Question about The Grove Dictionary of Music

[George]

We used the Grove in college as a reference, a source of facts, much in the same way that English majors use the dictionary. Is its entries supposed to be impartial and mostly objective?

I ask because of this entry from 1954 about Rachmaninov:

"His music is well constructed and effective but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from arpeggios. ... The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninoff's works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor."

[Harry]

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, that has me flabbergasted

[The Diner]

Little did they know of the future artificial and gushy listeners.

[The new erato]

Opinions vary, between critics and over time. And fashions change. So what else is new?

[Opus106]

Opinions vary, between critics and over time. And fashions change. So what else is new?

George wants to know if the '54 edition was edited by a relative of D. Hurwitz or N. Lebrecht.

[The Diner]

Rachmaninoff is not top drawer. Never will be.

[Gurn Blanston]

Here's his intro from the current Grove's:

Rachmaninoff [Rakhmaninov], Serge [Sergey] (Vasil'yevich)
(b Oneg, 20 March/1 April 1873; d Beverly Hills, CA, 28 March 1943). Russian composer, pianist and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, the last great representative of Russian late Romanticism. The influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers soon gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom, with a pronounced lyrical quality, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity and a palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colours.

Lot less subjectivity in there now, it seems...

[George]

Opinions vary, between critics and over time. And fashions change. So what else is new?

Is the Grove a collection of opinions or facts?

[PaulSC]

Yes.

[The new erato]

Yes.

Yes. The quote is a collection of both.

[George]

So no one knows if the Grove's entries are supposed to be impartial and mostly objective?

k a rl? You out there?

[The Diner]

It's a frikken dictionary. I'm sure they'd like to be considered definitive.

[Christo]

Why can't a dictionary be objective and objectionable at the same time?

[Gurn Blanston]

So no one knows if the Grove's entries are supposed to be impartial and mostly objective?

k a rl? You out there?

Like everything else, it has changed over the years. When George Grove wrote the first edition back around 1870, he put in a bunch of facts as he knew them and also wrote an essay on each topic that pretty much presented his opinion of that composer. That style lived on for a long time, but today the essays are much less opinionated and comparative in the way of subjectively rating composers to their peers than they used to do. The people who write it now are top-rank musicologists, by and large, and they try to be more objective. Some composers have a big enough entry that it rates to get a whole book of his own. The Haydn book is an excellent resource, and highly commendable, as are Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert and....

[The Diner]

They should change the name to Grove's Good Music Guide.

[Opus106]

They should change the name to Grove's Good Music Guide.

Only for the online edition, perhaps. Including too many album covers will increase cost of production, and the dead-tree edition cannot have polls  -- silly ones; on Fridays -- unlike the website.

[The Diner]

...and the dead-tree edition cannot have polls  -- silly ones; on Fridays -- unlike the website.

We're waaay behind on these.

[George]

Like everything else, it has changed over the years. When George Grove wrote the first edition back around 1870, he put in a bunch of facts as he knew them and also wrote an essay on each topic that pretty much presented his opinion of that composer. That style lived on for a long time, but today the essays are much less opinionated and comparative in the way of subjectively rating composers to their peers than they used to do. The people who write it now are top-rank musicologists, by and large, and they try to be more objective.

Thanks for your response, Gurn!

I wrote an email to my old Music History professor in college and this is what he had to say about it:

That statement about Rachmaninoff is, of course, ridiculous. First of all, many older editions of Grove's were written by British critics, who tend, even occasionally to this day, to be bitchy and condescending.  This kind of editorializing will hopefully not appear in present-day reference works.  But this mid-20th-century criticism of Rach is typical, and does reflect an opinion of Rachmaninoff that is based on prejudice and ignorance.  The prejudice stems from his position as a great performer. As in the case of Liszt, when someone is a particularly famous performer, the compositions are sometimes considered suspect. There were, of course, composers like Mozart and Mendelssohn who were great performers, but somehow they are considered composers first.  In addition, there was, and still is to some extent, ignorance of Rachmaninoff as a composer. If one knows only the piano concertos and a few preludes, then the picture of him as a composer is grossly incomplete.  Even the symphonies only add another piece to the picutre.  There are vocal masterpieces---the Vespers. the cantata based of "The Bells," and some of the songs---chamber music, and even three one-act operas (terrific pieces).