Percy Alfred Scholes (1877–1958)

So often, in the orchestra, I have faced confusion. Having a dictionary at hand, is an immediate aid, if not the remedy itself. For example, so often the differences in names can throw one down a loop: "The American nomenclature of whole-note, quarter-note, eighth-note, measure, etc. has been preferred to the English semibreve, crotchet, quaver, bar, etc. as being more logical and of greater help to the student." Nice to know!

The entries are professional, avoiding controversy, which is always controversial. The Beatles, we recall, broke up in 1967. It's wonderful to flip through the memories; so many improbable things keep occurring.

"Wagner" is lionized as one of few who transformed the art, while also pointing out that he is himself a "musical dead-end". I think the Dictionary misses the point of the womanizing, and the outright theft of property from Jewish musicians. While Wagner was dead fifty years before Hitler's puppet-Reich, the fascist plutocrats who subsidized both remain some of the wealthiest families of Europe. Based on theft.

The dictionary mentions the outright theft and cooperation of Carl Orf, who was happy to steal from Mendelsohnn and rewrite-re-compose the work of oppressed genius to make it Judenfrei. The professionalism of the dictionariat comes through with the entries on Wagner's grandsons and Schoenberg. Why does lieder bring us to tears? Here is a Reference tool thick enough to absorb the salt.… (más)

The Oxford Companion to Music is a massive and comprehensive tome for all things Classical Music. When I say all things Classical Music, I don’t just mean that it covers famous composers, since it does that adroitly; the book also covers the instruments used in producing such works, it has various entries on musical notation, it has entries on large countries and how they relate to music, and finally, it has entries on the various eras that exist in Classical Music. So if you need information on the Baroque Era just turn to page 101. Do you want to know how the Early Americans saw music? Turn to page 1312 for all the information you need.

As I said, the book focuses on Classical Music, so it mainly covers composers and their works. Depending on how influential a composer was, they might have more than a paragraph of text devoted to them. If you are looking for several pages on Antonio Vivaldi for instance, you might want to look elsewhere, but if you need a lot of information on Ludwig Van Beethoven this book has you covered. It discusses his birth, his musical contributions as related to his increasing deafness, his eventual originality, and his three major periods of work. So it covers the major composers more heavily, but I don’t really know the requirements the editor put forth to have a larger amount written on a certain composer. Maybe if the composer had developed in their style or changed enough? As I said, Beethoven has an arc to his pieces. Then again, I could not imagine this book without long entries on Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven.

As a reference guide, this book is pretty difficult to beat. However, that leads to a weakness in my personal enjoyment of it. The book is a reference guide, that means it wasn’t printed to be read from cover to cover. You could do that if you wanted to, but this book works much better as something that you use to look up a term or instrument that you have never heard of. So if you were looking at some sheet music and found a term like ‘veloce’, or you were going to a symphony and heard that there was an instrument known as the euphonium, or if you have to do a report or essay on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then this is a good place to start.… (más)