As an avid researcher and an eclectic lover of music, I've found my Shangri-la! It's
in the form of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition, which
was released last month. It's a huge, 29 volume reference for any musical question,
large or small, containing over 30,000 articles together with appendices and an index.
It took seven years to complete and is the work of 6000 expert contributors and an
editorial staff of 60.
The results are astounding. This comprehensive and authoritative juggernaut,
encyclopedic in scale and scope, is queen undisputed of music knowledge. While the
list price (US $4,850) means that this is primarily a purchase to be made by libraries
and the like, one can get free trial access to the entire text on a web site for a 24
hour period! I've been immersing myself in it for hours now. I've been perusing
articles on all my favorite musicians and every conceivable genre including classical
music, reggae, jazz, funk, blues and issues including race, postmodernism, feminism,
gay and lesbian music and house music. Experiencing this site is a very personal and
interactive experience that one can taylor to suit their own unique music interests.
To give you an idea, a search for "Mitchell, Joni" returned 241 results, sorted by
relevancy, beginning with an insightful, albeit too brief in my opinion, biography.
I'm going back in a minute to browse more deeply, but the first few pages of Joni hits
revealed some real jewels. They really seem to have gotten it right here.
Fabulously, there's a 577 article section on women composers that doesn't even include
contemporary artists like Joni! Such a collection is unprecedented and long overdue.
Then of course you have a treasure trove of the latest scholarship on your Beatles,
your Beethoven, your Elvis, Steely Dan, Billie Holiday, Hollies, Whitney Houston,
Mozart...ad infinitum.
As the SF Chronicle said in the article that tipped me off to the resource: "The New
Grove is more than simply a huge compendium of information. As a reflection of the
current thinking among musicians and scholars, it provides a fascinating,
kaleidoscopic picture of the state of musical life at the turn of the century."
I could go on and on, but it occurs to me that this is beginning to sound like an
info-mercial. Nevertheless, trust me, if you have even a remote interest in music of
any and all kinds (and I know you do), you must visit this site and take the 24 hour
free ride!
To whet your appetite, I'll just post the beginning of a very interesting and
informative article on Singer/Songwriters:
<<Singer-songwriter.
A term used since the late 1950s to describe those mainly American and British singing
composer-performers, often with roots in folk, country and blues, whose music and
lyrics are considered inseparable from their performances.
1. Characteristics.
Singer-songwriters are generally socially aware performers, the themes of their work
often involving a sense of introspection, alienation or loss (real or imaginary): this
is shared by both the singer and the listener, the sense of intimacy magnified by the
microphone. In their performances and on many of their recordings there is an almost
symbiotic relationship between the singers and their instruments, usually guitar or
piano, at which the songs have generally been composed. The playing is usually fairly
simple and always underpins the text; quirks of technique sometimes trigger a new
direction for the lyrics. Remnants of the compositional process can survive in the
performance itself: the initial empty bars or anacrustic beginning to the text, for
example, give thinking time as well as asserting the pitch.
Singer-songwriters have been described variously as folk poets (Beltz on Chuck Berry),
auteurs (Laing on Buddy Holly), poet-composers (Mellers on female singers) and even
bards (Bok), indicating the supreme importance of the words, with both the sung lines
and their instrumental accompaniment providing support. Although many
singer-songwriters have published poems as literature (Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Leonard
Cohen), the genre is both an aural and oral one with its roots in ancient oral
traditions. The songs have the legitimacy of a poet reading his or her own verse, to
which is added the authority of a musician singing an own composition. The direct
connection between performer and audience can produce a cultural commonality or
authenticity which has made some songs extraordinarily representative of their time:
Joan Baez and the anti-war movement in the USA, Joni Mitchell and Woodstock, Ray
Davies and London of the 1960s. Since Lennon and McCartney the term singer-songwriter!
!
has also been used of certain s
ingers who generally wrote only the music (Elton John) or the lyrics (Morrisey). It
tends not to be applied to singers for whom the song is a supporting element of a
wider agenda, even though the singer may have written both words and music, as in the
case of David Bowie.>> (Five more pages on this subject and more Joni references
follow on the site.)
Sorry to go on this long, but there's no overstating this music knowledge wonder.
Check it out at: www.grovemusic.com
-Julius
P.S. In the links section on Joni's bio page, there's a link to JoniMitchell.com!
