It took Philip Morehead about four years to put together The New International Dictionary of Music, a new book designed to offer some competition to the mostly British, mostly classical music dictionaries already on the market. “Really, there’s no book quite like this,” he says. “It covers a very broad area–on a very superficial level. Since most music dictionaries are British, our aim was for it to be predominantly American. When there was a choice to be made–composers, performers–the American got the edge.”
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Working on a reference book comes naturally to Morehead, music administrator at Lyric Opera. His father, Albert Morehead, who wrote several volumes of Hoyle’s Book of Games, was for many years editor of New American Library’s Roget’s Thesaurus, Webster’s Handy College Dictionary, and World Almanac (“the second-largest-selling paperback in publishing history,” Philip notes). Albert died in 1966, and the books he’d worked on were turned over to his son, who now revises them on a ten-year cycle. “I’m usually at work on one of them. It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge–as soon as you finish it’s time to start over.”
Opening the 620-page volume at random, you find a wild variety: Marni Nixon (the singing voice of actresses in many movie musicals), the opera Nixon in China, node, noel, No, No, Nanette, noodling, Jimmie Noone (a jazz clarinetist). There are occasional odd lapses (shouln’t the entry for Les Noces note that Stravinsky wrote it?), but the book is fun to thumb through–the Grateful Dead share a page with Bach’s Great G Minor Fugue.
