A Grove of Treasures

By R.Z. Sheppard

From Palestrina to Presley, in 20 volumes

Poets, philosophers and churchmen have fretted for centuries about the demonic and divine natures of music. The results have been gloriously inconclusive. But in the past hundred years scholars have plodded to an unassailable truth: whether it overheats the blood or soothes the savage breast, music is one of history's great growth industries. Technology has electrified the ether: since Edison and Marconi, listeners have increased a billionfold. There is scarcely an Aleut or Patagonian today who cannot flick on a transistor against the shriek of icy winds.

One result is that people talk and read more about music than ever before. For the most compulsive of these, the publication this month of the 20-volume sixth edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Macmillan Publisher's Ltd.) is a great event. Since 1890 Grove has been the last word on music, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world. The initial edition was titled A Dictionary of Music and Musicians by Eminent Writers, English and Foreign. The word "foreign" was a bit patronizing; of the 118 contributors listed in that four-volume edition, 102 were British. This reflected the insular judgment of the founding editor, a nonmusician named George Grove, one of those versatile achievers of whom the Victorian Age was justly proud. Sir George, a civil engineer, built lighthouses in Jamaica and Bermuda and worked on the British railway system. He was a self-taught Bible and music scholar who in 1852 became secretary of the Crystal Palace, a concert and exhibition hall. He wrote program notes and served as a founder and director of the Royal College of Music.

Grove's musical idols were Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Mendelssohn. But his dictionary mirrored his national biases. Early editions contained the names of English composers and musicians of negligible influence. Though subsequent updatings sought to broaden the work's scope, a major revision was not attempted until the nine-volume fifth edition of Grove's in 1954. However, Grove's was still dominated by the tastes of a single editor, on that occasion, the late English critic Eric Blom.

Grove's new chief is Stanley Sadie, 50, a specialist in 18th century music, author of books on Mozart and Handel, editor of Musical Times and critic for the Times of London. Sadie appears to have a firm grip on two vital facts: that culturally as well as commercially this is an age of internationalism, and that the rapid growth of music can no longer be interpreted by one person. Grove 6 acknowledges this with a systems approach that employs computers, a team of advisers and editors and an army of 2,300 contributors (20% of them British; 35% American). It is not a revision but a new construction job, as if an old walled city had been leveled and a cosmopolitan capital built in its place. Compared with the 1954 model the New Grove is 97% new; its size has more than doubled (to 20 volumes with 15,000 pages); and cost of a set has soared from $127.50 to $1,900.

Grove 6 offers not only updated biographies and bibliographies but greatly expanded coverage on forms, theory, cities and their musical traditions, instruments, musical sociology and institutions. A generation of scholarship has enhanced the reputations of such composers as Monteverdi, Palestrina, Lassus, Josquin, Vivaldi, Cimarosa and Donizetti. Entries on such late 19th century romantics as Bruckner and Mahler have been greatly expanded; the 20th century giant Stravinsky gets 30 columns of biography and discussion vs. nine in Grove 5.

Jazz and non-Western music receive greater attention. No more condescending talk of "primitive" music; now there are a million words on the "ethnomusicology" of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific. Pop is sometimes treated in solemn detail. On the Beatles: "Early style is typified by She Loves You (1963), with its duple metre, almost hypnotic beat, pentatonic melody, 32-bar song form and tonic-mediant tonal relationship; its text concerns adolescent love, and has a quasi ritualistic 'yeah, yeah, yeah' refrain."

The entry on Elvis Presley concentrates on the singer's virtuosity ("His voice covered two and a third octaves from G to B with an upward extension to D in falsetto"). The King's drug-taking is not mentioned. Yet for the first time in Grove, stars of the past are handled bluntly. The deaths of Schubert and Schumann are attributed unequivocally to syphilis; Tchaikovsky's homosexuality and suicide are clearly acknowledged.

Sadie can be rough on his predecessors at Grove 5: "The articles on Rachmaninoff and Richard Strauss were not worthy of the subjects ... Organist and Composer William Wolstenholme left no impact on the history of music and he shouldn't have been in at all." The new edition is tougher and less sentimental. Sadie's own piece of Mozart, the longest single biography (89 columns) in the dictionary, is a good example. Says Sadie: "Mozart was not just a victim of infirmities and circumstances. He alienated potential patrons and that's partly why he died poor at the age of 35."

Procuring, editing and checking 18 million words and 3,000 illustrations caused staggering problems. Publication deadlines were delayed at least two years: some contributors were five years late. computers too were obstreperous. At one point, recalls Sadie, all articles beginning with U, X, J and C were deleted; K was lost for a while; and "Haydn made our computer have a seizure."

The strengths and weaknesses of huge reference works like the New Grove will take years to judge. But Macmillan is already planning Grove 7. Though it may be too early to shout encore! it is reassuring to know that Sadie and his band will play on.

--By R.Z. Sheppard.

Reported by Eric Amfitheatrof/London and Nancy Newman/New York

With reporting by Eric Amfitheatrof, Nancy Newman

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