BOOKS
The first place to look
Philip Hensher
The huge encyclopaedias which describe all the manifestation of a single cultural fact were a 19th-century phenomenon, and they have started to look slightly strange. Like that other 19th- century invention, the department store, they seek to bring a gigantic range of dis- parate objects under a single roof, with the promise that here is knowledge, unified, exhaustive and consistent. Grove's Dictio- nary, the Dictionary of National Biography, the OED, Thieme-Becker's dictionary of art all present a single subject, exhaustively pursued; the boundaries of the subject seem clear. Connections are drawn, and an argument pursued with a confidence which displays a certainty that here is indeed a unified phenomenon.
Whether we can still believe that is a moot point, and, however useful these vast enterprises remain, they now seem to be asserting a cultural unity which looks far less substantial than it used to. To the founders of the OED, what `English' was seemed fairly clear. Now, we probably pre- fer to think of `Englishes', and the standard form of the language found in these islands as only one of many multiplying varieties, and not necessarily the most important one. The DNB's project, to map the lives of those who made a major contribution to national life, once seemed unproblematic; new, we are uncomfortably aware of the decisions which were made long before anyone started to think of who to include, and it is hard to think of the volumes of the DNB as making up a single subject in any sense.
Grove's dictionary is one of the major monuments of Victorian thought, and through successive editions it has pursued what once seemed the single object of music' with resolute certainty and admirable ambition. What music meant was once a simple fact; the body of West- ern art music which derived from the ancient Greek theory of the modes, sup- planted from time to time by voices from outside: popular music, folk music, Orien- tal and African traditions. It still seems like a single subject, but the old hierarchies are going, and even someone like me, who still thinks of the pinnacle of the Western art tradition as obviously better and more cen- tral to culture than anything else to be found in the new Grove, has to admit that it will not seem like that in 50 or 100 years' time.
When Grove was first published, music meant a series of notes written by a com- poser and played by a musician on a musi- cal Instrument in a concert hall. Since then, figures have come to prominence for whom directs its listeners to stop listening to the events on a concert hall platform, and start to listen to the random sound events of the world around them, represents a gigantic enlargement of the whole concept of music, and one which no dictionary can start to deal with.
For the moment, however, it is still a subject, and one which the new edition of Grove deals with in an admirably thorough way. Though there is still a conviction one that I can't argue with — that Bach and Brahms are going to seem of most sig- nificance to the great mass of its readers, it has made a serious attempt to broaden its awareness of music outside the Western art tradition. Personally, I cannot see who on earth is going to go to Grove to find out about Niggaz With Attitude, but it is important for an enterprise like this now to acknowledge that music is an enormously various endeavour, and not the unified sub- ject it once seemed. The introductions to non-Western traditions are admirably done, and the coverage of contemporary popular culture reasonably plausible. They have made a serious attempt, not just to update the dictionary by including the lat- est young composers, such as Julian Ander- son, who gets in by the skin of his teeth, but by enlarging the scope — there is a faintly alarming entry on lesbian and gay music and a fair number of other, similarly politically correct discussions. Good for them — some of the subjects which Grove used to pass over in lordly silence are, it turns out, quite interesting. It is not, how- ever, Grove's fault that, given its history, it is always going to be seen as principally a dictionary of Western art music, and that is how it is going to be of most use.
What we have, then, is a dictionary which is at its most useful when it is most tradi- tional, in its articles on individual com- posers, musical forms, nations and instruments. These are in the main of the very high standard which one expects from Grove, and anyone who wants a quick, thorough account of the career of Handel ought always to go first to this source. As ever, the single most useful and interesting feature of Grove is that it offers very full lists of works by individual composers, and not just the obviously major ones: it is something which very few dictionaries have the resources to offer, but it is amazingly useful to be able to look at every titled scrap of music by a composer. The search engines ought now to allow you to pursue wonderfully idle queries, and turn up fan- tastically obscure settings of different Shakespeare plays, so long as you remem- ber to enter Arnleto as well as Hamlet. On the whole, the entries on composers are excellent, and very extensive. I spent a very agreeable few hours looking up every single composer I could find from that fascinating period, pre-revolutionary Russia — it was something I thought I knew something about, but the dictionary went well beyond such interesting minor figures as that mad prodigy Stanchinsky and Stravinsky's rival, Maximilien Stein- berg, and well into areas of great darkness. Major composers are covered well and seri- ously, on the whole — I say on the whole, because I did come across a fantastically awful entry on Tippett, which, barkingly abstruse and revoltingly gushing, is in the end more or less meaningless. Musicolo- gists write worse than anyone else, when they really try, and this, full of Widmer- pudlian talk of 'affirmative tendencies', is an absolute corker. Really tricky customers sometimes escape; the entry on Janacek's musical style is startlingly superficial. But the thoughtful, illuminating piece is much more common; Berlioz, for instance, is treated accurately and with concision, and his style analysed with great penetration, technically but also lucidly. The articles on national schools of music are always pretty good, even where the material is unpromis- ing; I particularly commend a highly amusing but decidedly brave improvisation on the utterly null subject of Canadian musical history.
The more technical articles are generally excellent. Sonata form and fugue are sub- jects which always tempt a dictionary into prescription, but these are carefully hedged round with qualifications, and the writers are scrupulous about distinguishing what theorists said the form ought to contain from what the practice of composers actu- ally demonstrates. Serialism is too closely identified with Schoenberg's twelve-tone theory, as if they were the same thing; in fact, serialism is a way of thinking about music which can be found in some form throughout the history of Western music. Occasionally technical analysis is shied away from; Per Norgard's proliferating series — one of the most important and fascinating developments in post-war music — is referred to, but not really explained. But in general the dictionary is difficult when it needs to be, and much 20th-centu- ry music cannot really be described without recourse to numbers and diagrams.
For the first time, Grove is being present- ed in an on-line edition, which was the form I had access to — a great relief, given the physical size of the object. The advan- tages of presenting a dictionary like this online are obvious; it allows, or ought to allow, a quick search throughout the entire text for key words, and cross-references can be swiftly followed up with a single click. The dictionary can be updated regularly, corrections made, and all without the need in the future for the vast labour of a whole new edition. At some point, the gigantic project of the dictionary could be directly coupled with a library of recordings avail- able for downloading, so that one could read an article on Debussy, and click on an underlined reference to a piano prelude and listen to it. Theoretically, I suppose, a music example could be converted into sound by a sufficiently advanced computer and played for the benefit of the musically illiterate, although I don't think the dictio- nary allows you to do this now. I found, too, that I could copy text from the dictio- nary, but not music examples.
As against all these advantages, real and potential, one slightly dislikes what is basi- cally renting a dictionary, rather than pos- sessing it. I can't be alone in finding the task of reading a long article on screen rather wearing — no doubt reading habits will change, but I can't get used to anything but print on paper. And I think the search facilities and cross-references are not really as good or as useful as they might be. If you enter 'twelve tone' into the search facility, for instance, you are directed to the entry on twelve-tone theory and a host of obviously irrelevant entries, such as `tenoroon' (a military instrument) but not to the entry on Schoenberg. Weirdly, when I tried entering 'Russia' into the article search engine, as opposed to the search of the full text, the dictionary returned the equivalent of 'there ain't no such animal'; you had to think of 'Russian Federation' before the dictionary would be prepared to be of any assistance. And in the articles themselves there could be a lot more cross- referencing, allowing you simply to click on a key word to be transported to another article.
Personally, I don't think I would buy it, and, despite the long and venerable history of the thing, I don't find it quite as useful as Macmillan's superb and indispensable Dictionary of Art. Grove always seems like a starting point for further reading, where the Dictionary of Art often tells you as much as you could conceivably want to know about a subject. All the same, it is a vital tool to anyone remotely interested in music, and remains what it has always been, the first place to look.
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