referencebooks

The Organ: An Encyclopedia

Douglas E. Bush, Editor
Richard Kassel, Associate Editor

Published by Routledge, 2006

This is an 8.5" by 11" hardcover book running to 679 pages including the index and the list of contributors, plus a brief preferatory section. This volume is part of a three volume set, the other volumes being encyclopedias on pianos and on harpsichords and clavichords. The three books are sold separately and paginated individually.

For a sense of what is covered, here is a list of the first fifteen entries in the "C" sequence, with SEE references included:

• CABINET ORGAN SEE CHAMBER ORGAN
  
• CADIRETA SEE RÜCKPOSITIV
  
• CAHMAN
  
• CALCANT
  
• CALLIDO
  
• CALLINET SEE DAUBLAINE-CALLINET
  
• CAMPANA
  
• CANADA
  
• CARE AND MAINTENANCE OF PIPE ORGANS
  
• CARHART, JEREMIAH (1813-1868)
  
• CARIBBEAN SEE CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA
  
• CARILLON
  
• CARLIER, CRESPIN (CRÉPIN) (D. 1636)
  
• CASAVANT FRÈRES
  
• CASE
  

The entries include parts of organs and organ technology through history geographical entries that discuss organ building history in different countries and regions; and important organ builders and organ building firms. Entries for organ-builders actually make up the majority of entries in the book, which is quite interesting.

I happen to know a bit of random knowledge about Italian pipe organ history and about an Italian organ building firm, and was very satisfied to find and entry for Italy, which went into depth where my knowledge consists of very little, as well as an entry for the organ building firm. The entry for the firm even mentioned their organ at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, which I have heard. It is fun to find a bit of unusual knowledge reflected and validated in a reference book. Take that as a sign of the quality of this book or as reason to think that I can't be objective in evaluating it.

The information in the entries is very detailed and clearly written. Not too much knowledge of music theory or history is assumed by the contributors.

This is a useful resource for anyone doing serious research in music history and musicology where it concerns organs. A very serious and well-done reference book.

National Anthems of the World, Seventh Edition

Edited by W. L. Reed and M. J. Bristow

Published by Blandford Press, 1987.

This is a 7" by 10" clothbound book running to 513 pages including a list at the end of national days (like our Independence Day) for each country.

What this book is is very simple: it's a compilation of the musical scores, lyrics (transliterated into the Latin alphabet when necessary), and translations into English of all of the world's national anthems. It also provides the names of the composers and lyricists, information about the songs' official adoption, and, where applicable, the songs' titles. That makes it a very useful and interesting book that doesn't have a lot of opportunities to go wrong. The main drawback of our edition is that it is so old. There have been many political changes since 1987 that would result in necessary updates to the book. The latest edition is the tenth, published in 2002; ours is far behind, I suppose because it has not been often-enough used to purchase an update.

This is a really neat book.

The Audio Dictionary, Third Edition, Revised and Expanded

By Glenn D. White and Gary J. Louie

Published by University of Washington Press, 2005.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback running to 503 pages including the bibliography and eleven appendices, plus a very brief introduction.

The introduction begins,

"Throughout the years of teaching acoustics and audio-related courses at the university level, we have felt the need for a book covering the terminology and basic concepts in the fields of sound recording, sound reinforcement, and musical acoustics. The marginal emphasis on audio education by our schools and universities has permitted a large body of folklore to exist. This book is aimed at dispelling some misinformation and is intended to supplement textbooks for courses in these areas and also to serve as a source of information for the general reader who has an interest in reproduced music and/or musical acoustics. The dictionary format was chosen primarily for ease of cross-referencing as well as ease of locating specific information. Definitions of fundamental principles and standards are included, as well as entries on more abstract and subjective concepts. The areas of basic acoustics, elementary electroacoustics, digital audio, electronics as applied to audio, and some topics within the areas of psychoacoustics are covered."

For some examples of what is here, here are the first fifteen entries given in the "W" sequence:

• Wall Wart
  
• Warp Wow
  
• Watermarking
  
• Watt
  
• WAV
  
• Waveform
  
• Wavelength
  
• Wavelet Transform
  
• Weighting
  
• Wet
  
• Whistle Filter
  
• White Noise
  
• White Van Speaker
  
• Whizzer Cone
  
• Whole Step
  

This book is good if you want to understand what sound engineers are talking about, but doesn't go into the detail you would need to actually do what they do. It's written in prose that's very understandable to non-engineers. Sometimes it's even entertaining.

The one odd thing about it, perhaps, is how much attention is given to outmoded audio technologies like tape recorders. There are probably whole areas of terminology relating to digital audio recording and digital signal processing that are left out. I think this is a consequence of the fact that the author is an audio veteran and approaches the field in somewhat old ways.

Still, despite it's somewhat old-fashioned point of view, it's a useful book.

An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music

Compiled by Nat Shapiro.

Published by Da Capo Press, 1981.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback running to 418 pages including the index of names and sources and the index of key words and phrases, plus a brief introduction.

This paperback edition is a reprint of the original 1978 book, which makes it a little moldy, considering how much music and talk about music there have been since then. Still, it's a nice collection of quotations about music, drawn roughly equally from general literature and the writings and sayings of composers and musicians.

The book is divided into eight parts with about 45 sub-parts. The eight main sections, with some sample subsections in parentheses, are:

1. Creators and Components (Melody, Harmony and Rhythm; Composers and Composition; the Avant Garde)
   
2. Exponents (Conductors and Conducting; Instruments and Instrumentalists; Concerts)
   
3. Proponents and Opponents (Critics and Criticism; Musical Misanthopy)
   
4. Lift Every Voice (Words and/with/for/to Music; The Wings of Song; Singing and Singers)
   
5. The Universal Art (Emotions, Vapors and Dispositions; The Food of Love; The Lingering Melody; Solitude; Tones in Time; The Soul of a Nation; The Open-Air Art)
   
6. Music for the Millions (Jazz; Blues and Blacks; Popular and Light; Folk; Dance)
   
7. Metaphysics, Metaphor and Miscellany (The Music of the Spheres; Music as Metaphor; Proverbs, Aphorisms, Wordplay, and Assorted Musical Saws)
   

Here are a couple of random samples:

Nothing is so truly bounded and obedient to law as music, yet nothing so surely breaks all petty and narrow bonds.
- Henry David Thoreau
Journal 1854

Jazz may be thought of as a current that bubbled forth from a spring in the slums of New Orleans to become the main spring of the twentieth century.
- Henry Pleasants (1910- )
News summaries, December 30, 1955

Flute, n. A Variously perforated hollow stick intended for the punishment of sin, the minister of retribution being commonly a young man with straw-colored eyes and lean hair.
- Ambrose Bierce
The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary

Good singing is often wearisome.
French proverb, c. 1498

I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly, discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.
- Oscar Wilde
The Critic as Artist 1891

Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia

By Oliver Trager.

Published by Billboard Books, 2004.

This is a 7" by 9" paperback book running to 724 pages including a brief bibliography, plus acknowledgments, a brief introduction and a "how to use this book" section.

Keys to the Rain is a straightforward, narrow-focused encyclopedia and discography, with entries covering Dylan's songs (the majority of the entries in the book are these), albums, people in his life, films, books, videos, and CD-ROMs.

Opening the book at random I'm looking at pages 186 and 187, where there are five complete entries and the beginning and end of another two. The entries on these pages are for the Feeling Minnesota soundtrack album, to which Dylan contributed a cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire;" "Female Rambling Sailor," a traditional song that has never appeared on one of his albums and that he has performed in concert just two times; Festival, a movie about the Newport Folk Festival released in 1967; "Final Theme," an instrumental version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" that appeared on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; and First Blues, an Allen Ginsberg spoken-word album with some instrumental accompaniment by Dylan on three tracks. As you can see, this Encyclopedia is also a very thorough discography/filmography/bibliography, and very useful for anyone who is a Dylan fan and wants access to his complete works. (Each entry for a song, album, or film gives publication information.) It is less biographical than many encyclopedias about creative artists.

Hip Hoptionary: The Dictionary of Hip Hop Terminology

By Alonzo Westbrook

Published by Broadway Books, on their Harlem Moon imprint, 2002.

This is a 5" by 7.5" paperback book running to 225 pages, including a list at the end of Hip Hop personalities, plus some introductory notes.

It's really more of a glossary than a dictionary, since only brief definitions are given, without pronunciation or usage notes or etymological information of the kind you'd find in a true dictionary.

The introduction does a good job of expressing the importance of new African American lexicons, referring back to American history from the days of the slave trade up through the 1970's.

For an idea of what's here, the first fifteen entries in the "O" sequence are:

• o
  
• Oaktown
  
• O.E.
  
• off the bat
  
• off the chain, off da' heezy f' geezy, off the dome, off the meat rack, off the meter, off the wall
  
• off the cuff
  
• off the hook
  
• off the titty
  
• off the wanger
  
• OG
  
• OJ
  
• OKC
  
• okie-doke
  
• old school/old skool
  
• old soul
  

Some of the words and phrases I wouldn't have guessed were hip hop terms - I knew "okie-doke" meant okay before hip hop had been born. But I didn't know that it meant "the runaround" or "trickery, up to no good." In some cases, though, a slang term is given with its regular, traditional white American meaning (e.g. on the money: on target). Maybe these slang terms have hip hop roots and I never realized it.

Commonly, I find definitions that I wish were a little richer, especially the ones for words meaning "good." These words all have shades of meaning in their real contexts that are lost if you define them as an exact synonym for "good."

I'd summarize this as a fun and useful book that's disappointingly thin on detail.

The Psychology of Music, second edition

Edited by Diana Deutsch.

Published by Academic Press in their Series in Cognition and Perception, 1999.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback running to 807 pages including the index, plus a list of contributors and a preface.

This is a borderline reference book, because it's organized as a treatise covering current knowledge about the psychology of music in 18 topical chapters, each written by a different scholar and divided into subsections. The chapters are:

• The Nature of Musical Sound
  
• Concert Halls: From Magic to Number Theory
  
• Music and the Auditory System
  
• The Perception of Musical Tones
  
• Exploration of Timbre by Analysis and Synthesis
  
• The Perception of Singing
  
• Intervals, Scales, and Tuning
  
• Absolute Pitch
  
• Grouping Mechanisms in Music
  
• The Processing of Pitch Combinations
  
• Neural Nets, Temporal Composites, and Tonality
  
• Hierarchical Expectation and Musical Style
  
• Rhythm and Timing in Music
  
• The Performance of Music
  
• The Development of Music Perception and Cognition
  
• Musical Ability
  
• Neuroligical Aspects of Music Perception and Performance
  
• Comparitive Music Perception and Cognition
  

Each chapter ends with a generous bibliography.

The writing in this book can be quite technical, requiring some background in both music theory and psychology or even neuro-psychology, which can make it a bit difficult for most of us to use. That said, it contains an impressive store of knowledge on a subject that many naively assume is simply a perennial mystery.

A weakness of the book is that it is primarily oriented in the Western classical music tradition, even where it discusses relatively contemporary music. This can make it seem irrelevant to many people's interest in the psychology of music even if the findings it communicates are truly generalizeable (which they may or may not be).

In any event, it is a very interesting and rich book, useful for anyone seriously interested in the psychology of music and how music "works."

Encyclopedia of the Blues

By Gérard Herzhaft. Translated by Brigitte Debord.

Published by the University of Arkansas Press, 1992.

This is a hardbound book (covered in blue cloth), measuring 6" by 9" and running to 513 pages plus a brief preface.

It's less a true encyclopedia of Blues music and more a biographical dictionary of the blues with some added features.

The table of contents is as follows:

1. Encyclopedia of Blues Artists [which comprises most of the book]
   
2. Bibliography
   
   
   
   1. Discography
      
   2. Books about the Blues
      
   3. The Regions of the Blues
      
   4. The Bluesmen
      
   5. Books outside the Blues
      
   6. Reviews and Magazines
      
   
   
3. Select Discography
   
4. Anthology
   
5. Blues Standards
   
6. Blues Artists and their Instruments
   

Entries on blues artists are brief, mostly a half a page to two pages in length, and give some biographical information and describe the musicians' playing. The descriptions are fun to read and not dry at all.

I find some reason to question the reliability of this resource, however. I looked up one of my favorite blues artists, R. L. Burnside (who died September 1st of this year), and found a two page entry that referred to him more than once as a classic example of a Mississippi Delta Blues player, also referring to his personal, percussive style. I know Burnside from his recordings on Fat Possum Records, which specializes in Mississippi Hill Country Blues - that's Northern Mississippi rather than the Delta. Fat Possum offers Burnside as their leading player and best representative of Mississippi Hill Country Blues music, which differs from Delta Blues quite a bit. I'm not an expert on Blues music, so if I can find an error like this so easily the reliability of Herzhaft's book is somewhat questionable. At the time of writing, though, I think Fat Possum was just getting going, and Burnside had in fact made a recording of Delta Blues music, and the distinct sound of Hill Country Blues may not yet have been known in Europe (where this book was put together).

I'd say it's a useful book but should be in combination with other sources and not relied upon too much for accuracy.

Word by Word Translations of Songs and Arias

Part I - German and French:
By Berton Coffin, Werner Singer, Pierre Delattre
Published by Scarecrow Press, 1966

Part II - Italian
By Arthur Schoep and Daniel Harris
Published by Scarecrow Press, 1972

This is a work in two separately published volumes measuring 5.5" by 8.5" and running to 620 and 563 pages respectively, including the indexes.

As the title says, the two volumes provide word-by-word translations of songs and arias from opera and classical choral music. The purpose of it is to give singers a way of knowing the meaning of what they're singing, so that they can add appropriate emotional tones to their performance.

The books are arranged in alphabetical order by composer and then song, using the song titles from the original languages. This can make it hard to look up a translation if you don't know enough information about it. For instance, if I want a translation to the words of that poem by Schiller used in Beethoven's 9th Symphony, "Ode to Joy" will not get you to it. (Actually, browsing through the section on Beethoven, I think that one is not in the book anyway.)

Since the purpose of the book is to provide word-for-word transations rather than translations of sentences based on meaning, the result is awkward reading, but useful for singers. Here is an example,

Schubert

An die Nachtigall
To the nightingale

Er liegt und schläft an meinem Herzen,
He lies and sleeps at my heart,

mein guter Schutzgeist sang ihn ein,
my good guardian spirit (guardian angel) sang him [in] (to sleep),

und ich kann fröhlich sein und scherzen,
and I can cheerful be and jest,

kann jeder Blum und jedes Blatts much freun.
can (of) each flower and each leaf [me] rejoice.

Nachtigall, ach! Nachtigall, ach!
Nightingale, ah! Nightingale, ah!

sing mir den Amor nicht wach!
sing (me the) Cupid not awake!
(do not awaken Cupid with your song)

The Green Book of Songs by Subject: The Thematic Guide to Popular Music

By Jeff Green.

Published by Professional Desk References, Inc., 2002.

This is a big, chunky hardback book measuring 7.5" by 9.5" by 3" thick, running 1569 pages including the index, plus 21 pages of preferatory material.

The book is an example of an excellent mass-market paperback that has a definite place in an academic library. The first few pages consist of snippets of praise for the book, which you don't usually see in academic resources. The subject matter and functionality of the book make it suitable for an academic community as well as a popular audience though.

What the book is is a big index of popular songs - more than 35,000 songs, actually - by what they are about (in nearly 1800 categories). The book is arranged in an alphabetic sequence of song subjects (each with numerous cross-references to other categories in the book), with songs listed alphabetically under each. For each song, the performer, album on CD, and publisher are listed.

Opening the book at random, I am looking at page 498, which has the last half page of a four-page section listing songs about Fools, a half page of songs indexed with the term "Forgive (synonym: Mercy)", followed on page 499 by the beginning of a 3 and 3/4 page section of songs about Freedom and Independence.

The "see also" references for "Forgive" are "Bad, Character & Integrity, Cheating & Lies, Faith, God, Guilt, Help, Love (various), Mistakes, Teaching Values."

Artists included span all the decades of recorded popular music for which the recordings are presently available. Popular music is defined broadly and includes multiple genres - country, heavy metal, new wave, soul, jazz, etc.

The book is entirely the work of Jeff Green, whose other job is Executive Director for the trade publication Radio and Records.

The first edition of the book was published by Green in 1977, and he has done updates many times since.

A very useful book.

The Big Book of Country Music: A Biographical Encyclopedia

By Richard Carlin

Published by Penguin Books, 1995.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback running 526 pages including the index, plus an introduction. It's printed on pretty cheap paper for a mass audience rather than specifically for academic library collections.

It's got more than 600 entries, mainly on individual musicians, giving biographical information, descriptions of their style and artistic contributions, a run-down of their recording careers, and selected essential recordings. Sub-genres and styles that are covered in the book don't necessarily have their own entries - only some do. The range of styles included shows the pleasingly-broad definition of Country used in compiling the encyclopedia - it covers "Old Time Music," "Country Rock," "Outlaw Country," "New Roots Music," "Rockabilly," "Countrypolitan."...

The entries are written in a very readable weekly-magazine style, and give lots of good information on the musicians covered. The entry for Waylon Jennings is longer than most, at just over a page. Carlin's discussion of Jennings' career shares a real expert's knowledge of the history of country music and includes his well-informed viewpoints. This book probably benefits from being the work of a single person.

I would like to see more non-biographical entries, for styles of music, important places and events, musical instruments, record companies, etc., but what we have is a nevertheless a very good book. It's useful to country fans, students of music and American culture, and anyone who's curious about country music.

World Musics in Context: A Comprehensive Survey of the World's Major Musical Cultures

By Peter Fletcher

Published by Oxford University Press, 2001

This is a hardbound book, 6.5" X 9.5", running 734 pages including the bibliography and index.

The title accurately states the book's intentions. Not a reference for facts and factoids so much as a reference that really requires reading, this book goes into great depth for a comprehensive work in one volume.

The table of contents is informative:

Part One: Genesis
1. Elemental Features of Music
2. Aspects of Civilization
3. Early Oligarchies in Mesopotamia and Egypt
4. Diverging Traditions 1: South and Central Asia
5. Diverging Traditions 2: Europe

Part Two: Traditional Musics of Africa and Asia
6. Africa
7. West Asia
8. The Indian Subcontinent
9. South East Asia
10. East Asia

Part Three: Europe
11. New Horizons
12. Enlightenment
13. Disintegration

Part Four: The New World
14. Cultural Mix in Latin America
15. Europeans North of Mexico
16. Africans North of Mexico

Part Five: The Modern World
17. Tradition and Change
18. Westernization and National Musical Identity in Africa and Asia
19. The Postmodern West

This book clearly required the hard work of many real experts to put together. It's something that you can hold in your hand and say, "This is a real reference book."

A Jazz Lexicon

By Robert S. Gold

Published by Knopf, 1964.

The book is a smaller hardback of 363 pages, including a longish introduction and a bibliography.

This is a dictionary of Jazz from the era of bebop and beyond. It's interesting as an actual dictionary of Jazz and as a historical document from a cultural era that generated some of the best American slang of the century. As a dictionary of jazz for the jazz student it is missing a great deal of vocabulary representing developments since the time of the work's publication, but by the same token it is extremely rich in the vocabulary of its time.

A few examples can best describe this book and show what's interesting about it:

oowee (and variant spellings), interj. [deliberately childlike exclamation; current since c. 1945]   Expression of extreme delight. - 1955 Solo, p. 25. "Mah, but he blows up a storm . . . Oooweee." - 1960 Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music, Winter, p. 47. I was THUNDERSTRUCK. I couldn't say a word. He gasses me. Ooooooooweeeee!

bombs, n. pl. [so called because of the volume and suddenness with which they erupt; current since 1944]   Unexpected bass drum accents, made an integral part of drumming by Kenny Clarke in the first years of bop (c. 1944), though occasional accidental or humorous use of them predate Clarke. - 1955 Hear Me Talking to Ya, p. 289. He taught me how to turn on what the kids now call "dropping bombs." - 1961 Metronome, April, p. 34. Dodds . . . underscores the work of the hornmen with "bombs" and off-beat rolls. - 1961 The Sound, p. 108. "That kid on drums dropped too many bombs." - 1961 The Jazz Life p. 37. Dropping bombs became a graphic term for the disturbing "new" drumming. - 1962 Dinosaurs in the Morning, p. 26. He depends on . . the relentless use of bass-drum explosions, or "bombs."

hipped to the jive, [variant of hip; hipped: some currency since c. 1900, hipped to the jive, c. 1935-c. 1945, obs. since]   Aware, knowledgeable - esp., see 1938 quot.: sometimes shortened to hipped; also rhyming slang hip(ped) to the tip, c. 1935-c. 1945: oral evidence only. - 1938 American Speech, Dec., p. 314. hipped to the jive: well informed on the latest slang expressions. - 1947 Esquire, April, p. 76. "Are there many squares in this outfit?" "No, man, we're all hipped."

Despite being classified in the ML's in our library, the strength of this book is really in general jazz culture slang and not in words about jazz music. There are some musical terms included, as well as the names of a lot of jazz dances that I've never heard of.

Great little book if you can find a copy.