Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 3.djvu/349

 ii s. m. MAY e, mi.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Musical dictionaries are poor in minor biographies both of the dead and the living. I could mention the name of an eminent living musician who has published upwards of 300 musical pieces, but only 250 of his compositions have got to our National Library. His name is in ' Who 's Who,' but not in Grove, who expressly mentions that he does not give minor biographies : " No attempt has been made to include the name of every musician " (vol. i. p. vi, 1904). I regret this. To have included them would not have required a hundred extra pages, and that number would nave made the last volume the same size as the previous volumes.

Grove has no notice of Wilson, though his Dictionary is mentioned in vol. i. (1904), p. 698, in an article by M. Gustave Chouquet of Paris. Chouquet notices Wilson's book in a very cursory manner, without sufficient allowance for the time at which it was pub- lished, when there were very few musical dictionaries, and not one eq\ial to Wilson's. In fact, I have only been able to find the following :

(1) By Thomas Busby (b. 1755, d. 1838), entitled ' A Dictionary of Music,' 1786, or ' A New and Complete Dictionary,' &c. (Watt gives both titles). This work went through many editions.

Watt's 'Bibliotheca Britannica ' has (2) Busby in conjunction with Dr. Arnold. He also gives (3) ' A New Musical Dictionary,' 1801, 3rd ed., 1812 (in the "subjects" volume called ' A New and Complete,' &e.). Busby in addition published (4) 'A Com- plete Dictionary of Music ' (1800?). The first and the fourth editions only are in the National Library.
 * The Musical Dictionary ' as being by

There is great confusion in the above, which an inspection of the various editions will enable a person to unravel. Much difficulty is caused by the loose way of citing titles.

Perhaps Busby's is the one that J. A. Hamilton edited as (5) 'A Dictionary of 3,000 Musical Terms,' 1836, 3rd ed., 1840. It is not mentioned by Grove (1906), who has a shorter notice of Hamilton (b. 1785, d. 1845) than the ' Dictionary of National Biography.'

Then we have (6) 'An Encyclopaedia or Dictionary of Music ' by J. F. Danneley (b. 1786, d. 1836), professor of music, 1825. This is a dictionary of terms, and not an encyclopaedia.

The next is (7) 'A Musical Manual or Technical Directory ' by Thomas

Busby, 1828. The half-title reads ' A Dic- tionary of Music,' which is what the book really is.

In none of these is the title of any previous dictionary given.

Wilson calls himself " esquire," to which, I presume, we may pay more attention for the year 1835 than in the present day. The addition is also useful as showing his sex. Moreover I judge from it that he was an amateur and not a professional musician, or he would have said so, as Danneley does. I infer that he was a man of independent means. The latter idea is in some way supported by his book being printed and published at Islington, from which I infer that he paid for it himself, and not the nominal London publisher Sherwood, who would have put his name first if it had been published at his expense.

The ideas in the preface seem to me to be well expressed. He says : " Few Sciences have been so little indebted to the Lexi- cographer as Music. In Dictionaries pro- fessedly devoted to the Arts, not one musical- term in a hundred is inserted ; of these very few are correct." They tell us that " a trumpeter plays on the trumpet, a violinist on a violin, &c." " These are not secrets worth knowing." Like the preface, the introduction seems to me to be the work of a ready writer who thoroughly understood his subject. The Dictionary must have been a work of much labour, for the writer desired to do better than had been done before.

On 4 November, 1871, I pointed out in ' N. & Q.' (4 S. viii. 379) that a bibliography of encyclopaedias was a desideratum. I can safely say there is not one now, or I should find it enumerated in Mr. W. P. Courtney's * A Register of National Biblio- graphy ' (reviewed 10 S. iii. 378). I sug- gested the want of a better encyclopaedia of imisic than Schuberth's * Miniature Ency- clopaedia ' in The Musical Standard in 1864 (see vol. ii. pp. 223 and 252), my letter being followed by one from the late B. St. John Baptist Joule (b. 1817, d. 1895), who said he had been through The Gentleman's Maga- zine in search of musical biographies. This want has in a great measure been supplied by Sir George Grove's excellent Dictionary ; but notwithstanding all the modern pub- lications, we still lack a biographical dic- tionary of musicians. Barwick's * Pocket Remembrancer of History and Biography,' with its 15,000 names to 1903, gives dates' of death of all the more important musicians only.