The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

• 1. Introduction

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  The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians began not as the monument it would become, but as four modest volumes published in London by Macmillan and Co. between 1879 and 1889. George Grove, its first editor, drew a deliberate line in history: he would not venture before the year 1450. That decision shaped everything that followed, including the debates, revisions, and occasional mischief that have surrounded the work for more than a century.

  Today the dictionary runs to 29 volumes in print and more than 50,000 articles online. It sits alongside the German-language Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart as one of the two largest reference works on music in existence. But how did a Victorian gentleman's project become the standard-bearer of music scholarship worldwide? And what do two fictitious composers and seven parody entries reveal about the people who built it?

• 2. George Grove's Foundation

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  Grove limited his chronological reach to music from 1450 onward, a constraint that would outlast him by decades and spark revision in nearly every edition that followed. The four volumes appeared across a span of ten years: 1879, 1880, 1883, and 1889. J. A. Fuller Maitland edited an Appendix in the fourth volume, and a separate Index edited by Mrs. E. Wodehouse followed in 1890.

  In 1900 the plates were corrected and the full series reissued, with the Index absorbed into the fourth volume. Both the original edition and that reprint are now freely available online, meaning Grove's own words remain accessible to anyone curious enough to look. The work he produced would be revised again and again, but the editorial architecture he established, volumes, appendices, supplementary indexes, became the template every successor editor inherited.

• 3. A Century of Revisions

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  Fuller Maitland took over for the second edition, which appeared in five volumes from 1904 to 1910 under the new title Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. That edition quietly dropped Grove's opening date of 1450, though it still left many earlier composers and theorists without entries. An American Supplement edited by Waldo Selden Pratt and Charles N. Boyd was published in 1920 in Philadelphia by Theodore Presser, acknowledging that a purely British perspective left gaps.

  H. C. Colles edited the third edition in 1927, also in five volumes, and then added a Supplementary Volume in 1940, designated the fourth edition. The seven-volume set, including the American Supplement, was reprinted together in 1945. Eric Blom's fifth edition of 1954 was the most thoroughgoing overhaul since George Grove first sat down to write: nine volumes, many articles rewritten in a modern style, and a large number of entirely new pieces. Blom personally wrote or translated many of those articles. After his death in 1959, Denis Stevens completed the additional Supplementary Volume that appeared in 1961. The fifth edition was then reprinted five more times, in 1966, 1968, 1970, 1973, and 1975, each time with corrections and updates.

• 4. The New Grove Arrives

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  1980 marked the most dramatic expansion the work had ever seen. Published under the name The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the edition grew to 20 volumes containing 22,500 articles and 16,500 biographies. Stanley Sadie served as senior editor, with Nigel Fortune among the main editors. The set was reprinted with minor corrections every year through 1995, with the exception of 1982 and 1983.

  By the mid-1990s the hardback set carried a price tag of roughly $2,300. A paperback edition appeared in 1995 at $500. Spin-off volumes followed: a four-volume dictionary of American music in 1984, later revised to eight volumes in 2013; a three-volume dictionary of musical instruments in 1984; a four-volume dictionary of opera in 1992; and a volume dedicated to women composers in 1994. Each was enhanced with expanded and updated material beyond what the main set contained.

• 5. Errors, Hoaxes, and Parodies

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  The 1980 New Grove carried at least two fabricated composers in its pages. The first was Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup, whose surname derives from a Danish village and a suburb of Copenhagen. Robert Layton wrote the entry. It appeared only in the first printing before being exposed and removed; the space it left was filled with an illustration. In 1983, the Danish organist Henry Palsmar founded an amateur choir named after this fictional musician, the Esrum-Hellerup Choir, gathering former pupils of the Song School, St. Annae Gymnasium in Copenhagen.

  The second false entry, Guglielmo Baldini, had a longer pedigree. The German musicologist Hugo Riemann had created the name and a fictional biography almost a century before the 1980 edition. The New Grove entry on Baldini was supported by a fictional reference supposedly appearing in the Archiv für Freiburger Diözesan Geschichte. Like Esrum-Hellerup, Baldini survived only one printing.

  Seven parody entries, written by contributors to the 1980 edition and packed with musical puns and in-jokes, were published in the February 1981 issue of The Musical Times. Stanley Sadie edited that journal at the time. The parodies included Khan't, Genghis, supposedly born in Ulan Bator around 1880 and died in New York on the 22nd of November 1980, and a composer listed as Stainglit (Nevers), Sait d'Ail, an anagram of Stanley Sadie's own name following the wordplay method of Luis van Rooten. None of these entries ever appeared in the dictionary itself.

• 6. The Digital Turn

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  The second edition under the New Grove name, published in 2001, reached 29 volumes and became the seventh overall edition of the work. Stanley Sadie edited it again; John Tyrrell served as executive editor. A planned CD-ROM release was dropped, but the edition launched simultaneously with Grove Music Online, a subscription internet service. Sadie noted in the preface that the single largest expansion in that edition was coverage of twentieth-century composers.

  The 2001 edition drew criticism for typographical and factual errors. Two volumes were reissued in corrected form after production mistakes led to the omission of sections from Igor Stravinsky's worklist and Richard Wagner's bibliography. The web version also drew early complaints for keeping images separate from the text rather than integrating them.

  Oxford University Press purchased the dictionary from Macmillan in 2004. Grove Music Online then became the cornerstone of the larger Oxford Music Online platform. Beyond the 29 print volumes, the online service incorporated the four-volume New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie in 1992, and the three-volume New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, second edition, edited by Barry Kernfeld in 2002, along with the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. The combined total exceeds 50,000 articles. Deane Root, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, assumed the role of editor-in-chief in 2009 and continues to lead what the service now calls Grove Music, the full slate of print and online resources carrying the Grove name.