Better than none

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Phillips, Peter

Eighteen months after its launch, PETER PHILLIPS assesses the merits of a British publishing institution

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition Edited by Stanley Sadie & John Tyrell Macmillan (London, 2000); 29 volumes; L2950. ISBN 0333 608003. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Online Version Edited by Laura Macy www.grovemusic.com; one-year access, L19.5. ISBN 0333 913981.

'DICTIONARIES and encyclopedias are, strictly speaking, scarcely reviewable', wrote Carl Dahlhaus in 1981, when confronted with this dictionary's immediate predecessor, The new Grove dictionary of music (NGI). One sympathises. What was then twenty volumes, costing L850, is now twenty-nine volumes and twenty-five million words, costing L2950. It may also be accessed online. But has our knowledge of music grown proportionally in the last twenty years? Evidently not, if one compares, for example, the old and new entries on Beethoven, which resemble each other quite closely: the increase is largely due to the inclusion of new topics, or the considerable expansion of some timidly dealt with before. Now there are hundreds of entries on jazz, popular and world music where, previously, there were but a handful. Eastern European musical studies, for instance, have been transformed by the fall of communism, enabling a free access to writers and information unavailable to NGI. Ethnomusicology holds a more important place than before, with the provision of more detailed entries on many countries, some making their debut. Then there are those subjects which once were thought to lie too far outside the - male - Western classical tradition to warrant inclusion: gay and lesbian studies, women composers and performers, electro-acoustic music, nationalism, orientalism, and postmodernism. Dahlhaus went on to say that he thought something as big as Grove ought not to be reviewed before ten years of shelf life, because by then the dross will have declared itself alongside the gold-dust. All the more so now; and there is the added thought that perhaps in ten years' time this massive project might be a little nearer completion, because neither in its print or online versions is this currently the case.

Grove is a colossal resource, usually accurate, generally easy to consult, unrivalled in its scope. Without it, musicians at every level of commitment would be fumbling with small libraries' worth of alternative material, possibly more upto-date than Grove but certainly more conflicting in their points of view. The advantage of a dictionary of first resource being so detailed while at the same time under one editorial roof cannot be overstated. Not only is there generally a consistent editorial tone and policy of presentation, but that tone and policy have been so influential through the previous editions of Grove that they have gone some way towards shaping the way we expect music to be discussed. The authority of Grove is maintained by these volumes, but it has been a close-run thing.

THE BOOK form of NGII was published in November 2000 - with quite a few errors and omissions. The most celebrated were so serious (Stravinsky's list of works was partly missing from vol.24 and Wagner's bibliography in vol.26 had been taken from NGI) that the publishers had to reprint them and send the improved copies out as free replacements. But these high-profile mistakes were only the beginning. For example, Krenek, being less important than Stravinsky or Wagner, may never have his bibliography in the printed form (and still lacks it in the standard online form, though curiously it has been supplied in The new Grove dictionary of opera entry, now incorporated into NGII online); and the number of misprints are legion. My favourite is the reference to `Wager tubas', where 'Wagner' was meant, which might be thought an encouragement to put your money where your mouth is. It is beginning to become evident that the burden Macmillan have placed on 'a programme of quarterly and annual updates from the Grove Editorial Team' is close to being unsustainable. To update the scholarship and prose-style of those core articles which were more or less republished from NGI is one task, but to have also to bring those articles up to the promised standard of presentation might actually take the twenty years of grace before the next printed version would have had to be planned if Grove were to stay as market leaders. Already a year and a half has gone by.

And then there is the wonderland of what was promised as a result of making use of the internet, benefits which were over and above what Grove had been able to provide before: such bonuses as `links to specialized online collections of instrument recordings', `high quality sound excerpts', 'carefully planned hypertext links and links to thousands of related sites'. It is true that some of these promises were realised just by the act of putting the dictionary online and that some of them are extremely useful, including the `unique "subject classification" feature, enabling research by topic without needing to know a specific term or name', and the `one-click cross-referencing'. But most of them are either nowhere to be seen or yield information which is worse than useless. For example there is not a single sound link to the 'Beethoven' article; while the 'link' option for `Beethoven' yields, amongst other things, access to the site of the Austrian National Tourist Office. And Bowiewonderworld.com is a riot. True, Grove disclaims any responsibility `for the content of thirdparty sites', but clearly some editorial control is needed if the use of the 'link' button is not to sink into farce. The one site I found which has an updated (`Sibelius enabled') sound file - designed to illustrate cadences - could not be played because, we are told, the necessary scorch plug-in is not yet supported by Internet Explorer or Netscape.