Ode to Joy

Cast your eye on the domain of Western classical music, and you might be surprised to discover it is a fairly modern medium. The classical repertoire stretches back a mere thousand years or so to roots in the plainchant of the Roman Catholic Church, paltry by comparison with the ancient lineages of poetry and tragedy, to say nothing of the primitive origins of painting and sculpture. But for an endeavor that has been around no longer than a blink of the eye of history, written music has engendered a remarkable amount of scholarly inquiry.

It’s easy to explain why. Its masterpieces are among the supreme achievements of human thought, marvels of logic, beauty, emotional complexity and spiritual transcendence. And music is naturally, indeed, by necessity, arcane. It is the most ephemeral of the arts and the most solid, because the sounds represented by its abstract notation must be recreated by living musicians each time it is to be heard. This makes the study of the interpretation and performance of music an essential part of the study of music, greatly enlarging the discipline while complicating the historian’s task by creating an infinite multitude of ways in which one can “know” a piece of music. What is Beethoven’s Fifth? Is it the notes Beethoven wrote in the score or Toscanini’s interpretation or Furt-wngler’s or John Eliot Gardiner’s? It is, of course, none of these things and all of them, and each time the score is played it emerges as something subtly or not so subtly different from what it was on any previous occasion.

How can such a capricious phenomenon be subjected to scientific study? Many pure scientists would agree with Richard Feynman that it can’t, and some of them would undoubtedly dismiss the attempt, as he did, as a lot of “low-level baloney.” Clearly the play is the thing. But that hasn’t kept generations of musicologists from trying to elucidate this most precious art or from spending years in libraries like archeologists on a dig, tracking down sources, gleaning kernels of new information from reams of old paper, piecing together the vestigial remnants of lost works and missing links in the evolution of known works. Some have spent their time devising grand theories; others working on minute pieces of puzzles only a few can even see.

Whatever the physicists may think, the universe of musicology is an expanding one, and charting it is no longer an easy feat. Every generation that comes along adds to the amount of data that is out there; each one sees things differently and in more detail, if not always with deeper understanding, than the one before. The process is a dynamic one, but every so often a “picture” gets taken showing more concretely how things have changed. It happened in 1980 with the publication of “The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” a 20-volume encyclopedia that stood unchallenged for two decades as the standard classical music reference work in English. This year we have a new picture--the 29-volume, largely rewritten and vastly more comprehensive second printed edition of “The New Grove”--and an altogether new way of viewing it, via an online edition with a database of 25 million words and links to images, sound files and related sites on the Worldwide Web.

To get an idea of the size of “The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” second edition, which its makers have dubbed “The New Grove II,” consider the following comparisons and statistics. The print version of the “new” “New Grove” contains 29,499 entries and 5,000 illustrations, takes up 55 inches of shelf space, weighs 118.9 pounds and enshrines the expertise of more than 6,000 contributors. It contains 20,374 biographical entries (compared with about 16,500 in the “old” “New Grove”) and 2 million words on “world” music (as opposed to about 1 million words on non-Western and folk music in the previous edition) and, in what is a happy development for many researchers, it comes with an index, the first time that has happened since Sir Charles Grove put one at the end of the very first edition of his dictionary in 1890.

Now that the 20th century has run its course, we see a little more clearly than was possible in the 1970s (when the first edition of “The New Grove” was compiled) who the significant creative figures of the century’s final quarter were. Thus, the entry on Philip Glass in the second edition has ballooned to 3,000 words from 200, and the entry on Arvo Prt has expanded almost tenfold, from 190 to 1,800 words. Wolfgang Rihm, who had no entry at all in the first edition, gets 3,000 words, and Henri Dutilleux, who certainly deserved better the first time around, has been upgraded from 890 words to 2,100. (Obviously pleased with their expanded erudition, the publisher provides such word counts in the collateral material.)

In addition to the aforementioned world music, jazz, pop and rock music are touched upon, if by no means thoroughly covered, in the new “New Grove.” Articles on the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Little Richard and the Pet Shop Boys appear alongside more expected fare such as entries on obscure medieval theorists and viola da gamba virtuosos. This proliferation of nonclassical topics in “New Grove II” is going to strike a lot of specialists as lip service. It is but the tip of an enormous conceptual iceberg that the editors have decided to call “contemporary thinking” and, for better or worse, tie up to rather than steer clear of. Thus, for the first time in any Grove, there are articles on gender, sexuality, feminism, “Women in Music” and “Gay and Lesbian Music,” as well as studies of postmodernism, nationalism, Marxism and Nazism.

And, lest anyone doubt that this “Grove” is fully in touch with the brave new, post-Derrida world of academic inquiry, there is also an article on “deconstruction.” But things get a little strange in the index, where “Women Composers” are listed separately from “Composers,” as if to suggest that they are essentially a different species. Isn’t the idea supposed to be that they’re not? The extent to which modern deconstructive and gender-based scholarship have hijacked the new “New Grove” cannot be determined on the basis of a cursory reading, but it may well become a significant issue as time goes by, the flip side of the coin of renewal.

Among the glories of the 1980 “New Grove” were its works lists and bibliographies, and these have been painstakingly revised and updated (in the new edition, the works list alone for Joseph Haydn is 60 pages). It is mind-boggling what has been produced in the last 20 years of musicological research in practically every area of the discipline. The task of tracking it all down for inclusion in the sometimes pages-long bibliographic listings that accompany the main biographical and topical entries had to be a daunting one, but for serious students and practitioners, it is a boon to have these sources listed in one place.

In many cases the insights gained from scholarly digging during the 20 years between 1980 and the publication of “The New Grove II” also necessitated the commissioning of new biographies of major composers. Some of these are wonderful, such as Alan Walker’s entry on Liszt and Barry Millington’s on Wagner (though we will miss Carl Dahlhaus’ wonderful essay on Wagner in the 1980 “New Grove”). Some are not, among them Geoffrey Chew’s nebulous analysis of Monteverdi’s works and historical position, shot through with jargon and flatulent constructions. Among the minor biographical entries there are also winners and losers. Gabriel Banat’s informative and splendidly written article on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges is the perfect cameo. On the other hand, Ian Denley’s treatment of Engelbert Humperdinck (the German composer, not the pop singer) comes uncomfortably close to drivel in places. “Much of Humperdinck’s instrumentation ... ranges from straightforward to highly complex and difficult...,” Denley writes, leaving the issue wide open. A bit later, he sophomorically intones: “Although his music is regarded as a synthesis of many prevailing styles, Humperdinck was very much an individual.”

“The New Grove II” contains a vast number of new and updated bios of performers as well, though I have to say that giving close to 200 words to the 25-year-old English conductor Daniel Harding seems a bit premature, especially when a figure like Osmo Vnsk, newly appointed music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, is omitted. Were Harding not English, he would certainly not have made the cut. Fortunately, there is a lot of very good material on artists who truly ought to be represented in any worthy classical compendium, though the bias--in terms of the scope and depth of respective entries--is still quite clearly toward composers, which in a work aimed mainly at scholars is understandable.

Gone is the fraudulent article that Robert Layton slipped into the 1980 “New Grove” on a nonexistent Danish composer whose first and last names were actually stops on the commuter rail line from Copenhagen to Hillerod. But the entry on Binchois still contains a hidden acrostic (hint: look at the letters that open successive paragraphs, beginning, in each case, with the second paragraph, in sections 1, 3 and 6 of the article).

In terms of its physical feel, the second edition is markedly superior to the first: It is printed on whiter, more pliable paper and bound in narrower volumes that are much sturdier. One of the worst things about the first edition was that the binding of individual volumes was flimsy and prone to cracking (as happened to nearly half the volumes in my set). These second edition bindings look as if they’ll resist that tendency.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the two-line credit that appears directly under the title on each bound volume of “The New Grove II”: “Edited by Stanley Sadie.” A noted Mozart scholar (long before he got dragooned into editing the first edition, in 1970), he will evermore be chiefly remembered as the spiritus rector behind the greatest work of musical lexicography in history, and that’s no small distinction. This time around, he got lots of help from an editorial staff of 60 and was able to share the burden of redaction with some very high-level colleagues, chief among them John Tyrrell, who came on board in 1997 as executive editor, and Laura Macy, who left a post at Penn State to serve as publishing director and editor of the online version of “The New Grove II.” Yet in spite of what were clearly Herculean efforts to assure the accuracy of the publication, numerous typos, proofing errors and slip-ups escaped detection on the first printing. The most significant of these were the omission of Igor Stravinsky’s chamber and instrumental works, solo vocal works, piano music and reductions and arrangements from the general works list that accompanies the entry on him and the disappearance of four pages of bibliographic listings from the entry on Wagner. Both gaffes were caught early in the game, and this summer Grove shipped newly printed replacement Volumes 24 and 26 to recipients of the encyclopedia’s first printing. Other mistakes I picked up at random included quite a few typos (“Bernado” rather than Bernardo Strozzi as the painter of a portrait of Monteverdi; Joseph “Boulogne” in the page-headers for the article on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges but Joseph “Bologne” in the text and the picture caption) and occasional grammatical errors (for example, the verb-less clause in the first sentence of the entry on Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber).

Many of these mistakes will undoubtedly be corrected in subsequent printings of the dictionary, even though most of them are too small to be worried about. And of course such things can easily be addressed in the online edition, which is one of the great advantages to having the whole content of the dictionary in a format that, in theory at least, is easily updated. I checked out the online edition and found it to be clean, fast and user-friendly. It is easily searchable, and the text is displayed in large sans-serif characters that makes onscreen reading a breeze.

The print edition of “The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” second edition, can be ordered by calling (800) 972-9892 or via e-mail at gdi.orders@aidcvt.com. Access to “The New Grove II Online” is available to individuals through a variety of subscription plans and rates, with options ranging from $295 a year for unlimited access to an hourly payment arrangement called a “MetroPass.” A monthly rate of $30 is available, as is a rate of $30 for 10 24-hour sessions. Library and business rates begin at $1,200 per year.

For more information, check the Grove Web site at https://www.grovemusic.com.