was not a modern creation: his name and biography were in fact created almost a century earlier by the renowned German musicologist Hugo Riemann. The New Grove entry on Baldini was supported by a fictional reference in the form of an article supposedly in the Archiv fur Freiburger Diozesan geschichte. Though successfully introduced into the encyclopaedia, Baldini appeared in the first printing only: soon exposed as a hoax, the entry was removed.^[12]

Seven parody entries, written by contributors to the 1980 edition, and full of musical puns and dictionary in-jokes, were published in the February 1981 issue of The Musical Times (which was also edited by Stanley Sadie at the time).^[26] These entries never appeared in the dictionary itself and are:

• Brown, 'Mother' (Mary) (b 1550; d Wapping 3 Jan 1611)
• Ear-flute
• Hameln [Hamelin]
• Khan't, Genghis (Tamburlaine) (b Ulan Bator, c1880; d New York, 22 Nov 1980)
• Stainglit (Nevers), Sait d'Ail (fl Middle Ages) – i.e. 'Stanley Sadie', following the example of Luis van Rooten
• Toblerone
• Verdi, Lasagne ['Il Bolognese'] (b Bologna, 10 Oct 1813; d Naples, 15 March 1867)

References[link]

Notes

Sources

• Blom, Eric, editor (1954). Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (fifth edition). New York: St. Martin's Press (OCLC 13586086) and London: Macmillan (OCLC 492124281).
  • Supplementary volume, associate editor Denis Stevens, 1961, New York (OCLC 13586310), London (OCLC 36817387).
  • Fifth edition reprints: 1966: New York (OCLC 474130074, London (OCLC 221046579); 1968: New York (OCLC 3263363); 1970: New York (OCLC 34631845); 1973: New York (OCLC 436093724), London (OCLC 37186724); 1975: New York (OCLC 603321134), London (OCLC 2275432, ISBN 978-0-333-19174-3.).

External links[link]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1900)