The New Grove, Second Edition

I should like to begin by thanking the organizers of this conference for kindly inviting me to come here and talk to you, and to give me this opportunity to meet the front-rank users of the work in which I have been engaged over the last thirty years. I came with not a little trepidation, wondering if I was somewhat uncomfortably akin to a Daniel entering a lions' den, but in the event I could scarcely have hoped for a warmer and friendlier welcome. And coming here to Louisville does give me an opportunity to thank you all for the generous help you have given us at Grove, over so many years, towards making our dictionary better and more useful, with your many suggestions and your ready cooperation in supplying any information we have sought from you.

The revised New Grove--we have sometimes called it New Grove 2 or Grove 7--is planned as a dictionary for the 2000s, to meet present needs and interests. It may be helpful to set this goal in a deeper historical perspective by considering the history of the Grove dictionaries.

When, in 1874, Dr. George Grove began work on a new dictionary of music, he was actuated by a desire to help what he called the "intelligent inquirer." In his eventual preface he defined this more fully. He aimed, as he wrote, to meet

[a] growing demand [that] has arisen in this country [Great Britain] and the United States for information on all matters directly connected with Music, owing to the great spread of concerts, musical publications, private practice, and interest in the subject, and to the immense improvement in the general position of music which has taken place since the commencement of the present century. . . . [Music] is rapidly becoming an essential branch of education . . . and a strong desire is felt by a large, important, and increasing section of the public to know something of the structure and peculiarities of the music which they hear and play, of the nature and history of the instruments on which it is performed, of the biographies and characteristics of its composers--in a word, of all such particulars as may throw light on the rise, progress, and present condition of an Art which is at once so prominent and so eminently progressive.

This desire it is the object of the Dictionary of Music and Musicians to meet. It is designed for the use of Professional musicians and Amateurs alike. . . .

. . . While the subjects have been treated thoroughly and in a manner not unworthy the attention of the professional musician, the style has been anxiously divested of technicality, and the musical illustrations have been taken, in most cases, from classical works likely to be familiar to the amateur, or within his reach. ¹

Those words were written in 1879, just before the first volume of his dictionary--which had initially appeared in fascicles--was published in complete form. Grove, of course, was himself an amateur in a sense; his music scholarship was fairly described by one of his successors as "largely empirical," though it is not the less careful or perceptive for that. He was by profession a civil engineer; lighthouses in Jamaica and Bermuda and a famous box bridge for the railway across the Menai strait in North Wales are among his most famous creations. He was also secretary of the Crystal Palace, the famous 1851 exhibition hall, a kind of palace of popular education, which also housed numerous large-scale concerts, especially oratorio performances, for all of which he provided pioneering "analytical programme notes"; he was also something of a geographer, historian, and archaeologist, an indexer of the Bible and writer of a thousand pages' worth of a biblical dictionary, as well as an editor of a literary magazine and the creator and first director of the Royal College of Music in London.

None of his editorial successors, I admit, has been comparably polymathic. Sir George was a Victorian figure, a self-made man (his...