Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians

• 1. Introduction

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  Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians arrived in 1900, the work of a single scholar named Theodore Baker, published by G. Schirmer, Inc. of New York. Its first edition ran to 647 pages, with an appendix of five more, and included three hundred portraits drawn in ink by a Russian artist named Alexander Gribayedoff. Whether Gribayedoff was the man's real name or a pseudonym for Valerian Gribayedoff, nobody has been entirely certain. That small mystery sits quietly in a book that grew, over a century, from one slim volume into six. How did a personal reference project become the standard-bearer of musical biography in the English language? And what kind of people shaped it along the way?

• 2. Theodore Baker's Foundation

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  Theodore Baker was born in 1851 and died in 1934, and by the time the dictionary appeared he had already spent years in the world of musical lexicography. In the years just before the first edition, he compiled and edited three successive editions of A Dictionary of Musical Terms, published in 1895, 1896, and 1897, also by G. Schirmer. That trio of smaller works served as a kind of rehearsal, training Baker to organize and verify musical knowledge at scale. The 1900 dictionary was a different order of ambition entirely. Its fourth edition, published in 1940, had grown to 1,234 pages, and its editors noted that American and Latin-American musicians were more fully represented in that issue than in any comparable English work of the time.

• 3. The Slonimsky Era

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  Nicolas Slonimsky was born in 1894 and died in 1995, and he took charge of the fifth edition, which appeared in 1958. He would not relinquish the editorship until the eighth edition in 1992, spanning several decades of stewardship. Slonimsky's arrival marked a turning point in the dictionary's ambition. He expanded the fifth edition to 1,855 pages and undertook a thorough review of every existing entry, personally consulting archival sources to verify and correct birth dates, death dates, and other biographical details. That effort at correction was itself a kind of argument: that a reference work could not simply accumulate names but had to earn the trust of its readers entry by entry. The seventh and eighth editions, which Slonimsky also oversaw, were marketed under the subtitle The Concise Edition.

• 4. Expanding the Canon

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  The eighth edition of 1992 did not merely enlarge the dictionary; it deliberately widened who counted as a musician worth memorializing. That edition revised 1,300 entries and added 1,100 new ones, reaching 2,115 pages. Its editors gave particular attention to female musicians, Asian musicians, multimedia composers, performance artists, and ethnomusicologists. These were categories that earlier editions had treated lightly or not at all. The ninth edition of 2001, billed the Centennial Edition to mark a hundred years since Baker's original publication, extended the scope further by prioritizing popular music and jazz. It was also the first edition to abandon the single-volume format, spreading across six volumes partly because of the expanded coverage and partly to allow more generous formatting for readability.

• 5. The Publishers Behind the Work

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  G. Schirmer, Inc. had published Baker's from the very first edition in 1900, but the company changed hands more than once in the decades that followed. In 1969, Macmillan Inc. acquired G. Schirmer. Then in 1986, Macmillan sold the music publishing side of G. Schirmer to Music Sales Corporation of London, retaining the reference holdings separately under the Schirmer Reference imprint. Schirmer Reference eventually passed to Gale, a division of Cengage Learning, which is where it currently resides. The editorial side of the ninth edition was overseen by Laura Diane Kuhn, born in 1953, who also collaborated with Slonimsky on the 1997 companion volume Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Classical Musicians. By 2007, an eBook version of the ninth edition had been released, offering a digitized form of a work that had begun as handwritten ink portraits.

• 6. A Century of Competitors

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  Baker's did not emerge into a vacuum. John Weeks Moore published a Complete Encyclopedia of Music in Boston in 1844, more than fifty years before Baker's first edition. George Grove edited A Dictionary of Music and Musicians in London in 1879, and Grove's Dictionary would become Baker's most prominent peer in the English-speaking world. On the American side, Oscar Lee Thompson, born in 1887 and died in 1945, edited the International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians in 1939 for Dodd, Mead and Company of New York. Baker's carving out a distinct identity among these works owed much to Slonimsky's insistence on archival verification and the dictionary's sustained attention to American and Latin-American musicians, a focus that Thompson's Cyclopedia also shared but that no comparable English work had matched before the 1940 Baker's fourth edition.