Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire (review)

Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire. By Maurice Hinson. 3d ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. [xli, 933 p. ISBN 0-253-33646-5. $59.95.]

Maurice Hinson has provided a new edition to what has been called "the most important bibliographical source book relating to music for solo piano in the English language" (Piano Quarterly 36, no. 140 [winter 1987-88]: 63). How much has changed? Not much. Mostly, what is provided is an update to the 1987 second edition to keep citations current and incorporate some recent publications while removing out-of-print ones. Hinson notes the "small but growing interest in minimal music" over the last decade, as well as the "big pendulum swing. . . toward freely tonal writing" (p. ix). Still, overall coverage remains quite consistent. The things that make the Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire valuable are all still intact:

publisher and edition information (including numbering concordances for composers with especially complicated publishing histories, such as Haydn or Scarlatti);

brief biographical sketches of important composers;

comments on compositional style and technique, and notable characteristics of specific works;

graded levels of difficulty for most works;

indexes to composers' nationality, and of black and women composers;

lists of anthologies and collections with contents, or at least composers, specified;

noteworthy bibliography on major composers' piano works, individual works, and performance issues.

Not everyone everywhere will agree with Hinson's selections or commentary, but most musicians will appreciate the perceptiveness of his lifetime of teaching experience, the acute brevity of his authoritative scholarship, and the detail afforded by his personal review. Hinson continues to include only published works that he can personally examine, and then assesses "what is worthy" (p. ix). In what is an admittedly subjective enterprise, Hinson is admirable for his breadth of taste as much as his breadth of knowledge.

Who will buy the third edition? Everyone, I imagine, who has an earlier edition, whether library, teacher, student, or lover of piano literature. Certainly it is a convenient, if hefty (two and a quarter inches thick!), volume to keep on top of the studio upright. But what will be the future of this reference tool, and many others like it?

I would be amazed if the publishing industry could continue to support the production of hardcover editions of reference bibliographies in our increasingly digital environment. Ultimately, this volume is a bibliography, brilliantly annotated, exactingly selected, but nonetheless a discrete collection of facts. As such, I would welcome the ability to search across its contents in ways not easily possible in its book form (for example, twentieth-century British women composers, or Henle Urtext editions of easy-to-intermediate compositions). Updates could be ongoing, instead of a decade or more apart. An interactive product could link a citation to a publisher's online order form. The esteemed Maurice Hinson should not be criticized for not making such a product. It falls to those of us in positions where we work with scholars and publishers to encourage, perhaps demand, the development of research tools that will have the greatest flexibility and provide the most benefit. The effort to create the content for this Guide and other volumes like it is considerable. To maximize access to that content is to honor the effort by allowing the user to expand upon it.