Historical Dictionary of English Music ca. 1400–1958 ed. by Charles Edward McGuire, Steven E. Plank (review)

At first sight one might wonder why a small dictionary of this kind is needed, given that so much information is now available on the web for almost anyone to access, free of charge if they are students. A subsidiary question is why a dictionary of English music, confined to a specific period, needs to be described as ‘historical’. An answer to the second question, at least, is that this is one of a lengthy series of ‘historical dictionaries of literature and the arts’, under the general editorship of Jon Woronoff, and that any contribution to it must necessarily incorporate the concept in its title, even though this seems to be only one, so far, with defined dates. Most of the other titles in the series are concerned with theatre, cinema, and broadcasting—examples include ‘American Radio Soap Operas’ and ‘Animation and Cartoons’—though there are also contributions on art and literature, and a few on music. It looks as though there might be a degree of overlap in some of the latter.

The first question is a bit harder to answer, because a book of this kind must serve a need not easily satisfied by existing publications, print or online. A convenient selection of essential material, awareness of recent research, an accessible style of writing, and some ancillary aids, would all justify publication, and in many ways this dictionary meets these requirements. After some prefatory material there is a chronological table, followed by an introductory survey of English musical history, emphasizing its social element and strongest, it seems to me, on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are 600 or so entries devoted to composers, performers, scholars, techniques, forms, instruments, institutions, societies, legislation, buildings, and individual works—a list derived from scanning the entries under letter A. At the end there is a ‘Select Bibliography’ with many subdivisions. It is very well designed to give undergraduates, including those for whom music is not a major component of their courses, an entrée into a subject that might at first seem rather forbidding, especially perhaps for North American students.

Why these dates in particular? In the preface they are said to ‘reflect the coalescence of an identifiable English style in the early Renaissance and the death of the iconic Ralph Vaughan Williams in the mid-20th century’; and ‘Although the chronological span is an arbitrary one, its compass embraces the emergence of distinctively English repertories until the successful establishment of English modernism.’ These statements invite a rather prolonged ‘Hmm’. As it happens, the authors have not been too strict about the limits they have established. There are entries on ‘Winchester Troper’, ‘Sumer is icumen in’, and ‘Robertsbridge Codex’ at one end of the spectrum; at the other, the entries on, for example, Britten and Tippett extend to the whole of their careers. The authors could perhaps have dispensed with a starting date altogether and added a few more key topics from pre-1400 materials. It is the philosophy behind the remarks about English style and repertories that causes raised eyebrows rather than the limits themselves.

It would be easy to spot the occasional omission and error, but on the whole I have been pleasantly surprised by the scope of this dictionary. I tried to catch it out by looking up entries on non-English musicians who have been influential in one way or another: Viotti, Moscheles, and Dannreuther, for example. All are in, and many others like them. There is an emphasis on topics such as theatre, musicology, and institutions that with a few exceptions are given as much coverage as composers. Dent, for example, gets as much space as Delius. Of Dent we are told that he ‘holds the curious position of being one of the most respected as well as the...