Okay, it’s a small matter -- if not as small as Dr. Stevenson and his editors would have the world believe. Here is something of greater concern. In considering with awe and admiration this new blockbuster compilation of everything in music worth knowing, you may stop to wonder where it all fits in the currently troubled world of serious musical thinking. Will all that knowledge -- about Schubert, or hip-hop, or Duke Ellington (with Andre Hodeir‘s original article eloquently expanded by Gunther Schuller) -- create a new generation of music consumer adept in the use of ears and in processing the information they harvest?
Several weeks ago one of our serious-music radio stations, one without commercials and therefore, you want to believe, free to explore interesting cultural byways, canceled a popular weekly program devoted to music before Bach. When confronted with complaints, an executive explained that the station preferred to concentrate on “significant” composers -- thus relegating to “insignificance” such nonentities as Purcell, Monteverdi, Palestrina, Dufay, Machaut or Hildegard von Bingen. I don’t know what musical treatises grace the bookshelves of KUSC‘s Brenda Barnes, if any, but if you had to guess which -- the 29 volumes of NewGroveII or one of the dozens of current sleazeball tomes with names like Mozart for Idiots and Who’s Afraid of Classical Music? -- you wouldn‘t need my help. Whatever its greatness, the indispensible new Grove just might become, against today’s cultural realities, an insignificant other.
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