Word: groves
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...