THE IDEAL DICTIONARY: IMPOSSIBLE TASKS,

FRANK ADJUSTMENTS, AND LEXICOGRAPHICAL

INNOVATIONS IN THE CREATION OF
GROVE MUSIC ONLINE

Anna-Lise P. Santella

Lexicographical Innovations in Print: Grove’s American Supplement (1920)

In the preface to the first American supplement to the second edition of Grove’s Dictionary
of Music and Musicians, published in 1920 by Philadelphia-based music publisher
Theodore Presser through an arrangement with Macmillan, editors Waldo Selden Pratt
and Charles N. Boyd described the project of putting the dictionary 1 together and con-
fessed that the results were not entirely what they wished:
The project of this volume, when proposed by The Macmillan Company to the Editor whom
they had selected, was finally taken up by him only with great hesitation, not because an
American supplement to the existing five volumes of Grove’s famous Dictionary of Music and
Musicians was not most desirable, but because of the inherent difficulties in the problem of mak-
ing it satisfactory. After prolonged consultation, the working-plan adopted was recognized as not
so much a “counsel of perfection” as a frank adjustment of ideals to what was practical within the
limits of time, space and scope proposed2.

I first read this passage shortly after I had sent the final manuscript for the eight-
volume second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music to the printers in 2014,
only to be hit with a spate of obituaries that meant some of the articles in press were
already out of date and there was nothing I could do about it. The tension between a “coun-
sel of perfection” and a “frank adjustment of ideals” hit close to home.
As the publishing editor of Grove Music Online, my job falls somewhere in the cracks
between musicologist, lexicographer, and professional shepherd. I work with an editorial
board of five scholars to define the policies and strategies that guide our work in main-
taining and developing a dictionary that has been in print continuously since 1879. I also
work with my colleagues at Oxford University Press to ensure that the editorial work is
carried out according to plan, and that the technology through which we publish Grove

Anna-Lise P. Santella is the Senior Editor for Music Reference at Oxford University Press, a position that in-
cludes serving as the publishing editor of Grove Music Online. I am grateful for input from Grove Music’s Editor-
in-Chief Deane Root, however all errors are my own.
1. The word “dictionary” is somewhat problematic when applied to Grove. All editions of Grove bear charac-
teristics of both dictionary and encyclopedia—indeed it is often termed an “encyclopedic dictionary”. The
American supplement contains articles that are by and large quite brief, and thus is closer in spirit to “dictionary”
than “encyclopedia”, despite the unexpected organisational features. Therefore, that is the term I choose to de-
scribe it. But for later editions of Grove, I prefer the term “encyclopedia”, as many of the articles go into greater
depth than is typical of dictionary treatment and are more focused on intellectual history than on linguistic
features. I use the term “lexicographer” to refer to curators of all of these types of publications.
2. Waldo Selden Pratt and Charles N. Boyd, eds. “Preface”, Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
American Supplement (Philadelphia: Theodore Presser, 1926), v.

213
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Music Online—the Web site—supports the board’s plans and the needs of the hundreds
of students, scholars, and professionals who use Grove every day 3.
I thus feel fully qualified to state that “a frank adjustment of ideals” is perhaps as true
a description of the process of editing a large reference work as has ever been written.
Creating a large and comprehensive scholarly publication inevitably forces you to con-
front limitations of all kinds (including your own). It is nothing if not humbling. Defining
what is to be included, who will write it, how the content is to be organised, categorised,
connected, and displayed so readers can use it for multiple purposes is a gargantuan task.
Moreover, many of the aims lexicographers hold dear are in conflict with one another: We
strive for completeness with material that is always changing, for order in subjects that are
anything but orderly. We aim for standardization that still allows for exceptionalism. We
aim to avoid repetition while making sure information is available wherever people need
it. We seek to represent past history and also to create materials for future scholars. And
we strive to do all this in a way that supports the work of novice and expert alike, of
people with varied interests and cultural and educational backgrounds. Ideals—“counsel
of perfection”—drive our work, but compromise is unavoidable as you try to match the
content with its users via the technology of the medium through which it is delivered.
Lexicographers have wrestled with these competing issues and others like them as long
as there have been dictionaries. As a class we are destined for disappointment. We cannot
do all these things, but it is critical that we try, because it is in the tension between two im-
possible tasks that innovation happens. And innovation in the way dictionaries work yields
innovation in the way scholars work. It is the responsibility of lexicographers to continue
to push the boundaries of what dictionaries can do. It helps scholarship grow.
The impossible tasks that Pratt and Boyd faced in creating the 1920 American supple-
ment hinged largely on the limitations of the printed book—that articles had to appear in
a particular order, that the single volume could only accommodate so many pages, that
images could only be published on inserted plates and, as this process was expensive, that
they could not be very numerous, and so forth. They did not consider including large
works lists, lengthy articles on complex topics, or detailed bibliographies—they would
have had to drop articles in order to make room for them. Creating audible musical ex-
amples embedded in the text was most likely something Selden and Pratt could not even
imagine. These are all things that are relatively easy for online publications today. In the
era of online research, our technologies are more forgiving, but still, they are not limitless.
Our impossible tasks are just different.
Pratt and Boyd’s primary innovation arose because they found the dictionary model
they had been given—the second edition of Grove (published between 1904 and 1910), in-
sufficient for their aims. The first and second editions of Grove were organised, as are
most dictionaries, alphabetically. Pratt and Boyd, however, wanted not only to make the
articles easy to find, but also to present a picture of the history of American music devel-
oping across time. This was their vision of “a counsel of perfection”—their ideal dictio-
nary. They bridged these dual needs by creating an encyclopedic dictionary in two parts,
one comprehensive and organised alphabetically like a traditional encyclopedia; the other
featuring biographies determined to be most representative of their period organised

3. The Grove Music editorial board currently includes Editor-in-Chief Deane Root (University of Pittsburgh),
Philip V. Bohlman (University of Chicago), Jonathan Cross (University of Oxford), Honey Meconi (University of
Rochester), and John Roberts (emeritus, University of California at Berkeley).
CREATION OF GROVE MUSIC ONLINE 215

chronologically, interspersed with long articles on key eras in American musical history.
An elaborate system of cross-references unified the two sections and avoided the need for
articles to appear in both parts. The result was, as the editorial introduction indicates, not
entirely satisfactory. And yet in refusing to be limited by the organizing structures of its
precedents, the editors of the first American supplement were remarkably prescient. The
need to find information through more than one point of entry is an issue scholars and
publishers alike continue to wrestle with in the digital age. If anything, the problem has
become more pronounced as digital access has expanded our reach. The ways in which
publishing technologies have evolved were influenced by innovative experiments just like
this one.

Grove Music in the Digital Age

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians made its online debut as Grove Music
Online in January of 2001, a few weeks ahead of the release of the twenty-nine volumes of
its second print edition (the seventh in its long history). That same month, another well-
known encyclopedia also went online for the first time: Wikipedia.
The two encyclopedias took very different approaches to lexicography and had different
priorities. Grove Music Online began as a digital mirror of its companion print publication—
the entire encyclopedia was digitised, with the exception of a few images for which online
publication permissions could not be obtained4. The site launched with 29,499 articles, the
product of several generations of scholarly work, with careful attention to provenance and
citation. Site updates were carefully planned and reviewed in a system built on experience
in print publication. Wikipedia began as a tool to aid collaborative work on Nupedia, an ex-
periment in open access publishing that sought to provide free, signed, peer-reviewed ar-
ticles written by experts. It launched with little more than a domain name and by the end
of its first month had acquired two hundred articles written specifically for the Web by
anonymous authors and a new mission to crowdsource knowledge and make the result-
ing articles freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Articles could be up-
dated at will by anyone with an account. Plans for signed articles and peer review were
dropped and Nupedia disappeared a few years later 5.
Grove made the bigger splash. Wikipedia’s debut was, at first, fairly quiet. But Grove
Music Online’s beginning was widely reviewed in music journals as well as in the main-
stream press. While some critics were optimistic about the new possibilities of the online
version, others were frustrated with the limitations of Grove’s first platform6. Much like
the editors of the first American supplement, the musicologists, librarians, and journalists
who reviewed Grove were not sure if the experiment was entirely successful. In the case
of Grove Music Online, much of the anxiety was directed at the technology itself and the

4. Beginning with the first edition: George Grove. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (A.D. 1450–1880).
London: Macmillan, 1879–90. 4 vols., ii, 3200 p. This edition is now fully digitised and available through RILM
Music Encyclopedias.
5. See Joseph Michael Reagle, Jr., “The Pursuit of the Universal Encyclopedia”, Good Faith Collaboration:
The Culture of Wikipedia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 17-44. See also, Wikipedia, s.v. “History of Wiki-
pedia”, last modified 10 December 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia (accessed
10 June 2016).
6. Lenore Coral offers a positive review in Notes 58, no. 2 (December 2001): 406–8. Linda B. Fairtile offers a
brief summary of reviews in her own balanced review in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 56,
no. 3 (Fall 2003): 748–54. See especially note 1.
216 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 63/3

way it interacted with the content. The biggest concerns were not with the actual change
in delivery model—from paper to computer screen—but in what that change suggested
about what matters most to us about scholarship. How had putting the dictionary online
solved some of the impossible tasks of lexicography? What others might it have created?
And how did this impact the field of music scholarship?
Some critics were worried that the online format represented if not the death of care-
fully maintained scholarly oversight, at least the onset of its decay. In a review in The
Musical Times from the summer of 2001, its publisher, conductor, and music scholar Peter
Phillips, raised a string of questions about the impact of the online format on the content
and quality of the dictionary:
[D]o people read long analytical articles on screen…? What happens to articles which are re-
placed? ...Will they simply disappear overnight never to be seen again? Or endlessly modified, so
that what once had scholarly integrity becomes a patchwork – death by a thousand updates? 7

Phillips also asked an important question about the role of Grove Music Online in general:
“Should Grove merely reflect the state of musicology, or should it also attempt to influence
the future course of scholarship?”8 This last one is the most critical, because its answer
defines the work that we—as lexicographers and as scholars—do. What is the role of the
encyclopedia in the digital age?
These questions were considered by my predecessors even before the launch of Grove
Music Online in 2001, and helped shape the program I now oversee. While the initial con-
tent set that made up Grove Music Online was identical to print, editors were already plan-
ning for new online-only articles, and new print publications on focused topics (an opera
dictionary, new editions of the dictionaries of American music and musical instruments
that had only appeared in print, a dictionary of early music that was not completed) de-
signed to round out the articles already on the site to better reflect the state of the field9.
The coordination of print and online publication is still a hallmark of Grove Music’s work.
Fourteen years later, as digital technology continues to change and offer new opportu-
nities, the Grove editorial board and its editorial staff at Oxford University Press are still
asking and responding to the question of Grove’s role in the digital environment. We have
been thinking even more than usual about these issues in recent months, as we are in the
process of building a new Web site to house the dictionary, which has afforded us the op-
portunity to reimagine the way Grove Music Online works. Prior to designing the new site,
we have done a great deal of research on who uses Grove and why, what they want to see
and what they do not, and how Grove interacts with other resources, both online and in
other formats, to build scholarship. And most importantly, it has made us consider how
Grove Music Online represents what we, as music scholars, value in our scholarly work,
what we are as a discipline, and where we are headed next. Despite our current focus on
very mechanical and practical details of the way the technology of the new site works—
we are currently up to our elbows in data modeling and taxonomy codes—the technolog-
ical object of the site is less of a focus than its role as the place where the audience en-
counters the content.

7. Peter Phillips, Review: “Better than None”, Musical Times 143, no. 1879 (Summer 2001): 77.
8. Ibid., 76.
9. The print edition was The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell,
eds. (London: Macmillan, 2001). It was published online at http://www.grovemusic.com in 2001 and in 2009 was
moved to http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com (both accessed 10 June 2016), where it remains today.
CREATION OF GROVE MUSIC ONLINE 217

The answers to Peter Phillips’s questions offer a possible barometer of Grove’s work
since the dictionary first went digital, a way to consider the point where technology inter-
sects with scholarship and the role digital encyclopedias can play in defining what musi-
cologists do as a field, and a measure of how successfully Grove has navigated the impos-
sible tasks of lexicography after digitalisation.

“Do people read long analytical articles on screen?”

The short answer is yes. It is possible to demonstrate this with usage statistics, one of the
most useful tools digital publishing provides. Our most viewed articles are among our
longest. But behind Phillips’s question lies a broader concern: do those who use the on-
line version of Grove read it in the same way that they did in print? The answer to that is
almost certainly no. For one thing, usage statistics do not make meaningful distinctions
between searching for quick information versus reading for understanding. It is possible
to see how long someone spends on the site and how many pages are viewed, but there is
no reliable way to know whether a page viewed for a long period of time is a person read-
ing carefully or someone who has stepped out for a cup of coffee.
Data question aside, several recent studies in the field of cognitive psychology suggest
we humans are not as good at dealing with the facts we read online as we are with those
we read on paper 10. And for researchers, the experience with print versus online is per-
haps especially different. In print, readers have to leaf through pages to find what they are
looking for, passing by other articles along the way. Online, that is not necessarily the
case. This is one of the reasons why online publishers tend to refer less often to Web site
“readers” as to “users”. Engaging with an online reference work is fundamentally differ-
ent from the experience of interacting with the same publication in print. While browsing
content is possible online, users are generally browsing lists of articles rather than the ar-
ticles themselves. When you see only an article’s title and the first few words rather than
the entire article, there is less material to catch your eye. It is easier to glance over many
articles very quickly, but it takes more work—an extra decision to explore, an extra click
of a link—to read something other than the thing you came for. Moreover, Web sites have
trained users to search, not browse. Users have become accustomed to the large friendly
search box in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. In the online environment, users
have come to expect keywords to take them exactly where they want to go. Users do not
have to look around. There is certainly something gained here—an efficient arrival at the
answer, the ability to pull together into a single set of search results related information
from disparate parts of the dictionary that might not be easily found in print. But there is
also something lost—the things you stumble on along the way, the articles alongside the
one you are looking for that you did not know would be useful to you.
One of the challenges of the new digital encyclopedia, then, is, how to encourage read-
ers to stay and explore, not just to find what they think they need and leave. There are a
number of ways in which to do this—designing a search experience that presents results
in a way that helps people looking for a quick answer find what they need, but at the same
time suggests other possibilities for study; designing tools as entry points that help

10. A summary of a number of studies appears in Ferris Jabr, “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The
Science of Paper versus Screen”, Scientific American (11 April 2015), http://www.scientificamerican.com
/article/reading-paper-screens/ (accessed 10 June 2016). Links to the studies discussed are included.
218 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 63/3

readers/users learn how to explore (and make them want to); and improving the ways we
link resources together. In a paper delivered at the IAML/IMS Congress in New York in
2015, “Telescopes, Times of Day, and Transits of Venus: Digital Collections and Connec-
tions outside Music”, musicologist Elaine Sisman traced the path of one of her own ex-
plorations, emphasizing the importance of browsing and digression in research. This ex-
ploratory approach is both valuable and relevant in the digital age, as it was in an era of
print alone, and requires that those defining the tools for such exploration to understand
what creative scholarship looks like. This is one of the biggest challenges we face and one
of our top priorities for the new Web site design.
And finally, Phillips’s question doesn’t consider the fact that reading is not the only
thing people do while visiting an online dictionary. Grove’s new Web site will allow us to
include audio and video recordings as well as the continued use of images and playable
musical examples, allowing authors the opportunity to illustrate their research in new
ways. The digital platform provides the opportunity to pull multiple modes of enquiry into
a single location, something print is not as well equipped to accomplish.

“What happens to articles which are replaced? Will they simply disappear? Or will they be
endlessly modified, so that what once had scholarly integrity becomes a patchwork?”
These questions are related, so they need to be considered as a group. In asking these
questions, Phillips is focusing on the single biggest difference between print and online:
the ability to update at will. Updating is the biggest project of Grove Music Online. It is
what the Grove editorial staff spends the most time on.
This is also the issue where Wikipedia and Grove most diverge. In crowdsourcing un-
signed articles, Wikipedia relies on the belief that with enough people watching (and serv-
ing both as a multifaceted knowledge base and also as a collective conscience), accuracy
will prevail. Grove has retained the traditional (and more time-consuming) process honed
in years of print publishing, of commissioning articles—signed by their authors—and sub-
mitting them for review, believing that our authority relies, in part on the transparency of
provenance and point of view, and the oversight of people whose work and intellectual in-
tegrity have been reviewed and approved by their peers. The two approaches serve dif-
ferent purposes, as do the two publications. Even as the Grove editorial board and staff
continue to improve the rate at which Grove updates (something our new platform will
help us with in allowing us to update monthly instead of three times a year), they remain
committed to the review process.
The third part of this question is the crux of the matter—in the online environment, the
concept of the edition is murky. Our Editor-in-Chief Deane Root has referred to Grove
Music Online as the eighth edition of Grove, but if you update continuously, how do you
know when your edition is complete? Does it matter? Is the very notion of an encyclope-
dia edition a relic of the print era?
The editorial board and I think it does matter. We do not consider the edition to be a
relic, but we think its profile has changed. Editions provide a type of oversight, curation,
and intellectual organisation that is not addressed in article-by-article updating alone. And
focused work on an edition creates urgency around a project, unifies a community of those
working on it, and helps give their work structure. Some types of scholarly development
happen best when a lot of people are working on the same thing together.
Moreover, the idea of an edition that is not quite finished is not new to digital publish-
ing. Even in the print era, editions could be fluid rather than static, as changes could be
CREATION OF GROVE MUSIC ONLINE 219

made with each new printing. Deane Root describes a copy of the first printing of the fifth
edition of Grove that lived in The New Grove office in London as follows:
Into each of its volumes had been pasted the articles from the second and subsequent printings
of the edition that contained changes from the first or intervening printings, and the volumes
were so swollen from the paste-ins that the covers were splitting on every volume. The “5th edi-
tion” contained thousands of changes over the course of its run11.

The staff and board of Grove Music Online, have been creating micro-editions—topical
projects within the content of Grove that we undertake with subject specialists. We have
been conducting these in a variety of formats—working with scholarly societies and with
editors we bring in ourselves, publishing both online and in print. One of our current proj-
ects is an update of articles on the music of East Central and Southeast Europe under the
direction of musicologist Jim Samson. This part of our content was originally planned as
part of the first edition of New Grove, which came out in 1980, and was revised for the sec-
ond edition in 2001. Given the dramatic political, economic, and social changes in that re-
gion since the articles about it were created and the new generation of scholars with more
global connections than their predecessors that has emerged, the field was in need of a to-
tal rethinking, not just a piece-by-piece revision, so we brought in area experts to help us.
In the process of working on such projects, we have learned that this approach does not
just make for better scholarship, but it also helps us to work more efficiently. The special
project editors provide us with support and oversight that we would otherwise also have
to be assembling piece by piece. The digital platform allows us the freedom to do this with-
out having to take on the added investment of a print publication.
Phillips’s other concern with article-by-article updating was display, specifically, what
happens to the old articles? In the days of print, consulting earlier versions was a simple
if cumbersome task: you simply tracked down the previous published edition of the book.
Online, the processes for dealing with previous versions of articles is far from standard-
ised. And Grove has some peculiar problems when it comes to versions, because of the
ways in which articles over time have appeared with major changes in various spin-off
publications (The Grove Dictionary of American Music, The New Grove Dictionary of
Opera, etc.) published by multiple presses (Macmillan, Norton, and Oxford). But we save
everything. You can see the date at which an article first appeared online and access al-
ternate versions of an article through the current version now, and will be able to continue
to do so on the new platform. Online publication allows us to make our written history
more accessible.
In some cases, Grove includes more than one article on the same subject. This situa-
tion occurs if the scope of the articles are sufficiently distinct and each article has some-
thing different to contribute to the knowledge of the subject. For example, Sabine Feisst’s
article on Arnold Schoenberg in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, which focuses
on the composer’s time in the United States and his influence on American composers, is
quite different than the article on the same composer in Grove Music Online, written by
O.W. Neighbour, which covers the whole of the composer’s career 12. Feisst’s article is still

11. Deane Root, personal communication (e-mail), 24 November 2015.

12. O. W. Neighbour, “Schoenberg, Arnold”. Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com
/subscriber/article/grove/music/25024 (accessed 10 June 2016). The article by Sabine Feisst has not yet been
published to Grove Music Online, but can be viewed in Oxford Reference at http://www.oxfordreference.com
/view/10.1093/acref/9780195314281.001.0001/acref-9780195314281-e-7442?rskey=gweebV&result=1 (accessed
10 June 2016).
220 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 63/3

in production for online, but once it is published, both articles will appear in a search for
Schoenberg with the scope defined. This represents a huge change in the concept of an
encyclopedia, one that puts more resources in the hands of readers. It is good for experi-
enced scholars, because they get not just facts, but multiple points of view. But it can be
challenging for those newer to the subject who are just looking for a quick answer or the
best place to start their research. It puts a lot of pressure on the search engine to ensure
that the article best suited as an entry point comes up first and on editors and librarians
to make sure less experienced users understand what they are seeing.
Phillips’s final and most critical question was not specifically digital, but more about
the role of the encyclopedia itself and whether it should be backward-looking or forward-
looking. The editorial board and I feel strongly that it should do both, and that it has,
in fact, been successful at both for many years. Representing past as well as future is an
issue of both content scope and access. With regards to scope, it requires that we are both
commissioning articles that cover areas of the field and approaches to them that are well
established, but also that we seek out areas that are developing in order to provide a place
for scholars to explore new territory, bringing together new ideas and sources in hopes
that future scholars will find them and do more with them. In addition, the Grove editorial
team must also actively and regularly scan existing content for possible historically and
culturally embedded bias, and consider ways to address it—e.g., how do we make sure we
are representing women composers and performers well, when they have historically
been poorly covered in academic writing? Focusing on representing the discipline’s his-
tory alone does not allow us to correct such omissions. As a dictionary with a title that
does not qualify its definition of music by geography or genre, we have a responsibility to
present a global view of music. Most of our current commissioning projects, including our
recent print publications, the second editions of The Grove Dictionary of American Music
(2013) and The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (2014), are focused on better rep-
resenting music from, and including more authors from outside the Western world and
outside the field of art music. Whether we mean to or not, the choices we editors make in
our commissioning imply weight, imply value. It is our responsibility as scholars to take
that seriously.
Broadening commissioning also has implications for access. We have learned, as we
work to increase the representation of international authors in Grove, that there are still
many scholars who do not have access to it. Just because a publication is digital does not
mean everyone can get to it. Not everyone has the financial or technological resources or
institutional access to Grove Music Online. And yet the work we do has a price tag, one
that is considerably higher than the all-volunteer labor on Wikipedia. We must work to ex-
pand access in a way that allows us to sustain our work. We already offer significant dis-
counts and free access in some regions through our Developing Countries Initiative13. And
in fact, we offer free access to Wikipedia editors to make sure that they are getting reli-
able information about the subject that matters most to us. We are currently working on
a discounting plan to help the growing class of music scholars without institutional access.
Developments in digital research are the natural trajectory of innovations and enquiries
begun in print. As in the print world, we lexicographers and the publishers still depend on
editorial oversight, and even more than before, we need to listen and respond to audience

13. Developing Countries Initiative, Oxford Journals, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordjournals
.org/en/librarians/developing-countries-initiative/ (accessed 10 June 2016).
CREATION OF GROVE MUSIC ONLINE 221

needs. We still need to help people gain access to what they need. We still believe integrity
and accuracy are of paramount importance. But digital tools have changed how much we
can do and how far we can reach, allowing encyclopedias not simply to follow but to lead
scholarship through the innovation that takes place when reaching beyond what is possi-
ble to what is needed.

English Abstract
Lexicography is by definition an impossible task, an activity built on ideals that are beyond reach.
But in wrestling with competing requirements, lexicographers have created innovations to dictio-
naries that have changed the way scholars work. This article examines two innovative moments in
the history of Grove Music—the publication of the first American supplement in 1920 and the debut
of Grove Music Online in 2001. It assesses their impact, considers the role of innovation in print
and digital environments, and projects paths for future growth to both dictionaries and the field of
music scholarship.

French Abstract
La lexicographie est par définition une mission impossible, une activité basée sur des idéaux inac-
cessibles. Mais devant faire face aux besoins de plus en plus exigeants, les spécialistes en lexi-
cographie ont dû faire preuve d’innovation au travers de dictionnaires, ce qui a eu pour conséquence
de modifier les habitudes des chercheurs. Cet article vise à étudier deux moments clés d’innovation
dans l’histoire du Grove Music: l’édition du premier American Supplement en 1920, et les débuts
du Grove Music Online en 2001. L’article évalue leurs conséquences, considère le rôle qu’à joué le
caractère innovant de ces 2 dictionnaires dans l’édition papier et numérique, ainsi que les projets
potentiels de développement, dans le champ de la recherche musicologique en général.

German Abstract
Lexikografie ist definitionsgemäß eine unmögliche Aufgabe; ein Unternehmen, das auf Idealen
beruht, die nicht erreicht werden können. Aber im Ringen um das Erreichen der Ansprüche haben
die Lexikografen in Nachschlagewerken Innovationen implementiert, die die Arbeit der Forschen-
den verändert haben. Dieser Artikel untersucht zwei innovative Umbrüche in der Geschichte von
Grove Music : die Publikation der ersten amerikanischen Ergänzung im Jahre 1920 und den Start
von Grove Music Online 2001. Er schätzt deren Einfluss ein, beurteilt die Rolle von Innovation im
Zusammenhang mit gedruckten beziehungsweise digitalen Umgebungen und entwirft Möglich-
keiten für das zukünftige Wachstum sowohl von Nachschlagewerken als auch von musikalischer
Forschung insgesamt.
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permission.