III. From the 18th century to the present
JAMES B. COOVER/R (II, 1 with JOHN C. FRANKLIN)
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music
In a charmingly ironic mixture of self-deprecation and pride, Samuel Johnson began the magnificent preface to his famous Dictionary (1755) with these words:
It is the fate of those who toil at the lowest employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospects of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries …. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.
As Johnson knew, there had been and would be many such unhappy mortals engaged in this particular lower employment of life. Some of their works, like his own, would achieve lasting fame and widespread importance; others would serve in more modest fashion people's day-to-day need to understand the ideas, words, facts and things by which they lived. All would be the result of a fierce natural urge to compile and compact the knowledge of the world or of a special interest into handy compendia in order to control it – an urge as old as civilization itself. The classical encyclopedias and dictionaries, from Nabnitu XXXII (18th century bce) to Dasypodius's Lexikon (1573), though they resemble only slightly those of modern times, nevertheless sprang from the same compulsion, a central purpose not disguised by the various and often inexact names they bore: Vocabularium, Thesaurus, Etymologicum, Catholicon, Elucidarium, Bibliotheca, Glossarium and others. Such compendia were written by scholars for scholars, not specifically for musicians, and were mainly systematically arranged summae (i.e. collections of all knowledge).
Modern lexicography of music began in the 18th century, with the first large-scale dictionary of musical terms (Brossard, 1703) and the first music encyclopedia (Walther's Lexicon of 1732). Both compilers, along with the later historian Hawkins (1776) and bibliographers Forkel (1792), Lichtenthal (1826) and Becker (1836), indicate their dependence on many of the early summae, though rarely the degree of dependence. Little research has been done into the sources, particularly the classical ones, used by these and later writers, and it is therefore not possible to establish fully the extent to which modern music lexicography is based on those classical antecedents. There are several works which, in their own ways, exemplify the kinds of study needed and which may serve as models of methodology: Stig Walin's study of terms for musical instruments in early Swedish lexica, Thurston Dart's examination of musical terms in Cotgrave's 1611 Dictionarie, Padelford's work with old English glosses and vocabularies, Düring's study of Greek musical terminology, H.H. Eggebrecht's Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie and Srinivasan’s examination of the sources for the Nātyaśātra.
The first sections of this article (§II, 1 and 2 below) discuss the precursors of Brossard and Walther and draw attention to the many outstanding research problems. Here and in §III, 1 and 2 a fairly strict chronological sequence has been followed and several of the more important general dictionaries and encyclopedias with musical sections have been included. In §III, 3, which is arranged chronologically by type, only specifically musical works are discussed.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music
2. 16th and 17th centuries: Reisch to Bayle.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music, §II: Before the 18th Century
The first known collection of musical terms is one of the oldest extant musical documents. Nabnitu (‘Creature’), a compendium of the Old Babylonian period (c1800 bce), treated all areas of human activity and is typical of Mesopotamian scribal instincts. Book XXXII, one of a small corpus of cuneiform musical texts, preserves intact the nine canonical string names and their arrangement, followed by a long and fragmentary list of tunings, instruments and instrument parts, most of which remain unidentified. Many of the Akkadian terms are given their Sumerian equivalents, implying a still older tradition of which Nabnitu XXXII was merely the codification. In fact, some of the Sumerian terms appear in musical contexts as early as the 24th century bce. Besides the Nabnitu, which continued to be copied through the neo-Babylonian period (c300 bce), the first important non-Western treatise is Bharata's Nātyaśāstra, a Sanskrit work giving a comprehensive account of dramaturgy in all its aspects, including music. In its present form, the Nātyaśāstra is generally agreed to date from the 2nd or 3rd century ce, but its jumbled inconsistency reveals the incorporation of much earlier material of indeterminate date and origin. The problem of chronology and sources plagues Sanskrit literature in general, not least the Dattilam of Dattila, a compendium of ancient Indian music first published in a translation by Wiersma-te Nijenhuis in 1970. Itself dating from around 700 ce, one of its verses attests the existence of earlier terminological dictionaries: ‘One should understand the words from common practice with the help of manuals of terms and other [books]’.
The first two centuries of Greek musical literature, between the Peri mousikes of Lasus of Hermione (late 6th century bce) and Aristoxenus’ extant Elementa Harmonica, have been lost. In any case it was not until the 4th century bce that the first true musicologists – Glaucus of Rhegium, Heraclides of Pontus, Phaenias of Eresus, and Aristoxenus himself – began to make systematic collections of Greek musical history. These treatises, now lost, were key sources for Imperial compilers such as Athenaeus and pseudo-Plutarch, and ultimately supplied much material for the late lexica. Such compilations reflect the Greek cosmopolitanism, with its more generalized forms of language, literature, art and music, which was the hallmark of the Hellenistic age.
In such a form Greek music and musical literature came at length to Rome, although it remained a somewhat exclusive art. Vitruvius, the master builder of Augustan Rome, warned that ‘harmonike is a dark and difficult subject, especially for those who do not read Greek’. In Book V of De architectura Vitruvius reports and defines many Greek musical terms which are not strictly relevant to his theme; chapter IV in particular is, in effect, a detachable musical dictionary. Earlier still was Varro’s Disciplinae (1st century bce), a comprehensive textbook based on the Greek system of education. Although Varro was eccentric in defining nine subjects rather than the canonical seven of later antiquity – nothing remains of the section on music – the work was an important prototype of encyclopedic form in its organization of material into such broad categories. With the addition of voluminous notes, a practice apparently begun by Pliny the Elder in his encyclopedic Historia naturalis of c77 ce, the Trivium and Quadrivium provided the basic format for most encyclopedic works up to the 17th century.
Although Walther did not mention Pliny’s work (which contains virtually no musical material), he gave a description of Julius Pollux's Greek lexicon, the Onomasticon (c180 ce), an excellent example of the format pioneered by Varro and Pliny. This work defines many musical terms relating to form and style, instruments, dances and drama; both it and Pliny’s Historia were known to Brossard. Pollux’s contemporary, Athenaeus, compiled the Deipnosophistae (‘Learned Banqueteers’, c200 ce), the most famous example of that curious genre in which arid stockpiles of trivia are made more palatable through being served as witty dinner conversation. Lichtenthal amplified Walther’s description of the Deipnosophistae, noting the musical terms and topics which appear in it. This gastronomic glossary is of special interest for its origins in previous collections, particularly the huge lexicon of Pamphilus of Alexandria W (c50 ce), itself derived from many earlier sources now lost. Both the Deipnosophistae and the coeval De musica attributed to Plutarch, which features a less imaginative party of diners, are of still greater importance for preserving extensive fragments of the 4th-century musicologists; indeed, these works are little more than digests of Aristoxenus and his colleagues.
Some time between the 1st and 4th centuries ce, Aristides Quintilianus produced his De musica, the closest any ancient writer came to a comprehensive encyclopedia of music. The author begins by decrying earlier piecemeal discussions of music, then presents a systematic account of harmonics, metrics, composition, instruments, notation and acoustics, including extensive treatments of the physiological, psychological and cosmological aspects of the art. Some of this material may well go back to the Archaic period (6th century bce). About 420 Martianus Capella, again borrowing freely from many predecessors, produced his curious De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, an allegorical fantasia on the liberal arts. The ninth book (‘De harmonia’), drawing heavily on Aristides, was printed in Marcus Meibom's Antiquae musicae auctores septem (1652) and Gerbert's Scriptores (1784). Walther will have known the work from his reading of Meibom. About ce 500 Stephanus of Byzantium compiled his De urbibus, noted by Forkel, Becker and Lichtenthal, and about the same time Boethius wrote his well-known De institutione musica. The latter exerted a great influence on Cassiodorus, compiler of the notable De artibus ac disciplinis liberalium litterarum of c560; chapter 5 of book 2, Institutiones musicae, is printed in Gerbert and was apparently well known to Walther.
One of the most authoritative reference books of medieval Christendom, the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, was completed about 600. Isidore was especially concerned with the words used by his clerical brethren, adding to his systematically arranged encyclopedia two dictionaries of terms, one alphabetical, one topical. Among the most widely-used books of the Middle Ages (there are about 1000 surviving manuscript copies, according to Collison, 1964), the Etymologiae became a source for countless subsequent lexicographers and exerted a profound influence on learning for a millennium. Eggebrecht (‘Lexika der Musik’, MGG1) believed that the 11th-century Vocabularium at Monte Cassino was an epitome of the work; Bartholomeus Anglicus in his 13th-century De proprietatibus rerum repeatedly stated that things were ‘As Isyder sayth’; Walther and Brossard both noted it. In the Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie (1972–) it is cited as an authority for meanings; there are studies of its musical importance by Tello, Fontaine and Avenary; excerpts are translated in StrunkSR1.
The Myriobiblon, sive Bibliotheca librorum, written in the 9th century by Photius, a patriarch of Constantinople, is important even today for its extracts from and comments on the writings of nearly 300 authors whose works are otherwise lost. Such syntheses were often more popular, more frequently reproduced and more enduring than the originals from which they were drawn, a tendency already visible in the various anthologiae or florilegia of later antiquity. Also from the 9th century come two Chinese encyclopedias: the T'ung-tien (‘Complete institutions’) by Tu Yu (735–812), chapter 5 of which is devoted to music, and the Yüeh-fu tsa-lu (‘Miscellaneous notes on music’, c890–900) of Tuan An-chieh. The latter is a remarkable work made widely available in a translation and study by Gimm. Chapters 13–26 cover instruments and their masters, 27–40 individual compositions; chapter 41 is on theory and 42 on institutions, including floor plans for music schools.
The relationship of Arabic musical works to the Western classical tradition remains largely unexplored, involving both the adaptation of Greek authors and the later reintroduction of this material to the West via Spain and in Latin translation. From the 10th century come the Mafāhtīh al-’ulūm (‘Keys to the sciences’, 975–7) of al-Kwarizmī, with three chapters in book 2 devoted to music, and the compendious Kitāb al-aghānī al-kabīr (‘Great book of songs’) by al-Isfahānī, which includes biographies of musicians. The latter has been frequently translated and reprinted in whole or in part, but the place of both works in the history of music lexicography remains unclear.
Popular throughout the Middle Ages, the 11th-century Suidae lexicon circulated widely in manuscript before its first publication (Milan, 1499) and was still in use in the 17th century. It was exceptional in eschewing the conventional systematic arrangement of medieval encyclopedias, by book and chapter based on the seven liberal arts. Instead, it was arranged alphabetically, and its nearly 30,000 entries embrace proper names of people and places as well as terms. Although it draws mainly on Greek literature, some Roman scholarship is also included. Forkel, Lichtenthal, Becker and others remarked that it contained many musical terms and ‘historical notices’ about music, some of which are now seen to belong to pre-Aristoxenian musical traditions deriving ultimately from the lost works of the 5th century and even preserving traces of an oral theoria of the Archaic period. Hugh of St Victor, writing in about 1127, did employ the traditional categories of systematic arrangement in his Didascalion, adding new ones as well: ethics, crafts and physics. He avoided the catholic secularity of the Suidae lexicon, keeping to more monastic concepts and drawing heavily on Boethius, Augustine of Hippo, Cassiodorus, Plato and others.
Another widely known encyclopedia of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and one of those most readily available to musicians because Hawkins reprinted it in his General History of Music (1776), was De proprietatibus rerum by the English Franciscan friar Bartholomeus Anglicus, who graciously acknowledged his indebtedness to Isidore. It was written about 1230 and translated frequently (into French, Spanish, Dutch and English in the 14th century) before the first edition was printed in 1472. An English translation made by John of Trevisa in 1397 appeared about 1495 and was republished frequently, several times in an edition enlarged by Stephen Batman. Brossard noted it among those works he would have liked to study; Walther provided a biography of Bartholomeus in his Lexicon, admitting that he saw the name in Brossard's list. Imitating Bartholomeus and also dependent on Isidore (to the point of obvious plagiarism) was Vincent de Beauvais' Speculum maius, compiled about 1244. In spite of its borrowings from Isidore (or perhaps because of them), it became one of the major encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, and now furnishes ideas about tastes, prejudices and intellectual concerns in the 13th century more clearly than many of its counterparts. Walther mentioned it, but apparently did not see it, although he does seem to have known Johannes Balbus's contemporary Catholicon, which, like the Suidae lexicon and many later works, included proper-name entries.
Brunetto Latini's Li livres dou trésor of about 1264 was probably the first major exception to the tradition of writing in Latin. His departure from it was more than just a change of language; it indicated a change of audience. This was the first encyclopedia compiled for laymen, and it became immensely popular. Between Guglielmo da Pastrengo's De originibus rerum libellus (c1350) and Johannes Tinctoris's Diffinitorium (c1495), there were few lexica of importance. Eggebrecht (‘Lexika der Musik’, MGG1) discussed several general terminological dictionaries, including Gerardus de Scheieren's Vocabularium (1477) and Wenceslaus Brack's Vocabularius rerum (1483), which, although unrelated to the work of Tinctoris, exemplify the growing demand for translations of Latin terms into other languages. These Latin–German dictionaries show clearly the derivative nature of most lexicographical work at the time; Brack, for example, derived most of the definitions for his 80 musical terms from Isidore via Hugh of St Victor (Eggebrecht, ‘Lexika’, RiemannL12).
Tinctoris's Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, published in the 1490s but written before 1475, is certainly the most important musical incunabulum. Nearly 300 terms from a wide range of musical matters are defined with almost cryptic conciseness. Parrish noted in the preface to his excellent translation (1963) that many of the definitions reappear verbatim in some of Tinctoris's later treatises. The sources that Tinctoris used for these definitions cannot be clearly determined. It is unlikely that he relied on any of the general encyclopedias then in circulation; nor does he appear to have used the 11th-century Vocabularium in Monte Cassino, with definitions (unlike Tinctoris's) derived mainly from Isidore. He may have relied solely on earlier music theorists, for the Diffinitorium includes only theoretical terms: there are no proper names, aesthetic considerations or descriptions of musical instruments. Although eight copies of the printed book and three early manuscripts (one from the 15th century and two from the 16th, with some 19th-century copies of them) survive, there is no evidence that the Diffinitorium had any impact on subsequent compendia, and most musicians continued to use the works of Pollux and Isidore, the Suidae lexicon and others.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music, §II: Before the 18th Century
There is, however, a variety of evidence to show the much greater influence and fame of Gregor Reisch's Margarita philosophica (1503), with its 32 chapters on music largely derived from Boethius. It was known to a number of 16th-century German theorists; Brossard, Walther and Janovka cite it among their sources, and Zaccaria Tevo's famous treatise of 1706, Il musico testore, quotes extensively from it.
Less famous, but also cited by Janovka as one of his sources, was Calepino's Dictionarium (1502). Predominantly a dictionary of terms, though containing some proper names, it was a standard reference work for over 200 years, expanding through many editions to include several languages by 1573. The Lectionum antiquarum, published by Rhodiginus (Richerius) in 1516, contained a large number of musical terms scattered throughout its ten chapters. It was cited by Brossard and Walther, but none of the three 18th-century scholars seems to have known Valla's De expetendis, et fugiendis rebus opus (1497) or the interesting Polyanthea by Nani Mirabelli (1503), which was arranged alphabetically by subject with etymologies and quoted examples of word usage. Nor did they mention the various dictionaries by Robert Stephanus (Estienne) (1531 and 1539), by his son Henry (1572), by Erasmus Alberus (1540) or by Dasypodius (1573). They did, however, use the revised edition of Hadrianus Junius's Nomenclator (1567), in which music terms can be found in rubrics 243–51. The only separate dictionary of music terms from the 16th century and one of the few in manuscript is Giovanni del Lago's Sequitano alquante definitioni di musica, written in 1530 and apparently unknown until Edward Lowinsky mentioned it in 1956.
Although Brossard and Walther used a number of the works mentioned primarily for definitions of terms, the sources they used for biographical and bibliographical information were more numerous. These include Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis (1545) and Bibliotheca instituta et collecta (1574), though apparently not the proper-name dictionary Dictionarium historicum ac poeticum of 1554 by Charles Stephanus (Estienne), which Collison (1964) called the ‘first indigenous French encyclopedia’. The last was a popular lexicon which grew out of Torrentinus's Elucidarius (1498) and, progressing through more than 20 editions by 1700, served as the basis for Louis Moréri's notable Le grand dictionnaire historique, first published in 1674. There is a similar wealth of English counterparts: Thomas Elyot's Dictionary (1538), which became the Bibliotheca Eliotae (1542) and was published under that title in many subsequent editions; Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), the first dictionary to place proper names in a separate alphabet; and Thomas Thomas's Dictionarium linguae latinae et anglicanae of 1587.
Walther was more dependent than Brossard on the steadily increasing numbers of bibliothecae and bio-bibliographical dictionaries describing the lives and works of artists and writers that appeared throughout the 17th century. He examined and cited many of them as his sources – Gesner (1545), Sacredonius (1558), Poccianti (1589), Verdier (1585), Possevinus (1593) and Alberici (1605). Draudius's three Bibliothecae (1610 and the two in 1611) provided him with information for many of his biographical entries, although he also used many local biographical works, including John Bale's Illustriūm Maioris Britanniae scriptorum (1548), which, with a second edition covering 14 centuries, served as a major source of information about English musicians; the later Bibliotheca belgica of Andreae (1623); Sweertius's Athenae belgicae (1628); and many Italian sources, such as Picinelli (1670) and Oldoinus (Oldoini; 1676, 1678), all three books containing many notices of writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, Mandosio (1682), Cozzando (1685) and Mongitore (1707–14). Also frequently cited are König (1678), Lipenius (1682), Bayle (1697), Mencke, Schöttgen and Jacobi (1717), Jablonski (1721) and many lesser sources.
Neither Walther nor Brossard seems to have known the interesting collection Icones diversorum hominum by Boissard (1591), which, according to Becker, contains 35 portraits of 15th- and 16th-century musicians with biographical notices, nor the first edition of Allacci's invaluable Drammaturgia (1666), a dictionary of dramas that included many operas. They also seem to have overlooked some important terminological works, particularly John Rider's Bibliotheca scholastica: a Double Dictionarie (1589), which was widely used in England and which contained proper names as well as terms. Other major dictionaries with musical sections are Goldast's Almannicarum rerum scriptores and Nicot's valuable Thrésor de la langue francoise (both 1606), Cotgrave's Dictionarie (1611), Baldus's De verborum vitruvianorum (1612) and Goclenius's Lexicon philosophicum (1613).
Most of the terms that required definitions and explanations before 1800 derived from the consideration of music as a science, which as part of the Quadrivium it was; Tinctoris in his Diffinitorium needed to explain only denotative words, that is, those with categorical meanings. But by 1800 the musical vocabulary had been greatly enriched with connotative words more difficult to define and thus more open to varied interpretation. Terms such as ‘adagio’ resist precise, scientific description, and in the 16th and 17th centuries they were growing more numerous and richer in meaning. That growth, paralleling the growing sophistication of music and its practitioners, created a need for more specialized and detailed discussion of terms. As a result, dictionaries and glossaries became frequent appendages to books on music theory and introductory tutors, starting with Praetorius's Syntagma musicum, iii (1618), which includes a section on ‘Italianische und andere Termini musici’. Robert Fludd's De templo musicae of 1617 contains an etymological dictionary in the first chapter of book 1. Nikolaus Gengenbach's small tutor Musica nova (1626) includes a list of ‘Technilogicam’ (cols.126–51). More extensive glossaries appear in the eighth (1632) and subsequent editions of Demantius's Isagoge artis musicae (1607). Shorter lists are found in many later works and incorporate terms of expression. Praetorius, Gengenbach, Demantius, Herbst and Ribovius, for example, all defined ‘adagio’, ‘forte’, ‘lento’, ‘piano’ and other connotative terms, as did Marin Mersenne and Athanasius Kircher in their two massive encyclopedic music treatises; the ‘foible’ of each of these authors, according to James Matthew, was ‘omniscience’. Throughout their works they concerned themselves with the definition of words in common use. Mersenne's Harmonie universelle (1636–7) and Kircher's Musurgia universalis (1650) were widely accepted as authorities for definitions, and Janovka, Brossard and Walther all indicated their dependence on them.
A large number of useful general works appeared in the 17th century that were also cited by Brossard and Walther. The latter noted that Martinius's Lexicon philologicum (1623) contained many musical terms, and he also referred to the classic works by Ménage (1650), Du Cange (1678) and Furetière (1690); Brossard listed only the last. Neither mentions works by Sir Henry Spelman (1664), Corneille (the interesting Le dictionnaire des arts et des sciences, published in 1694, the same year as a supplement to the great Dictionnaire of the Académie Française, in opposition to Furetière's compendium) or Matthias Schacht, who compiled the first biographical dictionary devoted solely to musicians, Musicus danicus, in 1687, though it was not published until 1928.
These books are the classical antecedents of modern music lexicography, an era which began with Brossard's and Janovka's dictionaries of 1701 and Walther's encyclopedic Lexicon of 1732. The line of derivation stretching back from these three to Varro in the 1st century bce had been interrupted only once, at the end of the 15th century by Tinctoris's Diffinitorium, which was in itself an anomaly because it was strictly terminological. None of its predecessors appears to be related to it in any way, and few if any later dictionaries seem to have been dependent on it, or even aware of its existence.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music, §III: 18th century to the present.
Some 200 years after Tinctoris's Diffinitorium, two dictionaries appeared simultaneously: Brossard's Dictionaire des termes grecs, latins et italiens and Janovka's Clavis ad thesaurum. Of the two, the former has proved to be more important. Brossard had originally appended it as a glossary to a collection of his motets, the Prodromus musicalis (1695). The only copy of the 1701 version known to exist, an incomplete pre-edition, lacks important bibliographical features included in the 1703 work, which most scholars regard as the true first edition (see Heckmann, 1965). In particular, there is a ‘Catalogue de plus de 900 auteurs qui ont écrit sur la musique’, which, as Duckles's review (1967–8) of the facsimile reprint points out, is a pioneer effort in the realm of universal music bibliography; it also furnishes some knowledge of Brossard's sources. Brossard's contemporaries recognized its importance. Mattheson, for example, included a ‘Zusatz zum brossardischen Register’, a list of an additional 400-plus authors, in the second volume of his Critica musica of 1725. By 1710 three later editions of the dictionary had appeared.
Although Brossard noted in his ‘Catalogue’ some 100 books he had used, Janovka in the Clavis ad thesaurum cited very few, Kircher's Musurgia universalis (1650) and Reisch's Margarita philosophica (1503) among them, but the most frequently mentioned is Carissimi's Ars cantandi (1692). Brossard defined many more than Janovka's 170 terms, but the latter's work is arranged alphabetically by broad subjects; many of its entries are treatises that incorporate explanations of numerous other terms. ‘Tactus’ occupies 50 pages in his discussion of ‘Stylus’, and Janovka defined a variety of separate styles, including, in the ‘Expressus’ category alone, ecclesiasticus, canonicus, motectibus, phantasticus, madrigaliescus, melismaticus, hyporchematicus, symphoniacus and dramaticus. Words used in the definitions that are defined elsewhere were indicated by both Brossard and Janovka in ways analogous to the use of asterisks in the present-day Harvard Dictionary of Music: Brossard used underlining, Janovka italics. Detailed indexes to these and other lexica, such as Paterson and Ritori's study of Hidden Terms in the Harvard Dictionary (1973), would greatly aid use.
Cigler has suggested (1968) that Janovka's dictionary was to have been followed by a companion biographical volume, which would have produced in combination the first encyclopedia of music. Brossard had the same idea, and in the preface to his ‘Catalogue’ remarked that he had been collecting information for years for a similar biographical lexicon. Neither achieved his goal. Walther, on the other hand, before publishing his encyclopedia, had prepared a separate dictionary of terms. The manuscript (c1708; D-WRtl Q341c) is entitled Praecepta der musicalischen Composition, and it includes about 250 definitions of Greek, Latin, French and Italian musical terms. Among the explicit references to earlier authority in the definitions, there are five to Janovka and others to Praetorius, Printz and Kircher, as well as one mention of the Suidae lexicon.
In the next few years little of interest to musicians was published. The first English dictionary was called A Short Explication of Such Foreign Words, as are Made Use of in Musick Books (1724). Intended for ‘Lovers of Musick’, it provided brief, almost telegraphic definitions of several hundred musical terms, and appended to it was a 22-page Account of Printed Musick, probably works issued by the publisher J. Brotherton. Six years later, a 42-page Short Explication of Such Italian Words appeared both separately and as part of a Walsh publication entitled Rules, or A Short and Compleat Method for Attaining to Play a Thorough Bass.
The most important English publication between 1701 and 1732, however, was the first edition of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary (1728), which became the prototype for most later general encyclopedias, such as the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and D'Alembert, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and many others. An encyclopedia is taken to be a comprehensive work encompassing terms, biographies and topics. The term itself appears to have been used first by Rabelais in Pantagruel (1532), where Thaumont says that Panurge has opened to him ‘le vray puys et abysme de encyclopedie’. Paul Skalič was the first to use the term as part of the title for his dictionary, the Encyclopaedia, seu Orbis disciplinarium (1559), but none of the titles of the many works cited by Brossard and Walther contained it.
Like Brossard's Dictionaire, Walther's Musicalisches Lexikon, oder Musicalische Bibliothec (Leipzig, 1732) first appeared in a pre-edition, entitled Alte und neue musikalische Bibliothec and published in 1728 with entries only for ‘A’. The complete work became the prototype for all comprehensive music encyclopedias that followed. Terms and persons were arranged in a single alphabet, and like J.H. Zedler's general encyclopedia, the Universal-Lexikon (begun in the same year), biographical coverage was not limited to the deceased but extended to living people as well. Zedler was also the first editor to employ associate editors to whom he could assign special areas.
Walther collected information by sending inquiries to various other authorities (he was probably the first music lexicographer to do so) but his primary authorities were books, hundreds of them, which he scrutinized page by page (many have been mentioned above). His choice of biographies was based on the ‘900 auteurs’ listed by Brossard in his ‘Catalogue’, and for definitions of terms, Walther studied many distinguished music treatises, again including the Brossard dictionaries and Janovka's Clavis ad thesaurum. Eggebrecht (1957) examined in detail Walther's definitions and found that Mattheson, Niedt, Glarean, Zarlino, Kircher, Mersenne and Praetorius are the most frequently cited of the long list of writers serving as his authorities. A subsequent edition of the Lexicon with many corrections was planned but not accomplished, and some manuscript emendations gathered for it were eventually incorporated by Gerber into his Lexicon (1790–92). Though the one and only edition of Walther contains numerous errors, it remains a monumental work offering an otherwise unobtainable range of early 18th-century opinions, speculations and judgments on music.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music, §III: 18th century to the present.
The arrival of the dictionaries of Brossard and Janovka and Walther's encyclopedia resulted in the rapid production of other music lexica. Within five years of Walther's publication of the first music encyclopedia (1732), a second appeared, the Kurzgefasstes musikalisches Lexicon, published in 1737 by Johann Christoph and Johann David Stössel in Chemnitz (some authorities, including Eitner, cite a ‘Barnickel’ as the compiler). The book was designed to be a compact Handlexikon for music lovers, and in many ways it was a popularization of Walther's work, though it also provided topical articles (e.g. ‘Music der Hebräer’). Walther is lauded in the introduction, and the list of other authorities at the end cites treatises by a number of music theorists (two for Mattheson, seven for Printz, eight for Werckmeister, the Syntagma musicum by Praetorius and others), as well as such general compendia as the Myriobiblon (c858) and Jablonski's Allgemeines Lexicon der Künste (1721). Handel appears under ‘Hendel’; the biography of Mattheson requires three pages, Bach's only three lines. It is a valuable work and historically interesting, not least because it is the first ‘concise’ music dictionary.
The first edition of James Grassineau's terminological A Musical Dictionary (London, 1740) is often said to be little more than a translation of Brossard, but it does not deserve such casual disregard. Although as Grassineau himself said, ‘I have follow'd a French author in many points’, worthwhile additions were taken from other writers (see Coover, 1971, and Shaw, 1973). When J. Robson reissued the dictionary in 1769, he added to it and also published separately a 52-page addendum of definitions drawn mainly from Rousseau's recently published Dictionnaire (1768), which he thought would improve the coverage and quality. Another lexicon published in 1740, Mattheson's curious Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte, was a collection of 148 biographies in which German musicians of the later 17th century and the early 18th were prominent; most of the notices were written by the subjects themselves, and the book's importance, and much of its untrustworthiness, rest on that autobiographical content.
Between 1753 and 1776 appeared a cluster of French dictionaries of the theatre, all of which were published anonymously though their authors' identities were known. Together they constitute an intriguing appendage to the history of music lexicography. This unparalleled surge of interest produced a Histoire du théâtre de l'Opéra en France by Durey de Noinville and Louis-Antoine Travenol (1753), Antoine de Léris's Dictionnaire portatif des théâtres … de Paris (1754), Claude and François Parfaict's seven-volume Dictionnaire des théâtres de Paris (1756), La Vallière's Ballets, opéra et autres ouvrages lyriques (1760) and Joseph de Laporte and S.R.N. Chamfort's Dictionnaire dramatique (1776). Also in this period, according to Fétis and others, L.F. Beffara compiled five large dictionaries of opera, ballets, cantatas and other dramatic music totalling over 30 volumes in manuscript, none of which was ever published; some are apparently lost, but two survive in the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra in Paris (Rés.602 and 603). This group of theatre dictionaries, with very similar coverage and compiled within a span of 23 years seemingly without precedent or successors, warrants closer critical examination.
Several important general biographical dictionaries of the arts were published in the second half of the 18th century. These include the biographical Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon by Jöcher (1750–51, with continuations and additions by Adelung and others until 1897), Meusel's useful Teutsches Künstlerlexikon (1778), which includes many articles on musicians, and L.A. de Bonnefons' Dictionnaire des artistes (1776). The dictionaries of arts terminology from this same period show a continuing concern for definition and clarification of the terms of aesthetics. Clear evidence of this concern is the appearance of a number of dictionaries of the fine arts with strong musical coverage: Lacombe's Dictionnaire portatif des beaux-arts (1752); Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4), a seminal work to which both Kirnberger and J.A.P. Schulz contributed several hundred music articles; and the later Kurzgefasstes Handwörterbuch über der schönen Künste (1794–5), with music articles by F.A. Baumbach.
Neither the increasing numbers of such works nor the earlier publication of separate works by Brossard, Walther, Grassineau and others changed the growing practice of appending lists of terms to music treatises and tutors. Among the more important and useful 18th-century examples are nine pages at the end of Spiess's Tractatus musicus (1746); 20 pages of ‘A Musical Dictionary’ in the magazine The Muses Delight (1754); the section on ‘Musikalische Kunstwörter’ in Leopold Mozart's Violinschule (1756); pp.393–482 and 586–99 of Adlung's respected and widely used Anleitung zu der musikalischen Gelahrtheit (1758); and an alphabetical Anhang to Kürzinger's Getreuer Unterricht (1763). Another group of appended lists, though interesting in part because they reflect what their compilers perceived as the needs of their audiences, are of little lexicographic significance. Tans'ur provided definitions for 1000 terms in editions of his New Musical Grammar (1746), and the second volume of G.B. Doni's posthumous Lyra Barberina (1763) included a nine-page ‘Onomasticum, seu Synopsis musicarum’ by G.B. Martini, which was actually an updated version of Doni's ‘Synopsis musicarum, Graecarum atque obscuriorum vocum’ that had appeared in book 3 of his De praestantia musicae veteris (1647). (Another dictionary by Martini, a Nomenclatura musicale … a guisa di dizionario, remains in manuscript in the library of the Bologna Liceo.) A ‘Dictionnaire de musique’ is included in Azaïs' Méthode (1776). The first such list in an American publication was William Billings's glossary of 140 words appended to his The Singing Master's Assistant (1778), and the first appearance in a Portuguese publication is the one in Solano's Exame instructivo sobre a música (1790). J.A. Hiller supplied a ‘Kurzgefasstes Lexikon’ in his Anweisung zum Violinspielen (1792), and two appended dictionaries appear in 18th-century Russian publications: a short list of Italian terms in the Russian translation (1773–4) of G.S. Löhlein's Clavier-Schule and a ‘Muzïkal'nïy slovar'’ in the first issue of the Karmannaya kniga dlya lyubiteley muzïki published by Gerstenberg in 1795. Many others probably exist without deserving widespread notice.
In the second half of the 18th century, general encyclopedias were much more significant than appended lists. It is important to note that compilers of general encyclopedias after about 1500 had been more concerned with the sciences, particularly the natural sciences, than with the Quadrivium. Music did not regain what might be thought to be its rightful place in such works until after 1750, most conspicuously with the publication of Diderot and D'Alembert's monumental and historic Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–65) and Rees's 45-volume New Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary (1802–20). (Parenthetically, the treatment of music in most general encyclopedias in the 20th century and the early 21st has once again been diminished, space being accorded more to practical matters, the greatly increased information on the pure sciences, and political events and ideas.) A vast literature has accumulated about Diderot and D'Alembert's famous venture, and a surprisingly large amount is concerned with its musical content. The goal of conventional encyclopedias has always been to present an objective summa of existing knowledge, but the unconventional Encyclopédie set out to guide opinion. Scholars and eminent literati made up its editors and contributors; after the much-respected musician Jean-Philippe Rameau had declined to prepare the music articles, the editors turned to a closer friend, the eloquent Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who accepted. In spite of complaining that he had little time to prepare his contributions, he eventually submitted nearly 400 entries, in many of which he graciously acknowledged an indebtedness to Rameau's works. Although Rousseau's haste engendered a sizable number of errors, it was on theoretical and philosophical grounds that Rameau attacked some of the articles, vigorously and almost immediately. The assault extended to Rousseau himself (for whom Rameau had little regard), to the Encyclopédie as a whole and to its editors. The course of the controversy can be traced elsewhere in this dictionary, in the articles on the two principal protagonists.
The terms in the Encyclopédie with whose definitions Rameau disagreed were ‘Accompagnement’, ‘Accord’, ‘Cadence’, ‘Choeur’, ‘Chromatique’ and ‘Dissonance’, none of them representing concepts easily or simply defined; from him, as from Rousseau, they elicited lengthy essays. From the outset Rousseau himself recognized shortcomings in many articles, and they added to his desire to prepare a separate terminological dictionary. His Dictionnaire de musique was completed in 1764 and published in 1768. It was the last of his major writings on music, a summing–up of all his thoughts, and for a man who was admittedly an amateur in many ways and a barely successful composer, it was a remarkable work. His ideas on the nature and meaning of music were all expressed in stylish and graceful prose, and the Dictionnaire immediately became, as Thomas Hunt said in his excellent study of the work, ‘a vital force in determining musical thought in the second half of the century’. It thus had a great effect on the content of many subsequent dictionaries, appearing in at least 22 editions as part of Rousseau's collected Oeuvres. J. Robson included some of it in translation in his Appendix to Grassineau's dictionary in 1769; a complete (though poor) English translation by Waring appeared in 1771. Diderot and D'Alembert, in spite of their quarrel with Rousseau, borrowed 375 articles from the Dictionnaire for the supplement (1776–7) to the Encyclopédie. Meude-Monpas' Dictionnaire of 1787 contains more than 100 of Rousseau's articles without acknowledgment. The two volumes devoted to ‘Musique’ edited by Framery, Ginguené and Momigny for the Encyclopédie méthodique (1791–1818) include entries from Rousseau with corrections, additions and commentaries, and among the hundreds of articles written by Burney for Abraham Rees's New Cyclopaedia (1802–20), at least 85 include translations from Rousseau (with appropriate acknowledgment). The Dictionnaire de musique moderne by Castil-Blaze published in 1821 contains 385 articles plagiarized from Rousseau; while willing to ‘borrow’ from him to this extent, Castil-Blaze ungratefully abused him with invective. In the same year Turbri published an abridged version aimed at a wider market, and Ernst Ludwig Gerber, in his Neues historisch-biographisches Lexikon (1812–14), listed four translations into German then in progress, though apparently none was ever completed.
The Dictionnaire was less an alphabetical list of hard words with definitions in the classic mould than a list of topics on which Rousseau, like Janovka, was moved to write long thoughtful essays. Although aesthetics and the nature of music interested Rousseau far more than simple definitions of denotative terms, many of his topics were new to music dictionaries (e.g. those pertaining to traditional and ethnic musics, including that of the Amerindians), and many were accompanied by music transcriptions. Although the work still contained numerous factual errors, some carried over from his articles in the Encyclopédie, its most valuable material lay in these long essays. His handling of terms was clearly much more derivative. For Greek theoretical terms he simply borrowed, in many instances from Brossard, while, like Brossard and Walther, Rousseau cited Athenaeus, Julius Pollux, Boethius, Martianus and others. He also depended on many of the same music theorists, especially Mersenne and Kircher, and curiously (in spite of their quarrel years before) on Rameau. Instruments were not described in the Dictionnaire because they had been covered in the Encyclopédie.
In the years after Rousseau, dictionaries and encyclopedias appeared more frequently, partly, no doubt, because his Dictionnaire became a basic source for subsequent compilers. The Dictionarium musica by John Binns (issued under the pseudonym Hoyle; 1770), an uneven work of limited value even to its intended audience of amateurs, drew more heavily on Grassineau than on Rousseau, but the latter's influence was apparent. Thomas Busby's dictionary (c1783–6) was a more original, better-written work than Binns's, and it went through many editions, including an American one in 1827 (the first time a music lexicon was republished in the USA). A Musikalisches Handwörterbuch by J.G.L. von Wilke, published anonymously in 1786, was an indifferent work of no great interest, but G.F. Wolf's Kurzgefasstes musikalisches Lexikon of a year later was more substantial, perhaps because it was contrived mainly from Walther and Sulzer with help from Rousseau; it went through several editions and was translated into Danish in 1801. Verschuere-Reynvaan's Dutch Muzijkaal kunst-woordenboek, even though it covered only ‘A–Muz’, appeared in two editions, the first in 1789 (370 pages), the second in 1795 (618 pages, but still only ‘A–Muz’). It owed much to Rousseau.
The next dictionary of terms was the first volume (vol.185, 1791) of two entitled ‘Musique’ prepared by N.E. Framery and P.L. Ginguené for the huge and unorthodox Encyclopédie méthodique published by Pancoucke and Agasse from 1782 to 1832 (196 vols. planned, 166 published, with 88 alphabetical sequences and 83 separate indexes). For the second ‘Musique’ volume (vol.186, 1818), J.J. de Momigny joined Framery and Ginguené as an editor. Because the Encyclopédie was essentially a recasting of the materials in Diderot and D'Alembert's encyclopedia into subject arrangement, it contains prodigious borrowings from the entries written for the earlier work by Rousseau, as well as from his own Dictionnaire. Nevertheless, some of the editorial additions and corrections were, rather ungraciously, harshly critical of his works.
John Wall Callcott's slight lexicon, An Explanation of the Notes, Marks, Words, &c. used in Music, first appeared in 1793. In 1798 he published a Plan of a Practical Dictionary of Music, an outline of a much more ambitious work that he hoped to issue in 1799 but did not, leaving 36 volumes of manuscript material collected between 1791 and 1807, as well as the resulting two-volume manuscript of the work (GB-Lbl Add.27649–50). The principal authorities for this compilation were Tinctoris, Brossard, Walther, Grassineau, Sulzer, Framery and Ginguené, Overend and Arnold. Some of Callcott's materials found their way into Burney's contributions to Rees's encyclopedia. Scholes, in his biography of Burney, noted letters written by Callcott to Burney in 1802–3 indicating his willingness to supply information already collected and to undertake further research if Burney so wished. Callcott's endeavours, to judge by the materials he collected and his assistance to Burney, were of above average calibre, and they deserve more study.
Only five biographical dictionaries of musicians were prepared in the 18th century: Mattheson's Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740) mentioned earlier, the ABC Dario Musico (1780), Hiller's Lebensbeschreibungen (1784), Mazza's Diccionario (1790) and Gerber's Lexikon (1790–92). Both Mattheson's and Hiller's works are more volumes of collected biography than dictionaries and are limited in scope to the authors' contemporaries. The ABC Dario Musico, the first biographical dictionary in English, presents only critical and satirical résumés, and Mazza's Diccionario, though it sets out valuable information on some 300 Portuguese musicians, remained in manuscript until annotated and published by José Alegria in 1944–5. The theatre lexica of Léris, Parfaict and others from about the middle of the century covered far more than biography. Only Gerber's Lexicon, published some 50 years after Walther's biographical coverage, remains important, standing as the first independent dictionary of musical biography and a model for many successors. Gerber relied on Walther's work, both the published Lexicon and the corrections collected in manuscript. This dependence was more marked in the first edition (1790–92) than in the second (1812–14), but even the first contained much original research and was surprisingly successful. Encouraged by the receipt of volunteered new information from correspondents and friends, Gerber undertook the greatly improved second edition. Both must be used together, for the second complemented rather than superseded the first. (The 1966–9 reprint of the two editions, edited by Othmar Wessely, includes various addenda and corrigenda as well as Gerber's own emendations which had, until the publication of this reprint, remained in manuscript.)
If works like Gerber's were few in number in this period, so too were separate music encyclopedias. They comprise a Kurzgefasstes musicalisches Lexicon published by Stössel (1737), a three-volume Dizionario by Pietro Gianelli (1801), Lichtenthal's Dizionario e bibliografia (1826) and La Borde's extraordinary Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (1780). This last work was strictly speaking a history, though parts of it, notably the first and second volumes, are encyclopedic in scope, defining terms and furnishing biographical data; the third volume is almost entirely a bio-bibliography of Greek and Roman poets, Greek and Roman writers on music, French and Italian composers and musicians (42 pages for Albinoni alone), classical and later writers on music (including Boethius, Mersenne, Guido and, strangely enough, Isaac Newton) and Italian poets and singers. La Borde cited some classical sources (Julius Pollux, Athanaeus, Isidore and the Suidae lexicon) but Fétis, who used the same ones, scorned La Borde's work, describing the Essai as ‘un chef d'oeuvre d'ignorance, de désordre et d'incurie’.
Two important general encyclopedias deserve attention here: the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1790–97, 1803) and the Rees encyclopedia, published in London from 1802 to 1820. The first two editions of Britannica failed to include articles on music, but a sizable number, including some biographies of musicians, appeared in the third. The articles, prepared mainly by W.M. Morison, Dr Blacklock and John Robison, sometimes cite Burney as an authority, but he had otherwise nothing to do with the work. Had he, the contents would surely have been more informative, less narrowly ‘English’ in point of view, more graceful, and more entertaining. Burney's experience, knowledge and wit were put to good use a few years later, however, by Rees in his New Cyclopaedia. More than 2000 articles came from the aging Burney in his final years, and although some were repetitive, some flawed and some eccentric, they covered with great wisdom an enormous range of subjects: biographies of composers, performers and non-musical friends; detailed definitions of terms; dissertations on historical and theoretical topics and on musical instruments (including the acoustics of the ‘Umbrella’), as well as essays on countries, cities, organizations and institutions visited by Burney in his travels. Some articles were but a single line in length, others so verbose they should have been trimmed mercilessly. He freely quoted from or summarized a number of sources and acknowledged all: articles by Rousseau in the Dictionnaire and for the Encyclopédie, Framery and Ginguené's ‘Musique’, La Borde's Essai and his own four-volume General History. Some of the information may have come from Callcott. Scholes's study The Great Doctor Burney includes a charming chapter with many details of this enterprise and Burney's extensive contributions.
In 1802 Koch's Musikalisches Lexikon appeared, an exemplary scholarly work with detailed scientific articles accompanied by an unusually large number of musical examples. Though it relied on Sulzer more than on Rousseau, it was also highly original. In 1826 it was translated into Danish, an abridged edition appeared in German in 1807, and a second edition of the original was republished as late as 1865.
A large number of terminological dictionaries survive from the first 30 years of the 19th century. Most are derived closely from Rousseau's work, without in any way approaching his importance. They include the dictionaries of Envallson (1802, the earliest Swedish music lexicon), Pilkington (1812, totally derivative), J.C. Röhner (1820, derived mainly from Verschuere-Reynvaan), Danneley (1825), Lichtenthal (1826, which includes the first Italian dictionary of musical terms), J.E. Häuser (1828), Andersch (1829), Jousse (1829), Schilling (the compiler of the massive and famous Encyclopädie, with his Musikalisches Handwörterbuch of 1830), Gollmick (1833) and William Smith Porter (1834, the second American dictionary of musical terms and an improvement on Pilkington's earlier work).
Biographical dictionaries from 1800 to 1835 are of two types: those offering international coverage, such as the still useful Dictionnaire by Choron and Fayolle (1810–11), and a new type offering biographies of musicians in a single country or region. Then, as now, many that professed an international perspective gave greater coverage to the musicians of the country in which the compiler or compilers lived and worked (this was true even of Choron and Fayolle). But in the early 19th century there were already traces of the specialization that has now become commonplace, and in 1811 Lipowsky published the first bio-bibliography restricted to the musicians of a single area, his Baierisches Musik-Lexikon.
A chronological survey of the next dozen years shows several biographical dictionaries with strong national bias. The first bio-bibliography of Italian musicians occupied pages 77 to 302 of Gervasoni's Nuova teoria di musica (1812); Bertini was much indebted to Gervasoni and to Choron and Fayolle when he began to publish his four-volume Dizionario two years later, although he gave most of the attention to Italian musicians. The first English biographical dictionary of musicians also came out in 1814 – Bingley's curious and less than scholarly Musical Biography, which was mostly concerned with English musicians – but it was not until 1824 that the first major biographical dictionary in English was published, Sainsbury's Dictionary of Musicians. This book was also heavily dependent on Choron and Fayolle (even the preface was a direct translation of theirs) and on Gerber as well. Bohumír Dlabač's Allgemeines historisches Künstler-Lexikon für Böhmen und zum Theil auch für Mähren und Schlesien (1815) remains an important source of information on early Czech music and musicians; the first biographical coverage of Polish musicians was Potočki's ‘Mały słowniczek muzyczny’, issued in 1818. A new edition of Castil-Blaze's Dictionnaire de musique moderne (1821) was published in 1828 with an appendix, a biographical dictionary of Flemish musicians compiled by J.-H. Mees.
In 1835 the first volumes of two great works, Schilling's Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften and F.-J. Fétis's Biographie universelle des musiciens, started to appear. Not since the simultaneous publication of the dictionaries by Brossard and Janovka in 1701 had there been such a noteworthy coincidence of two important lexicographies. Schilling's comprehensive encyclopedia covered terms, topics and biographies in six volumes (1835–8) and a supplement (1841–2). It was a careful work, full of dependable information on a wide range of topics and people, some not discussed in any other lexica, not even in Fétis's monumental Biographie universelle. A concise one-volume edition of the work, compiled by F.S. Gassner, appeared in 1849. Schilling's energy appears to have been limitless, for he produced an astonishing amount of lexicographical work in a few years. He had already published a terminological dictionary, Musikalisches Handwörterbuch, five years before the Encyclopädie; another dictionary of terms, Der musikalische Sprachmeister, in 1840; the biographical dictionary Das musikalische Europa and a Musikalisches Conversations-Handlexikon (a two-volume abridgment, superior to Gassner's, of his Encylopädie) in 1842; and in 1849, an enlargement of his 1830 Handwörterbuch under a new title, Musikalisches Conversations-Handwörterbuch (2/1856).
Though Fétis's famous lexicon does not surpass Schilling's in reliability, it is memorable for the personality of its compiler. Fétis had strong opinions, some of them eccentric, and had little hesitation about displaying them in his articles. The eight-volume Biographie universelle (1835–44) was followed by a second enlarged and revised edition (1860–65) and many subsequent ones, as was a valuable two-volume supplement first published by Albert Pougin (1878–80). Several other writers published corrections and additions to both the first and second editions and to Pougin's supplement, clearly indicating the work's continued importance. Fétis's respect for classical antecedents is clear. The catalogue of his magnificent personal library (now in the Bibliothéque Albert Ier, Brussels) includes many of the works discussed above: Martianus Capella, Julius Pollux, Stephanus (three editions), Calepino, Bayle, Possevinus, Sweertius, Athenaeus, Oldoinus and two copies of the Suidae lexicon. Among the music encyclopedias and dictionaries listed are those by Walther, Brossard, Praetorius and Mattheson, and large numbers of important treatises (e.g. Kircher and Mersenne), histories, commentaries and biographies, and a profusion of works on organology. (This last is not surprising, for Fétis formed one of the finest collections of musical instruments, now in the Brussels Conservatory.) With this outstanding collection of books, scores and instruments readily available to him, it is no surprise that his Biographie universelle should prove to be an extraordinarily rich source of information on the lives and works of hundreds of musicians.
By the time of the second edition, the necessary dependence on Choron and Fayolle's Dictionnaire, Walther's Lexicon, Mattheson's Grundlage, Forkel's Allgemeine Litteratur, Gerber's Lexikon and the histories of Martini, Burney and Hawkins had considerably lessened as a result of Fétis's extensive travels and a voluminous correspondence with his biographees and other writers on music, such as the bibliographer C.F. Becker. In the long view of history, his methodology is much more significant than his personal biasses, for it achieved for the Biographie universelle a leading position in the tradition of scholarly music historiography.
The ‘fierce natural urge’ of the lexicographer mentioned earlier manifests itself in three forms, sometimes separately, often all together – bibliography, biography and terminology. Behind that urge rests a conviction that knowledge of people from their biographies, knowledge of what they wrote (assembling what G. Kubler in The Shape of Time called the ‘grand catalogue of persons and works’) and an understanding of the words they employed assures comprehension – and more importantly, control – of all knowledge. Examples from the 18th and early 19th centuries are plentiful: Brossard, unable to satisfy completely the impulse, lamented that he lacked the time to compile a biographical dictionary of the names in his ‘Catalogue de plus de 900 auteurs’; Janovka is said to have planned a biographical complement to his Clavis ad thesaurum; Schilling published both terminological and biographical dictionaries as well as the combined Encyclopädie. In more recent times the same impulse has affected such lexicographers as Pulver, Pedrell, Pazdírek, Baker, Scholes, Slonimsky and others. Fétis, too, responded to that urge, and one year before the Biographie universelle began to appear, included in the second edition of his La musique mise à la portée de tout le monde a ‘Dictionnaire des mots dont usage est habituel dans la musique’ that ran to over 100 pages. Within a few years this extremely popular book had been translated into six European languages, and both the Portuguese translation by J. Almeida and the Italian by E. Predari included the dictionary, the latter adding a large biographical dictionary which may have been extracted from the Biographie universelle.
Fétis's contemporary August Gathy published a modest Musicalisches Conversations-Lexikon in 1835, and though it was understandably overshadowed by the works of Fétis and Schilling, it reached a sufficiently large audience to warrant two other editions. Moved by the same lexicographical impulse for total control, Gathy also produced three editions of his terminological dictionary, the Neues musikalisches Taschen-Fremdwörterbuch, between 1850 and about 1870.
Among the many general encyclopedias published during this period, few are of special interest to musicians. Perhaps the most valuable is Jeitteles's Aesthetisches Lexicon, which appeared in two volumes in 1835–7. The music articles were prepared by Freiherr von Lannoy, and it compares favourably with other dictionaries of the arts, such as Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie (1771–4) and Lacombe's earlier Dictionnaire of 1752.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music, §III: 18th century to the present.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music, §III, 3: After 1835
From 1835 the pace of publication quickened noticeably, from an average of eight new music dictionaries or revised editions each year in the 19th century to nearly 100 a year now. More significantly, changes were taking place in the nature of the dictionaries themselves, often to meet the needs of a rapidly growing and better-educated middle class and also as a result of the accelerating growth of scholarship. Although there was a large increase in derivative abridgments of earlier lexica, compilers who sought respect for their works had to demonstrate scholarship and sound research and had to furnish new information. Although Fétis was not the only scholar to achieve these aims, he perhaps more than anyone defined new goals and standards.
Even as the specialized dictionary became more common (see below), three distinct categories of music lexica remained clearly discernible, all derived from prototypes that had developed in the 18th century: the comprehensive work or encyclopedia (§3(ii) below), which included terms, biographies and topics (leading to the appearance towards the end of the 19th century of a large and almost separate genre, the concise encyclopedia or Handlexicon); the terminological dictionary (§3 (iii)), little changed from Brossard's day, but embracing by the end of the 19th century many so-called ‘pronouncing dictionaries’; and the biographical dictionary (§3 (iv)) modelled on Gerber and Fétis. Two subgroups were relatively new in the early 19th century: the national or regional biographical dictionaries (§ (iv)(b)) and the various other specialized dictionaries devoted to a single subject, such as the organ, women musicians, modern music or instruments and instrument makers. These categories are rife with subdivisions, and many so-called dictionaries (e.g. those of scales, themes or gramophone records) stretch the definition of the word to cover what in earlier times would have been considered patent anomalies.
Specialized dictionaries – whether comprehensive, terminological or biographical – focus on specific topics in music. As such, they are usually aimed at audiences that are relatively sophisticated about such specialities, and they evolve when the accumulated information on any one topic grows to the point where it becomes effectively impossible to treat it adequately as only one of many topics within the conventional lexicon. They are generated too when a compiler decides that the accumulated information must be arranged in dictionary form for easy reference. Since about 1700 the number of such works has grown rapidly in all fields of study.
The first in music was Friedrich von Drieberg's Wörterbuch der griechischen Musik (Berlin, 1835). Although there are earlier works on broader subjects, containing important information for musicians, for instance Allacci’s famous Drammaturgia (1666), which included operas; a so-called ‘dictionary of modulations’ in chart form by Geminiani (c1754); Wetzel's Hymnopoeographia (1718–28); the theatre dictionaries of Beffara (c1750), Durey de Noinville (1753), Léris (1754), Parfaict (1756), La Vallière (1760) and La Porte (1776); the Russian Dramaticheskiy slovar' (‘Dictionary of the theatre’; 1787); and Compan's Dictionnaire de danse (1787), Drieberg's is the earliest to be devoted wholly and exclusively to a musical topic. Strangely enough, a work that almost became the first special music dictionary – it followed Drieberg's Wörterbuch only one year later – was the comic Dictionnaire aristocratique, démocratique et mistigorieux de musique (Paris, 1836).
In modern times, because of the amount of information that has become available and the constant need for fast retrieval of it, growing varieties and numbers of special music dictionaries have appeared, a large proportion of them devoted to popular music, jazz, the avant garde and ethnomusicology. That they have appeared far in advance of adequate coverage of those same topics in conventional music encyclopedias marks a change from earlier times when the topics of special dictionaries closely paralleled those in the comprehensive encyclopedias, such as church music, hymns, opera, instruments and their makers, and women (a topic, interestingly enough, on which dictionaries were published before 1900).
There also exists a large category of musical reference works, mostly of the nature of guides to the repertory, that are organized in ways very similar to a dictionary. Thus while a ‘dictionary of opera’ will list headwords pertaining to opera in alphabetical order, a ‘dictionary of operas’ will list simply operas themselves and is thus a guide rather than a dictionary. It is instructive to consider the different ways in which opera dictionaries, or rather opera guides (books of opera plots), may be constructed: some are organized first by period, then nationality, then by composer and finally by chronology (for example Kobbé's The Complete Opera Book); others are organized alphabetically by composer, then by chronology (the Viking Book of Opera); others are purely chronological (Loewenberg, Annals of Opera); and a few are purely alphabetical, by opera title (and thus eligible for description as a dictionary). Opera is the specialist area that received the most lavish treatment from lexicographers during the latter part of the 20th century, and the result of this was the publication of several major reference works devoted entirely to operatic and other musical works for the theatre. As well as the four-volume New Grove Dictionary of Opera, other dictionaries have treated the subject with a level of detail and exactitude which give them a lasting value. Notable among these are two German publications. Pipers Enzyklopädie des Musiktheaters: Oper, Operette, Musical, Ballett, which began publication in 1986 under the editorship of Carl Dahlhaus, not only includes important articles on composers and works but is also magnificently illustrated. From the last decades of the 19th century until the 1920s, the indefatigable Franz Stieger (1843–1938) compiled the information for his 11-volume Opernlexikon, originally planned for publication in the 1920s but not issued until 1975–83. This is an astonishingly full listing of operatic works by titles, by composers and by librettists, and it also includes some oratorios and ballets. In all Stieger lists about 60,000 works. The most recent attempt in the apparently irresistible quest for truly comprehensive documentation of opera is the Edwin Mellen Opera Reference Index (1986–), compiled by Charles H. Parsons. By the end of 1999, 21 volumes had appeared. These include catalogues of composers (vols.i–iv) and librettists (vols.v–vi), a geographical index of premières (vols.vii–viii), a list of opera subjects (vol.ix), a discography (vols.x–xii), indexes of casts for premières (vols.xiii–xiv) and for other performances (vols.xv–xvi), an opera bibliography (vols.xvii–xviii), a listing of reviews of premières and other significant performances (vol.xix), an opera ‘videography’ (vol.xx) and a listing of printed opera scores in American libraries (vol.xxi).
Other types of material considered in specialist dictionaries include hymns, psalmody, songs, film music, orchestral music generally, musicals and various kinds of chamber music as well as jazz and popular repertories. Popular music was a striking area of growth for lexicographers during the last years of the 20th century, with the publication of broad-ranging dictionaries and encyclopedias such as Peter Gammond's The Oxford Companion to Popular Music (1991) as well as more specific dictionaries devoted to jazz, country music, rock music, punk and heavy metal. These publications helped to fill the gaps left by otherwise authoritative dictionaries in which the coverage of popular music was felt not to have been a priority.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music, §III, 3: After 1835
The number of comprehensive works and encyclopedias of music published after 1835 rapidly increased, balanced by a proportionate decrease in the number of good separate terminological and biographical dictionaries. Only a handful of distinguished dictionaries of musical terms were published in the 19th and 20th centuries, and few of them approached the worth or influence of Brossard's, Rousseau's or Koch's earlier efforts. Of the international bio-bibliographies compiled between 1835 and the present, probably only Eitner's Quellen-Lexikon (1900–04) and the several editions of Baker's A Biographical Dictionary (from 1900) possess the durable value of their forebears, Gerber, Choron and Fayolle, and Fétis.
The quality of comprehensive reference works, on the other hand, has been improving as their numbers grow. Though they tend to be derivative, many examples of original scholarship exist. A few are remarkable because of the sheer strength of their compiler's personality, as in the case of Scholes and Thompson; the saving grace of many others (it gives some of them their only value) is the extent to which they are chauvinistic.
To a great degree the list of entries in most encyclopedias is identical; few of them, published in any country, can afford to ignore Bach or Vivaldi, the term ‘Sonata’ or the subject of modes, or even to give little space to such articles. The range of entries has widened considerably since the day when Walther included only biographies and definitions of terms. An encyclopedia may now display an amazing variety of features, such as descriptions of compositions by individual title (e.g. ‘Heldenleben’), title translation (‘Hero's Life’) or collective title (‘Razumovsky Quartets’); histories of publishers and instrument makers; articles on institutions and organizations (Sacred Harmonic Society, Three Choirs Festival), as well as theatres, halls and libraries; the history of music in specific geographical areas (such as cities) and surveys of national musics; and most importantly, good cross-reference systems. The article on Bach in a German encyclopedia is apt to be more comprehensive than the article (perhaps by the same authority) in a dictionary published in Spain, and an article about the vihuela in that same Spanish dictionary will usually offer more information than is provided in a Swedish encyclopedia. But such chauvinism is normally modest.
There is, however, a conspicuous move towards more nationally biassed works. Since World War II music encyclopedias have been published in at least 12 countries for the first time. Nations with a long history of such works have produced more and better ones; in several cases these are more nationalistic, such as the Diccionario de la música by Torrellas and others (1927–9).
Music encyclopedias improve and grow larger, and the editorial responsibilities are frequently borne by a large group of editors. Most multi-volume works not only have several editors, but include articles from numerous authorities scattered around the world. The tradition of the one-man encyclopedia (of which notable examples were the personable works by Riemann, Scholes and Pratt) is represented by very few recent productions, and the later editions of many dictionaries that began as one man's accomplishment are now produced by many editors and contributors. In most cases the gain in factual accuracy has been balanced by the loss of a unique personality. Only a few are still referred to by a single compiler's name, such as Grove, Riemann and Scholes. More frequently, especially since the 1950s, they are recognized by their titles; the monumental Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart edited by Blume and commonly referred to as MGG is an example.
MGG appeared serially over a number of years, and its immense coverage served to emphasize the pressing need for a new work of comparable scope to be published in English. That MGG was a work of impressive and monumental scholarship was never in any doubt, but its densely packed columns also left some room for improvement in terms of the dictionary's physical appearance and its ease of use. The publication in 20 volumes of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1980, edited by Stanley Sadie, was an important landmark in musical lexicography: like MGG before it, The New Grove marked a great advance in the gathering together of detailed information and up-to-date research. Its preparation did much to generate new lexicographical and musicological work with a vastly more extensive range of articles than in any previous publication in English, and a rigorous editorial policy sought to ensure a consistency of presentation and a level of detail which established new international standards. Articles on composers were generally much more extended than in earlier editions of Grove, and many significant musicians who had escaped the attention of previous editions were included for the first time. Others had very much longer articles, sometimes as a result of critical re-evaluation (it is instructive to compare the length of the article on Rachmaninoff in Grove5 with that in The New Grove). Inevitably there were also some casualties: musicians who appeared in the fifth edition but who were not to have entries in The New Grove. Many of these were composers and performers who had enjoyed some minor celebrity but whose reputation had subsequently declined. This was a pragmatic solution to a besetting problem with publications of this scope: absolute comprehensiveness is something that can rarely if ever be achieved satisfactorily, and thus older editions of major dictionaries such as Grove continue to have their uses for their coverage of certain minor figures.
The growth of scholarly work in areas such as medieval music and musical analysis was reflected in the quality and scope of entries, and lists of works for composers – especially those for major figures – were particularly detailed and methodical. Another area in which The New Grove broke new ground was ethnomusicology, with an array of articles that presented important scholarly work on music about which information was otherwise difficult to find. This did much to emphasize the avowed quest for a dictionary of this size to have more outward-looking comprehensiveness than had previously been the case.
Written by a large team of experts, The New Grove aimed for a helpful consistency of presentation rather than for a numbing uniformity. The result was that it included many articles which belied the notion that stern objectivity was the only substitute for the more capricious work of single-author dictionaries. The range and number of illustrations were also greatly expanded. But the publication of this dictionary marked only the start of what was almost certainly the most sustained and productive lexicographical endeavour in music during the 20th century. The continuing process of revision and addition that followed the initial publication of The New Grove resulted in an important series of specialist dictionaries devoted to musical instruments (1984), to American music and musicians (1986), to jazz (1988), to opera (1992) and to women composers (1995). These were derived only in part from the parent dictionary, with a particularly high proportion of completely new entries commissioned for The New Grove Dictionary of Opera and The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. In turn, these specialized works fuelled the revision process for the greatly expanded coverage of the second edition of The New Grove. This continous process of revision, refinement and expansion has been an innovatory and certainly very fruitful one, drawing on the information-gathering resources and the editorial expertise of an encyclopedic music dictionary in order to produce more sharply focussed publications, which are then able to form part of the basis for the subsequent revision and enhancement of the larger work.
In 1994 publication started of a completely revised edition of MGG. Under the general editorship of Ludwig Finscher, the new edition was organized entirely differently from the first edition, not as a single alphabetical sequence, but along the more schematic lines of the Riemann Lexikon, with explicit divisions into a Sachteil (dealing with terms, concepts, places, institutions and the like) and a Personenteil (dealing with individuals). The number of entries was considerably increased from the first edition, the majority of articles were completely new or extensively revised, and the volumes were generously illustrated, including the use of colour plates. The work is an magnificent monument to musicological writing in German, and publication has ensured the continuing importance of the dictionary, which was partially eclipsed after publication of The New Grove. Moreover, the physical appearance is less forbidding than that of the original MGG, with the welcome result that the dictionary is also much easier to use. In 1978–9 the Brockhaus-Riemann-Musiklexikon appeared, edited by Carl Dahlhaus and H.H. Eggebrecht; it was followed by a second edition in 1995.
Italy and France, too, have remained important centres for musical lexicography. In Italy, the most important recent contribution is the eight-volume Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (Turin, 1983–90), divided Riemann-like into two parts, ‘Il lessico’ and ‘Le biografie’. In France, the most significant modern dictionary is the more compact Dictionnaire de la musique (1970, with later revisions), edited by Marc Honegger, which includes some interesting autobiographical entries such as that contributed by Messiaen on his life and works. This is an unusual feature, seldom encountered in recent dictionaries.
The rapid and bewildering growth of information technology has formidable implications for any major work of reference. It is probable that most current music dictionaries will be available on-line to subscribers in the near future (some, such as The New Grove Dictionary of Opera and the second edition of The New Grove are already accessible in this form), allowing for frequent updating as well as for various kinds of searches, some of them highly sophisticated. However, notwithstanding the considerable value of electronic publication, and the astonishing speed of development in this area, it had by 2000 not yet threatened to supplant the publication of reference works in hard covers, and reports of the demise of the printed book still seemed premature.
The work of the lone compiler has come more and more to be limited to the production of ‘concise’, ‘brief’ and ‘pocket’ encyclopedias, most of them highly derivative, distinguished mainly by their convenient size and price. The amount of information now available for inclusion in a music encyclopedia probably discourages heroic, single-handed compilations like those of Riemann, Scholes and Moser in the recent past, and of Walther, Rousseau, Gerber, Fétis and Burney in earlier times, although Slonimsky's revisions of Baker are notable (and often compellingly readable) exceptions. Scholes's great monument, The Oxford Companion to Music, was completely revised under the editorship of Denis Arnold and published in two volumes as The New Oxford Companion to Music in 1983. Scholes's original work remains an immensely entertaining source of information, full of delightful surprises, but the revised version is a scholarly multi-author dictionary which is still usefully compact. Oxford have continued to update their other music dictionaries, and the single-author tradition is gallantly maintained in the firm's list by Michael Kennedy's New Oxford Dictionary of Music.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music, §III, 3: After 1835
Few among the modern works included in this category match the importance or influence of the illustrious dictionaries of terms published before 1835 by Tinctoris, Rousseau, Janovka, Brossard or Koch. Even the most distinguished among them are decidedly eclectic, remarkable primarily for their compiler's good sense in choosing worthy forebears and then paraphrasing them accurately, or elegantly.
Whatever their quality or lineage, they have been issued in great numbers and are widely used. In deference to their intended audiences, they differ greatly in size, coverage and detail. Some simple ‘primers’ offer little more than equivalents of foreign terms (Buck's New and Complete Dictionary of 1873 has the entry: ‘Lieder. (Ger.) Songs’). Slightly more ambitious compilers attempt definitions of such terms: a paragraph is devoted to ‘Lied’ in the 1895 edition of Baker's A Dictionary of Musical Terms. Still others provide additional data: equivalents in several languages, pronunciation, definitions of the words in various contexts, historical changes of meaning, quoted examples of word usages and references to synonyms, antonyms or related words.
Except for the rudimentary primers, almost all furnish essays, long or short, on topics such as ‘Opera’, ‘Acoustics’ or ‘Form’. Perhaps this is so because an entry for ‘Opera’ or ‘Form’ offers a compiler greater opportunity to mingle personal opinions with historical facts than do entries for ‘Clausula’, ‘Langsam’ or ‘Fanfare’. Choices of subject and length of essay often shed light on the personality of the compiler. Stainer and Barrett, for example, in their Dictionary of 1876 devoted only eight columns to ‘Opera’ but 32 to ‘Larynx’ and another five to ‘Laryngoscope’. Even in a dictionary such as this, the range of topics covers several subjects. The article on ‘Larynx’ in the Stainer and Barrett dictionary clearly deals with general science and anatomy, but the majority of articles, as in most dictionaries, are historical (e.g. ‘Greek music’, ‘Discantus’ and the like). Usually a sizable number are theoretical (e.g. their article on the ‘Seventh, Chord of the’), and occasionally an article is a mixture of both history and theory (e.g. the ten columns they devote to ‘Fingering’). Bibliographical treatments of subjects are plentiful, an excellent example being the article on ‘Periodicals’ in the Harvard Dictionary.
Until the mid-20th century surprisingly little interest was shown in the etymology of musical terms, their changing usage and, historically, the ideas that they connote. H.H. Eggebrecht's Studien zur musikalischen Terminologie (1955) is a pioneer work in this field, and his Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie (the first loose-leaf sections of which began appearing in 1972) is an apt reflection of the studies he has advocated. It may become the most important terminological lexicon of music since Rousseau's Dictionnaire of 1768, for each word is treated as an ‘idea’ and is the topic of a historical essay, with etymological details and evidence from early theorists and encyclopedists, many of whom are listed above. It harks back to Janovka's systematically arranged Clavis ad thesaurum (1701), where many terms were defined in essays on a small number of topics.
Even more like Janovka's work is the Harvard Dictionary of Music edited by Willi Apel and first published in 1944; entries are provided for broader subjects, while hundreds of familiar terms are given cross-references to a major article where the term is set in context (e.g. ‘“Recoupe”, see under “Basse danse”’, ‘“Dis, disis”, see “Pitch Names”’). In 1986 an extensively revised edition of this work was published as The New Harvard Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by D.M. Randel.
Before 1835 most of the terminological dictionaries were similar in format and organization, and the works of Janovka, Brossard and Rousseau served as their models. But then some new types emerged, of which the most popular was the English-language ‘pronouncing’ dictionary. The need for aids to pronunciation had been recognized much earlier. Brossard included a one-page ‘Table ou récapitulation des principales difficultez de la prononciation italienne’ in the 1703 edition of his Dictionaire, but between the time of this guide and the flood of more ambitious works late in the 19th century, most dictionary compilers did not provide such assistance. The earliest pronouncing dictionary appears to have been Adcock's The Singer's Guide of 1873, and the popularity of this kind of work seems to have reached its height by about 1910, particularly in the USA. Since the end of World War II only a handful have been issued, suggesting clearly that the need has diminished. The same is not true for specialized dictionaries of terms (on jazz, the organ or music theory, for example). These, as well as the highly specialized ‘polyglot’ dictionaries of musical terms, have been increasing in numbers in recent years. The most important of the latter type is the Terminorum musicae index septem linguis redactus (1978), prepared under the supervision of Horst Leuchtmann to assist those working with or reporting to the offices of RISM and perhaps the first music dictionary compiled with the aid of computer.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music, §III, 3: After 1835
In the history of music lexicography there have been only four general dictionaries of biography that can be considered monumental: those by Gerber and Fétis (discussed in §2 above), Eitner's Quellen-Lexikon and Baker's A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900).
Of the astonishing number of important works written, compiled or edited by Robert Eitner, none remains more useful than his Quellen-Lexikon (1900–04). Though dependent on its forebears from Walther to Gerber and Fétis, it is a monumental accomplishment, and though corrected, amplified and in some ways superseded by MGG and RISM, it remains indispensable. The lists of works by major composers with locations of manuscripts are less valuable now than formerly, but those appended to biographical notices of many minor composers are often still useful. Some of Eitner's entries are not included in any other dictionary. Baker's one-volume work, published for the first time in 1900, has remained throughout its lifetime the best international biography of musicians in English, and reissues of it under the successive editorships of Gustave Reese and Nicolas Slonimsky have markedly improved each edition. It grows larger and more dependable, and with supplements appearing more frequently than in the past, it is kept surprisingly up to date.
There are others that are also extremely useful. As has been pointed out already, the most valuable feature of many dictionaries and encyclopedias is their emphasis on the music and musicians of the country in which they are published. This is equally true for general biographical works; thus Schmidl's excellent Dizionario universale (1887–90) is especially informative about the musicians of Italy, Ricart Matas's Diccionario (1956) about those of Spain. Even the four most important works named above display some nationalistic emphasis.
After Fétis there was a pronounced trend away from the mammoth international biographical dictionary towards those limited to the musicians of one country or region. The first of this kind, F.J. Lipowsky's dictionary of Bavarian musicians, had already been published in 1811. Carl Kossmaly and C.H. Herzel's Schlesisches Tonkünstler-Lexikon (1846–7), J.H. Letzer's Muzikaal Nederland (1850) and Wojciech Sowiński's Les musiciens polonais et slaves (1857) were the next important ones. These and similar books are now extremely valuable because they frequently offer information about less well-known musicians who have been excluded from newer compilations. Only about 20 such lexica were published in the whole of the 19th century, another 20 from 1900 to World War II.
One specialist music dictionary stands out as a sinister memorial of the war years: Theo Stengel and Herbert Gerigk's Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, mit einem Titelverzeichnis jüdischer Werke, first published in Berlin in 1940 under the auspices of the Nazi government as the second volume in the series Veröffentlichungen des Instituts der NSDAP zur Erforschung der Judenfrage. This is a very rare example of a musical dictionary issued with an explicitly gruesome purpose. By a ghastly irony, this grotesque (and sometimes inaccurate) dictionary still has a value today for those working on Jewish musicians in the first half of the 20th century. The war years also saw the publication of A. Vodarsky-Shiraeff's Russian Composers and Musicians (New York, 1940), the earliest biographical dictionary to provide worthwhile information in English about musicians in the Soviet Union; this was followed in 1943 by I.F. Belza's Handbook of Soviet Musicians, and both remain useful.
Since the war, the number of such dictionaries has greatly increased, which is only to be expected in view of the growth of the world's population and consequent increase in the number of the musicians about whom information is needed and the number of people needing such information. There have been a number of useful specialized dictionaries devoted to performers (with and without a particular national focus). Notable among these, for the welcome breadth of its coverage and for the inclusion of biographical information which is often hard to find elsewhere, is the Dictionnaire des interprètes et de l'interprétation musicale au XXe siècle edited by Alain Pâris, first published in 1982, with revised editions in 1989 and 1995. New musical cultures have developed and acquired their own reference material, while older ones have come to be scrutinized in ever more detail.
For a comprehensive list and index of Dictionaries and encyclopedias of music see volume 28.
Dictionaries & encyclopedias of music
Grove5 (A.H. King)
Grove6 (J.B. Coover)
GroveA (D.O. Ota)
MGG1 (‘Janowka, Thomas Balthasar’, M. Ruhnke; also ‘Lexika der Musik’, H.H. Eggebrecht)
MGG2 (‘Musiklexika’, M. Bandur)
RiemannL12 (‘Lexika’, H.H. Eggebrecht)
StrunkSR
F.M. Padelford: Old English Musical Terms (Bonn, 1899/R)
G. Schad: Musik und Musikausdrücke in der mittel-englischen Litteratur (Frankfurt, 1911)
J. Bücher: Der Einfluss der Musik auf den englischen Wortschatz im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 1926)
M.M. Mathews: A Survey of English Dictionaries (London, 1933)
P.M. Riches: Analytical Bibliography of Universal Collected Biography (London, 1934)
M. Appel: Terminologie in den mittelalterlichen Musiktraktaten (Bottrop, 1935)
I. Düring: ‘Studies in Musical Terminology in 5th Century Literature’, Eranos, xliii (1945), 176–97
D.T. Starnes and G. Noyes: The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson (Chapel Hill, NC, 1946)
P. Scholes: The Great Dr. Burney (London, 1948/R)
S. Walin: ‘Musikinstrumenttermer i äldre svenska lexikon’, STMf, xxx (1948), 5–40; xxxi (1949), 5–82
S.H. Steinberg: ‘Encyclopedias’, Signature, new ser., no.12 (1951), 3
J.B. Coover: A Bibliography of Music Dictionaries (Denver, 1952, enlarged 3/1971 as Music Lexicography)
H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Aus der Werkstatt des terminologischen Handwörterbuchs’, IMSCR V: Utrecht 1952, 155–64
D.T. Starnes: Renaissance Dictionaries (Austin, 1954)
H.H. Eggebrecht: Studien zur musikalischen Terminologie (Mainz, 1955, 2/1968)
D.T. Starnes and E.W. Talbert: Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill, NC, 1955)
E. Lowinsky: ‘Adrian Willaert’s Chromatic “Duo” Re-Examined’, TVNM, xviii/1 (1956), 1–36
H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Ein Musik-Lexikon von Christoph Demantius’, Mf, x (1957), 48–60
H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Walthers Musikalisches Lexikon in seinen terminologischen Partien’, AcM, xxix (1957), 10–27
J. Fontaine: Isidore de Seville et la culture classique dans l’Espagne (Paris, 1959)
H.P. Gysin: Studien zum Vokabular der Musiktheorie im Mittelalter (Zürich, 1959)
M.M. Keane: The Theoretical Writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau (Washington DC, 1961)
O. Wessely: ‘Ein Musiklexikon von Francois Le Cocq’, Hans Albrecht in memoriam, ed. W. Brennecke and H. Haase (Kassel, 1962), 101–8
R. Collison: Encyclopaedias: their History throughout the Ages (New York, 1964)
S.L. Jackson: ‘What a History of the Encyclopedia could Show’, Library Review, xix (1964), 398
A. Berger: ‘New Linguistic Modes and the New Theory’, PNM, iii/1 (1964–5), 1–9
E.T. Cone: ‘A Budding Grove’, PNM, iii/2 (1964–5), 38–46
S. Borris: Terminologie in der neuen Musik (Berlin, 1965)
H. Heckmann: ‘Einleitung’ to facs. of S. de Brossard: Dictionaire (Hilversum, 1965) [see also V. Duckles (1967–8)]
C.M. Winchell: Guide to Reference Books (Chicago, 8/1967, rev. 9/1976 by E.P. Sheehy)
T.W. Hunt: The Dictionnaire de musique of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Denton, TX, 1967)
R.B. Slocum: Biographical Dictionaries and Related Works (Detroit, 1967, suppls., 1972–8)
F. Blume: ‘Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: a Postlude’, Notes, xxiv (1967–8), 217–44
V. Duckles: Review of facs. of S. de Brossard: Dictionaire (Hilversum, 1965), Notes, xxiv (1967–8), 700–01 [see also H. Heckmann (1965)]
E. Jacobi: Rameau: Complete Theoretical Writings (Rome, 1967–72)
H. Avenary: ‘Musikalische Analecta aus Isidors Etymologiae’, Mf, xxi (1968), 38–9
R. Cigler: ‘Notes on the History of Musical Lexicography in Czechoslovakia’, SPFFBU, H3 (1968), 87–98
T. Dart: ‘Music and Musical Instruments in Cotgrave’s Dictionarie (1611)’, GSJ, xxi (1968), 70–80
H.H. Eggebrecht and F. Reckow: ‘Das Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie’, AMw, xxv (1968), 241–77
R. Klein: ‘MGG bei “ZY” angelangt’, ÖMz, xxiii (1968), 430–31
E. de Freitas e Castro: ‘Dicionários de música brasileiros’, Revista brasileira de cultura, no.5 (1970), 9–20
J.A.H. Murray: The Evolution of English Lexicography (College Park, MD, 1970)
P.A. Scholes: ‘Dictionaries of Music’, The Oxford Companion to Music (London, 10/1970)
J. Subirá: ‘Un panorama histórico de lexicografía musical’, AnM, xxv (1970), 125–42
J. Leyerle: ‘The Dictionary of Old English: a Progress Report’, Computers and the Humanities, v (1970–1), 279–83
A.J. Aitken: ‘Historical Dictionaries and the Computer’, The Computer in Literary and Linguistic Research (Cambridge, 1971), 3
R. Collison: Dictionaries of English and Foreign Languages (New York, 2/1971)
V. Duckles: ‘Some Observations on Music Lexicography’, College Music Symposium, xi (1971), 115–22
SPFFBU, H6 (1971)
Zur Terminologie der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts: Freiburg 1972
H.H. Eggebrecht, ed.: Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie (Wiesbaden, 1972–)
B. Huys and others: François-Joseph Fétis et la vie musicale de son temps: 1784–1871 (Brussels, 1972)
M. Paterson and S. Ritori: Hidden Terms in the Harvard Dictionary (diss., Kent State U., 1973)
P.J. Shaw: A Comparison of 18th century Music Dictionaries Published in England (Chapel Hill, NC, 1973)
N. Williams and P. Daub: ‘Coover’s Music Lexicography–Two Supplements’, Notes, xxx (1973–4), 492–500
N. Findler and H. Vill: ‘A Few Steps towards Computer Lexiconometry’, American Journal of Computational Linguistics, i (1974), 169
R. Sajak: Sebastian de Brossard als Lexicograph (Bonn, 1974)
D. Sherman: ‘A New Computer Format for Webster’s Seventh Collegiate Dictionary’, Computers and the Humanities, viii (1974), 21–6
A. Cohen: ‘Musique in the Dictionnaire mathématique (1691) of Jacques Ozanam’, MR, xxxvi (1975), 85–91
S. Sadie: ‘The New Grove’, Notes, xxxii (1975–6), 259–68
R. Lonsdale: ‘Dr. Burney’s “Dictionary of Music”’, Musicology, v (1977), 159–71
H.W. Hitchcock: ‘On the Path to the U.S. Grove’, Notes, xli (1984–5), 467–70
D. Franković: ‘Glazbena terminologija u Slovniku umjetnikah jugoslavenskih Ivana Kukuljevića Sakcinskog’ [Musical terminology in Sakcinski’s Slovniku umjetnikah jugoslavenskih], Arti musices, xvii/1 (1986), 3–74
V.H. Duckles and M.A. Keller: Music Reference and Research Materials (New York, 4/1988, rev.5/1997 by I. Reed)
M. André: ‘Eine Quelle zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Ernst Ludwig Gerbers Neuem Tonkünstlerlexikon’, Festschrift Klaus Hortschansky, ed. A. Beer and L. Lütteken (Tutzing, 1995), 325–7