Publications

A dictionary of music and musicians is the first edition of Sir George Grove’s eponymous music encyclopedia (now continuously updated as Grove Music Online). When the first volume was published in 1879, Grove intended to only publish two volumes, but as work on the dictionary continued, the size of the dictionary expanded to four. In this first edition, Grove limited the content of his dictionary to Western music composed after 1450. Unlike contemporaneous dictionaries such as those compiled by Fétis and Riemann, Grove’s did not isolate articles on persons and terms into separate volumes; rather, each volume contains articles on composers, performers, musical terms, music theory, instruments, and musical institutions and societies. Although the dictionary is comprehensive in coverage and international in scope, Grove noted in his Preface that he had thought it “right to treat English music and musicians with special care”. Grove, who trained as a lawyer and was self-taught as a music critic, wrote many of the articles himself, most notably the biographies of canonical composers such as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert. He also commissioned articles from over 50 writers spread across England, America, and continental Europe. The writers included highly trained amateurs, similar to himself, and music librarians and professors at conservatories and universities. As the first edition of the longest-running and most comprehensive English-language encyclopedia of Western music, A dictionary of music and musicians is an invaluable historical document.