Skip to main content

The New Grove Dictionary Of American Music

March 2023
1min read


edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie; Grove’s Dictionaries of Music Inc.; four volumes; $495.00.

Here is a masterful achievement, a well-written, handsomely presented, definitive encyclopedia of American music and musicians. An outgrowth of the twenty-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians published in Britain in 1980, this set not only provides much greater depth on American musical subjects, it also shows greater breadth than its predecessor, giving equal weight to popular, jazz, folk, and “serious” music. The article “Detroit” treats the history of symphony societies and educational institutions there, but although it is accompanied by a photograph of the Motown record company, it contains only one sentence on recent popular music; another article, “Motown,” tells the story behind that picture. Such cultural schizophrenia is probably inevitable, since today’s musical spheres are so disparate, but The New Grove nearly succeeds in overcoming it, treating all subjects with equal scholarly care and thoroughness. The result, a work in which you can read equally instructive entries on Walter Piston and lggy Pop, is truly refreshing, both entertaining and wise.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April 1987"

Authored by: Otto Friedrich

From Fort Ticonderoga to the Plaza Hotel, from Appomattox Courthouse to Bugsy Siegel’s weird rose garden in Las Vegas, the present-day scene is enriched by knowledge of the American past

Authored by: Geoffrey C. Ward

A biographer who knows it well tours Franklin Roosevelt’s home on the Hudson and finds it was not so much the President’s castle as it was his formidable mother’s.

Authored by: Alfred Kazin

A journey through a wide and spellbinding land, and a look at the civilization along its edges.

Authored by: Shirley Abbott

In the quiet luxury of the historic district, a unique form of house plan—which goes back two hundred years—is a beguiling surprise for a visitor

In the blustery days of late fall, the traveler still can find the sparseness and solitude that so greatly pleased the Concord naturalist in 1849

Authored by: Brian Dunning

Within the city’s best-known landmarks and down its least-visited lanes stand surprisingly vivid mementos of our own national history

Authored by: Selma Rattner

Every town you pass through has felt the impact of the modern historic-preservation movement. Now a founder of that movement discusses what is real and what is fake in preservation efforts.

Authored by: Richard Reinhardt

No city has more energetically obliterated the remnants of its past. And yet no city has a greater sense of its history.

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.