Study Of Cathedral Music And Welsh folk Music

Sir George Grove was an English engineer, musical scholar, and editor of the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary originally called A Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He was trained in classics, divinity, math, and philosophy, and developed a love for music and the arts at home. While working as an engineer in the mid-1800s, he also studied cathedral music and Welsh folk music in his free time. Grove was also famously known for his program notes, especially his analyses of Beethoven’s works. He was constantly researching and collaborating with other musical scholars, both at home and abroad, to provide new information for these program notes. In the 1860s, Grove became the assistant editor to lexicographer William Smith, whose principal project at the time was to write and compile a Biblical dictionary.

Grove’s dedication and enthusiasm for the research led him to envision creating a musical dictionary. He became editor of Macmillian’s Magazine in 1868, and used his position to push for coverage on music and musical affairs. He never stopped researching, compiling information on the symphonies of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and acquainting himself with the works of Schubert and Schumann prior to the publication of his dictionary, which was released in 1878. Even after his encyclopedia was published, he continued his research in order to add content to his dictionary, traveling to Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna to study primary sources and acquire first-hand accounts and anecdotes from composers’ family and friends. He was a champion of scholarship during his tenure as director of the Royal College of Music, encouraging his students to be well-versed in literature and other such intellectual pursuits.

While director of RCM, he continued with his career as a music critic, wrote program notes, and attended various concerts and festivals, never stopping his pursuit of furthering his musical knowledge. He published several more books, even after his retirement. Dr. Deane Root is the current editor of Grove, and a prominent musicologist, teacher, and bibliographer. Prior to his appointment as editor-in-chief, he served in various directorship positions in American academia, including Director of Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also credited for his significant contributions to the encyclopedia’s collections on popular music while serving as the area coordinator for New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

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Root has a particular focus on American popular music before 1900, and seeks to link his research to issues such as social justice, cultural outreach, and historical preservation.  In addition to his duties as editor, he has served as an expert advisor to filmmakers, museums, and other cultural institutions. Grove Music Online originated from A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, written by British scholar and patron George Grove. Its purpose was to serve as a reference work for music professionals, the intellectuals of British society, and literate music lovers. Even from the first edition, published in 1878, the encyclopedia was fairly restricted in content and scope, due to the limits of published scholarship and British imperialist attitudes of the time. Grove’s original encyclopedia favored the work of English artists and scholars, and excluded non-Western and pre-Renaissance music and musicians.

J.A. Fuller Maitland, the editor of the second edition of Grove’s Dictionary, helped broaden the content featured in the encyclopedia to include an article on acoustics and added information regarding ancient music. The push to develop the encyclopedia seems to have come from Grove’s Dictionary’s competitors; other reference works such as Mendel’s Lexicon. While Maitland did not shift from the work’s original ethnocentric focus on the British Isles, supplemental articles were later added to the edition, including an “American Supplement”, which appeared in 1920. So far, Grove’s Dictionary was still a far cry from being a wide-ranging and unbiased musical reference work. In the third and fourth editions, we see Grove’s Dictionary expand past British musical history and move towards becoming an objective reference work at the hands of editor H.C. Colles. In addition to being an expert on English music history, he also was knowledgeable of late 19th century German orchestral music and art song.

After World War I and the rise of fascism on the European continent, Colles edited the personal reflections and anecdotes found in previous editions of Grove’s Dictionary to be more impartial by revising, extending, and replacing older articles. Post-World War II, there was a rapid influx of knowledge and scholarship due to colleges and universities adding music departments and hiring immigrant professors and faculty members. The editor of the fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary, Eric Blom, was in charge of accounting for all of this new information in this particular edition. His strict editing style helped push the encyclopedia to the forefront of scholastic reference works. Likewise, the editorial staff working on the sixth edition made close revisions to all of the information included in the previous edition, and made sure that each article reflected the traditional English literary style, so that it would be fully accessible to educated English readers.

This means that American terminology was excluded from the sixth edition in order to avoid confusion for the encyclopedia’s intended audience.  However, chief editor Stanley Sadie, who was not only a music critic and journalist, but also a prominent musicologist, made enormous changes to the encyclopedia. The changes were so significant that Grove’s Dictionary was renamed The New Grove. Yet perhaps the most important of Sadie’s contributions to the sixth edition was his collaboration with musical scholars that enabled him to bring so much new information to The New Grove, as he recruited distinguished musicologists from every continent to contribute articles and ideas for the development of the encyclopedia. The New Grove had officially put its ethnocentric past to rest. The collaboration with musical scholars continued under Sadie’s leadership, and The New Grove expanded to smaller, book-length projects focused on specific aspects of music, such as dictionaries on jazz and female composers.

It reached a point where The New Grove second edition had grown so large that the cost of printing and distributing was reaching an exorbitant amount, so the contents of the second edition were digitized and uploaded onto GroveMusic, an electronic document. Following the launch of GroveMusic, Dr. Laura Macy, an early music scholar, led the effort to convert The New Grove from an encyclopedia to an online reference database − troubleshooting bugs, uploading information, and constantly making updates, while continuing developing print projects. Now, Grove Music Online is a fully online reference work, and it is the first edition of Grove’s to be published only electronically. The current editorial board focuses on making frequent updates to keep articles current, encouraging scholarly revisions to be done on already-existing articles in the database, expanding their audio and video collections, and including more research on Eastern European, global, and popular music in the catalog.

It is truly remarkable to see how far the collection has grown throughout the editions, as to start, Grove’s strong bias for English music and scholarship persisted for almost a century, and it took even longer for the editorial staff to include non-Western music in the catalog. We are living in the era of the best edition of Grove’s, as the online database currently holds the most accurate, unbiased, and recent information available, all easily accessed with a subscription and a computer. While financially, a subscription may seem cost-prohibitive for an individual who uses the database for casual research, most music schools already have a subscription that can be used by students, faculty, and staff.

Accessing Grove’s is certainly not nearly as restrictive as it was in the time of its first few print editions, where your social class and your education level determined your ability to access the encyclopedia’s contents, specifically, your literacy level. The increase in the widespread use of technology over time certainly contributed to the explosion of information that happened after World War II. Scholars were able to travel to conferences, meet musicologists and ethnomusicologists of different focuses and specialties, and exchange information and ideas. Advances in long-distance communication enabled scholars to stay in touch with one another and give each other frequent updates on their research, and advances in recording technology allowed them to collect and transcribe music from different parts of the world that were previously ignored by music researchers and academia.

Post-World War II was also a time of relative peace compared previous eras, and musicologists were able to travel across the world to conduct their research undisturbed by strife and conflict. These factors all accounted for the large volume of new information that was brought to light following World War II, and the inclusion of these new articles in subsequent editions of Grove’s greatly expanded the collection, making it more inclusive of non-Western music traditions. This established a precedent that is upheld today by the current editorial board to ensure that Grove’s remains unbiased, wide-ranging, highly informative, and useful for today’s music scholars.

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