For musicians who take ideas seriously, the publication of the long-awaited second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians will likely be remembered as the biggest story of 2001.

The New Grove II (as its publishers have styled it) has been the subject of numerous feature articles in major newspapers and magazines, among them the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. It is rare for such attention to be paid to an encyclopedia, but The New Grove II is no ordinary reference book. Not only are its 25 million words available both in traditional print form and in a fully searchable on-line digital version, but the on-line version will be updated on a continuing basis by a permanent staff of editors and researchers.¹

The New Grove II is the first comprehensive encyclopedia of music that endeavors to treat classical and non-classical music on roughly equal terms, and also to take cognizance of the explosion of writing about music. According to the editors, Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell:

This new edition seeks to accommodate the globalization of our times with its enhanced and more consistent coverage of non-Western musical traditions. It deals with the widening scope of academic studies with substantially extended treatment of popular music traditions the world over. Music-theoretical questions are more fully and methodically addressed, as are issues surrounding the philosophy and psychology of music.

In order to accommodate this additional material, The New Grove II has grown considerably. Its predecessor, published in 1980, was twenty volumes long and contained 22,500 entries by 2,400 contributors from 70 countries; this second edition is 29 volumes long and contains 29,000 entries by 6,000 contributors from 98 countries. The coverage of non-Western music has doubled in size, from 1 million to 2 million words. All told, The New Grove II contains 5,623 articles on new topics, including 700 new biographical entries on “composers and performers of popular music,” 3,000 additional entries on “composers of our time from all parts of the world,” and essays on such up-to-the-minute subjects as “Deconstruction,” “Postmodernism,” and “Women in Music.” Finally, new biographies have been commissioned of several major composers—among them Bartók, Brahms, Britten, Chopin, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Schubert, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Verdi.

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All this may leave tradition-loving readers wondering whether the editors of the new New Grove have made a complete break with the past, one whose implications might be summed up in the title of the fifth volume, “Canon to Classic Rock.” But in fact, most—if not all—of the differences between The New Grove II and its predecessor are far less dramatic than those between the first New Grove, published in 1980, and its immediate predecessor, the fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

By now, The New Grove has become so reassuringly familiar a landmark that it is easy to forget what life was like without it. Prior to 1980, there was no English-language music encyclopedia generally accepted as authoritative. The original Grove’s, published in 1889 and revised in 1904, 1927, 1940, and 1954, was widely used in the English-speaking world, but scholars without exception considered it to be greatly inferior to its German counterpart, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1949-79).

Part of the problem with the old Grove’s was that, prior to World War II, academic musicology was basically a German enterprise, whereas England’s musical culture was “amateurish” in both the good and bad senses of that ambiguous word. Sir George Grove (1820-1900), the first editor, was a quintessentially eminent Victorian, a civil engineer turned music administrator whose intense love of the classics led him to undertake the formidable task of editing a four-volume encyclopedia of music. He wrote about Beethoven and Schubert with the passion of an informed amateur (“Whatever the music of other composers may do, no one ever rose from hearing a piece by Schubert without being benefited by it”), but knew little of what the American musicologist Joseph Kerman has called the “positivistic” side of musicology—the painstaking collection of rigorously verified historical data.²

Though Grove’s grew more scholarly with each successive revision, it never broke free of the provincialism that had long been the curse of British musicology and music criticism. In a way, this was a boon, for Grove’s remained that rarest of things, a reference book with a personality. But too often the personality was narrow and blinkered, not merely about the emerging modern movement in art but also about artists whose only sin seems to have been that they were not British. A case in point is this now-notorious passage about Sergei Rachmaninoff:

As a composer he can hardly be said to have belonged to his time at all. . . . His music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from arpeggios. . . . The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninoff’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor.

It was just this sort of priggishness with which Stanley Sadie, editor of the sixth edition of Grove’s (known to scholars as Grove 6 and to ordinary users as The New Grove), sought to make a clean break. Unlike its predecessors, Grove 6 was an almost completely new production, as indicated by its full title, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Both the word “new” and the omission of the possessive from “Grove” were meant to signal that the days of the gentleman amateur were gone for good. Gone, too, was the tacit assumption that the Western classical-music tradition was the only one worth writing about, for The New Grove contained extensive coverage of non-Western and non-classical music.

Like every encyclopedia, The New Grove had its defects. Its coverage of American music was inadequate (though far better than that of Grove 5). Many of its contributors were strangely reticent about the devastating effects of totalitarianism on music in Europe in the 20th century. And The New Grove as a whole had little to say about the moral force of music, preferring to engage with it on purely historical and technical terms. In the words of Samuel Lipman:

There is so much in its pages of human ambition and human activity—but in the end the persistent failure to consider a wider meaning for music makes it all seem like a massive necrology. . . . [T)n giving up the passé musical judgments and intellectual apparatus of an earlier age, something else was lost as well: the high Victorian seriousness displayed by George Grove and many of his important contributors.

Still, The New Grove spoke the truth when it declared in its article about musicology that “the German monopoly . . . has clearly been broken forever.” At last, English-speaking scholars had created an encyclopedia of music that, whatever its shortcomings, was fully professional in every sense of the word.

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No sooner had The New Grove been published, however, than its makers began to lay the groundwork for an even more ambitious revised edition.

In 1985, Norton brought out a series of paperback volumes containing The New Grove’s biographical articles on major classical composers; these had been reworked in the light of later research, and some were completely new. In addition, five subject-specific New Grove dictionaries were published: on musical instruments (1984), American music (1986), jazz (1988), opera (1992), and women composers (1994). Each contained large amounts of new or revised material.³

The New Grove II is based in part on these publications, as well as on The New Grove, from which many entries have been reprinted without substantial change. Most of the new biographical articles on major composers were undertaken in order to incorporate significant contemporary research, in the process correcting certain glaring flaws of the 1980 work. Barry Millington’s article on Richard Wagner, for example, contains the honest discussion of Wagner’s anti-Semitism that was inexplicably (and inexcusably) missing from the New Grove essay by Curt von Westernhagen and Carl Dahlhaus; similarly, Roland J. Wiley’s article on Tchaikovsky dismisses as unprovable the theory of the composer’s suicide, which was taken at face value in 1980 by David Brown.

The New Grove II is not without flaws of its own. Web-based discussion sites of scholarly organizations like the Music Librarian Association resound with heated postings in which shortcomings are catalogued in proliferating detail, while sharp-eyed reviewers have pointed out numerous errors, omissions, and inconsistencies. Most are trivial, though a few have proved dire enough to cause, already, the reissuing of the 24th and 26th volumes in corrected editions, suggesting that The New Grove II was rushed into print prematurely.⁴

Other errors—of perspective—run deeper. For all the determined attempts of the British editors to de-provincialize their coverage of music, The New Grove II remains an encyclopedia that devotes 38 pages to Benjamin Britten versus eight to Aaron Copland. (Even Igor Stravinsky gets only 40!) And over and above its pro-British bias, The New Grove II suffers from what might be termed the academic non-judgmentalism of its predecessor. It is indicative of the editors’ overall approach that there is no article on “beauty,” and most of the contributors tend to steer well away from vividly affective language of any sort. Here, for instance, is Alan Blyth on the great Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter:

Her voice, basically firm and flexible, has an individual tang to it; she employs it intelligently to project the meaning of all she sings, and on the stage she commands the personality to perform comedy and tragedy with equal aplomb.

This is true enough as far as it goes, but it barely goes anywhere. The same may be said of too many of the blandly unspecific descriptions of composers and performers alike, which also have a way of skimping on highly relevant biographical information. Thus, you will not learn from their biographical entries that the jazz pianist Bill Evans was a heroin addict, or that the German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was a member of the Nazi party who for that reason was banned for years from the Metropolitan Opera.

For the most part, however, The New Grove II rises to the great occasions, especially in its extended biographical essays about the major classical composers. Peter Franklin on Mahler, Alan Walker on Liszt, Stephen Walsh on Stravinsky, James Webster on Haydn, Roland Wiley on Tchaikovsky: these, and many others, are near-ideal pairings of scholar and subject. Time and again, one feels that their articles have told you everything you want and need to know, presenting the facts with admirable clarity—at least so long as both the facts and their organization fall into established academic traditions.

By contrast, and almost without exception, the weakest articles are the ones dealing with jazz and popular music, two areas where formal scholarship too often tends to be shallow or non-existent. Even where existing documentation is reliable, The New Grove II sometimes fails to make use of it—there is, for example, no biographical article about the singer-mandolinist Bill Monroe, the inventor of bluegrass music, though his life and work have been extensively researched. And as for the coverage of rock music, it is both arbitrary and not infrequently pompous, bordering at times on outright self-parody, as in this entry on the pop singer Michael Jackson:

In terms of video, Jackson also appeared to be repeating himself, returning over and over again to the street-gang, West Side Story-style mise-en-scène of Beat It. An exception to this is the Afrocentric, Egyptian fantasy of “Remember the Time” from Dangerous.

Needless to say, some will boggle at the fact that rock receives any kind of coverage in The New Grove II, especially given the fact that it has yet to be subjected to the kind of close positivistic scrutiny that is growing more common in jazz scholarship. Even here, though, there is no real break with the ultimate aims of Grove 6 (in which rock also figured, albeit much less prominently), but rather a failure to bring them to fruition. The New Grove II seeks to be comprehensive: to describe, insofar as possible, every kind of musical activity, good or bad. Where the hard facts have been fully gathered and digested, their presentation is generally sound. In this as in most other ways, The New Grove II is for all intents and purposes continuous with Grove 6—usually better, sometimes not as good, but plainly arising out of the same intellectual impulse.

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Despite its self-evident resemblance to its predecessor, however, The New Grove II is in two crucial aspects a profoundly different enterprise.

The positivist monopoly on musicology was already starting to break up in 1980, and in the past two decades it has increasingly given way to a concentration on what scholars call “critical theory.” This is not music theory in the ordinary sense—theory as the codified principles of traditional musical language and structure—but rather the sort of “theory” that now dominates the academic study of English, in which critics seek to elucidate the meaning and significance of literature by considering it in the light of socio-cultural context and political doctrine, the latter usually Marxist in origin.

The makers of Grove 6 shied as far away as possible from such politically conscious thinking. Nor does it come remotely close to dominating The New Grove II. But certain of the newer biographical entries clearly reflect its influence, most notably Philip Brett’s article on Benjamin Britten:

Many of his new friends, including [W.H.] Auden, who imparted a carpe-diem message and undoubtedly lectured Britten on the topic, were almost openly gay, and he must have realized that the left-wing, pacifist, agnostic, and queer model they offered him provided a suitable identity niche in which to lodge his particular personal concerns, though few of his friends believed that he was ever entirely comfortable with it.

But it is in the newly commissioned articles about general topics that theory intrudes most sharply in The New Grove II. The intrusion is not always disadvantageous, especially when it comes to placing musical phenomena within their larger cultural context. Thus, whereas Grove 6 at times almost perversely discounted the influence of politics on music, The New Grove II contains an article on Nazism in which the ugly facts of musical life under Hitler are discussed straightforwardly. And while many contributors to Grove 6 presented serialism and the postwar avant-garde as historically inevitable, The New Grove II readily acknowledges that the hermetic modernism of Arnold Schoenberg and his progeny has failed to prosper: “Copland, Barber, Britten, and Shostakovich increasingly appear central to any musical characterization of the century. Modernism may end up as only one of many competing 20th-century trends and not the century’s dominant voice.”

Still, for every such entry there is another in which critical theory is allowed to run amok, a prime example being a jargon-ridden, eleven-page article on “Gay and Lesbian Music” by the aforementioned Philip Brett. And though The New Grove II has finally deigned to acknowledge the existence of the Nazis, Christopher Norris’s fawning articles on Marxism and “socialist realism,” the simple-minded musical style forcibly imposed on Soviet composers by the apparatchiks of the Kremlin, are nothing short of disgraceful:

Musicology was not immune to the kinds of “free-world” or “liberal” triumphalist rhetoric that greeted the end of Communist rule in central Eastern Europe. . . . There is no reason to suppose that gifted composers have not been genuinely moved by social inequity and not genuinely responded. Socialist realism, as an effort to liberate such response, is not a codified and now obsolete style but rather an expression of humane values that have been with us at least since the French Revolution.

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In the encyclopedias of the past, such blunders would have been written in stone. But The New Grove II, unlike its predecessor, is mutable. Should the editors decide at some future date that Christopher Norris was wrong about Marxism, they need not wait two decades in order to correct his mistakes. Instead, they can alter the electronic text of the on-line edition, instantaneously and at will.

This feature of The New Grove II is without question its most significant and far-reaching break with tradition. Heretofore, for better and for worse, a central attribute of encyclopedias has been their permanence. As Joseph Kerman wrote apropos of Grove 6:

[A] dictionary, even the best dictionary, is essentially just another trophy of positivism. It is a static rather than a dynamic thing, an immovable object rather than an irresistible force. Synoptic, celebratory, retrospective, and sterile, it stores but does not generate, transform, light up, or blossom.

The New Grove II on-line is different—radically so. The question is whether this difference is, in the long run, a good thing or a bad thing.

If knowledge is power, what is an encyclopedia? For the user, it is certainly a power source, but one that, as Kerman suggests, might better be compared to a storage battery than to a generator. But the makers of encyclopedias also possess an independent power of their own: the power of selection. By choosing one person to write about Beethoven and another to write about Count Basie—or by choosing not to write about Count Basie at all—the editor of an encyclopedia establishes a set of intellectual priorities. Should his encyclopedia be purchased by libraries and acknowledged by critics and scholars as pre-eminent in its field, then those priorities will be unconsciously accepted by many, perhaps most, of the people who consult it in years to come.

George Orwell understood this. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth was in charge of the translation of encyclopedias and dictionaries into Newspeak, the politically correct version of English in which it was impossible to utter a heterodox thought. Back issues of the London Times were rewritten each day in order to accord with the current dictates of Big Brother, and in time served as the source material for subsequent editions of reference books. This process was not a product of Orwell’s imagination: he based it on The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, whose subscribers were expected to scissor out old articles and replace them with new, updated ones supplied by Moscow when former eminences ran afoul of Stalin and were excised from history.

This is not to suggest that The New Grove II on-line will be run along the lines of the Ministry of Truth. But no one can doubt that it will evolve far more rapidly than any previous music encyclopedia, or that musicologists with political agendas will seek to influence that evolution as they see fit. What will The New Grove II on-line look like a year, or five years, from now? Will it be gradually re-created, entry by entry, so as to accord more completely with the thinking of scholars like Philip Brett and Christopher Norris? Will it remain essentially positivistic in orientation? Or will a new generation of scholars pull it in still another direction, as yet unforeseen?

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Whatever the future direction of The New Grove II, one thing is certain. It will keep on growing—and this, too, is liable to be a mixed blessing.

It is tempting to argue that The New Grove II has already grown too big, too indiscriminately inclusive, for its own good. Certainly one must vigorously question the appropriateness of entries in which the ephemeral achievements of present-day rock musicians are described in an elephantine style for which the only possible word is pseudoscholarly To apply to Michael Jackson a mode of discourse designed for Mozart is to obscure—perhaps inadvertently, perhaps willfully—the infinite difference between the two.

At the same time, it must be acknowledged with gratitude that the editors and contributors continue to devote the overwhelming bulk of their time and energy to writing about the art music of the West. Indeed, the extent to which The New Grove II is still dominated by Western classical music indicates that, for all their seeming non-judgmentalism, the positivistic musicologists are not without a hierarchy of values, uncomfortable though it may make them to admit as much. Notwithstanding their earnest attempts to “deprivilege” classical music, they still give more space to Beethoven than to any other composer, and describe him, just as they did in 1980, as “the most admired composer in the history of Western music.”

To call Beethoven “admired” is, of course, a very different thing from calling him “great.” It remains to be seen whether such carefully calculated praise can long withstand the attacks of the critical theorists. For they, too, have a hierarchy of values, and unlike their positivist colleagues, they are hardly shy about advancing it. The time may come—it may already be here—when it will not be enough to “defend” classical music merely by giving it more space in The New Grove II than any other kind.

On the other hand, there is also something to be said for the sheer inclusivity of The New Grove II, and to criticize its excesses of comprehensiveness is not to say that the goal itself is ignoble. Far removed though it may be from the original intent of Sir George Grove, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians continues to embody in its 29 volumes the supremely Victorian notion that music is universal—or, to put it another way, that there is some meaningful sense in which Beethoven, Count Basie, Benjamin Britten, and Bill Monroe were all engaged in the same activity. Moreover, it asserts by its very existence the possibility that all men in all conditions can participate in that activity in all its myriad manifestations—itself a hearteningly old-fashioned notion in our fissiparous age of identity politics.

Indiscriminate though it may be, there is thus reason to appreciate the deeply idealistic premise on which The New Grove II continues, at least for now, to be based. Between its covers, all music, if not equal, is nevertheless one.

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¹ The print edition of The New Grave Dictionary of Music and Musicians costs $4,850. Unlimited access to the on-line version is available for $295 a year or $30 a month. Either version can be ordered from Grove’s Dictionaries Inc. by calling 800-972-9892 or visiting www.grovemusic.com.

² For a more extended discussion of Sir George Grove and the early editions of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, see Samuel Lipman’s essay, “Within a Budding Grove’s” (COMMENTARY, March 1982; reprinted in The House of Music: Art in an Era of Institutions, 1984).

³ For a detailed consideration of the last of these volumes, see my “Ms. Wonder-Child, For Example” (COMMENTARY, March 1996).

⁴ Apparent signs of haste are to be found even in some of the best entries: Mark Tucker’s otherwise exemplary key article on jazz, for example, makes no mention whatsoever of the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, a central figure whose omission is so astonishing that one wonders whether some portion of the article inadvertently went unprinted.

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