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The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

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The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians, considered by most scholars to be the best general reference source on the subject in the English language. Along with MGG, it is the largest Western music reference work. Initially released through the vision and toil of George Grove, it was brought to a new height by Stanley Sadie and is the leading music reference source in English for both encyclopedic information and bibliographies.

File:The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.jpg
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2001

Editions

Grove's Dictionary

It was first published in 1878 as A Dictionary of Music and Musicians in four volumes edited by Sir George Grove with an appendix and index. The second edition, in five volumes, was edited by J. A. Fuller Maitland and published between 1904 and 1910. The third edition, also in five volumes, was edited by H. C. Colles and published in 1927. The fourth edition, also edited by Colles, was published in five volumes plus a supplement in 1940. The fifth edition, in nine volumes, was edited by Eric Blom and published in 1954. A supplementary volume followed in 1961.

The New Grove, 1st ed.

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 twenty volumes with 22,500 articles and 16,500 biographies.[1] It was edited by Stanley Sadie.

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 $2300. A paperback edition was reprinted in 1995 which sold for $500. At that point, editors likely decided to concentrate on the 2nd edition rather than continue to correct the mistakes of the original 1980 edition.

  • 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

The New Grove, 2nd ed.

The second edition under this title (the seventh overall) was published in 2001, in twenty-nine volumes. It was also made available by subscription on the Internet in a service called Grove Music Online[2]. 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 the subject of some criticism (e.g. in Private Eye) due to a significant number of typographical and factual errors that it contains. It has been reported that these were due in part to students having been used to check it, although in fact no students were ever employed as editorial staff. Two volumes were re-issued in corrected versions after publication, however, after production errors had caused the omission of sections of Igor Stravinsky's works list and Richard Wagner's bibliography.

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

Grove Music Online

Since its publication, the online edition of the New Grove has been continually maintained under the editorship of Laura Macy. Regular updates are made to the content of the encyclopedia, including a large number of revisions and additions of new articles. As well as the 29 volumes of the New Grove 2nd edition, Grove Music Online incorporates the 4-volume New Grove Dictionary of Opera (ed. Stanley Sadie, 1992) and the 2-volume New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edition (ed. Barry Kernfeld, 2002), comprising a total of more than 50,000 articles.

Status

The New Grove, if available, is generally the first source that musicologists use when beginning research or seeking information on most topics. Its scope and extensive bibliographies make it exceedingly valuable to any scholar with a grasp of the English language.

The dictionary was published by Macmillan Publishers but was sold in 2004 to Oxford University Press. 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.

In accordance with its status, the New Grove is expensive to obtain a copy of; the print edition costs over $2000, while an annual subscription to Grove Music Online is $300[3].

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

Contents

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

See also

  1. ^ Scott Kennedy, Reference Sources for Small and Medium-sized Libraries (1999) p. 216.
  2. ^ Grove Music Online - online version of the 2001 edition
  3. ^ Subscribe to Grove Music Online
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