Shorter Notice
IT is astonishing how much information is contained in this companion to the Com- panion. The tables of notation and nomen- clature alone, with the relevant terms in four languages, are a model of clarity and concision. Diagrams of organ mechanisms, pictures of percussion instruments and a certain number of pleasant but not essential or even wholly relevant illustrations (an 18th-century flute-player on p. 211, for instance is surely a waste of space) give the book an easy-going air and invite browsing rather than strictly utilitarian use. Any but the biggest composers, for example, come off rather badly, with such a phrase as "many successful orch., choral and chamber works," no names and no dates. On the other hand there are entries, to take a chance page, under Evans's Supper Rooms and Eustachian Tubes, and a quite dispro- portionate amount of space is given to purely linguistic entries with no strictly musical bearing whatever (avec, ii faut, se charger, erniedrigen, Ersatz, keineswegs, werden). Nor is the language employed always economical or elegant. Thus Boyd Neel is said to have "qualified as medical man "—why not "doctor " 7—and the second of the two sentences devoted to Massenet begins " Made self known in all countries . . ." The entries on all kinds of church music are particularly full and
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