Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians is a major reference work in the field of music, originally compiled by Theodore Baker, PhD, and published in 1900 by G. Schirmer, Inc. The ninth edition, the most recent edition, was published in 2001.
Leading up to the initial publication of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Baker had compiled and edited three editions of A Dictionary of Musical Terms — published 1895, 1896, and 1897, respectively, by G. Schirmer, Inc. [1]
The first edition, published in 1900, has 647 pages [2] plus an Appendix of 5 pages. It includes 300 vignette portraits drawn in ink, from portraits or photographs, by Russian artist Alexander Gribayédoff (possibly a pseudonym for Valerian Gribayédoff).
The fourth edition, published in 1940, has 1,234 pages. American and Latin-American musicians were more fully represented in this issue than in any English work of the kind in its day. [2]
The fifth edition was rewritten by new editor Nicolas Slonimsky, who would remain editor for several decades (up to the eighth edition in 1992) and have a considerable influence on the style and content of the dictionary. In preparing the fifth edition, Slonimsky expanded the size of the work to 1,855 pages and undertook a thorough review of the existing entries, expending considerable effort verifying and correcting biographical details such as birth and death dates by reference to archival sources. [3]
The eighth edition of 1992 revised 1,300 entries and added 1,100 new ones, coming to 2,115 pages, with an emphasis on expanding coverage of female and Asian musicians, multimedia composers, performance artists, and ethnomusicologists. The seventh and eighth editions were pre-titled The Concise Edition.
The ninth edition of 2001, billed the "Centennial Edition", was the first not to be a single-volume work, taking up six volumes, partly due to expanded coverage and partly due to somewhat more generous formatting to improve readability. The ninth edition included a focus on increasing coverage of popular music and jazz. [4]
G. Schirmer, Inc., publisher of Baker's since the first edition, was sold to Macmillan Inc. in 1969. [5]
Macmillan sold G. Schirmer, except for its reference holdings, to Music Sales Corporation of London in 1986. Schirmer Reference is currently owned by Gale, a division of Cengage Learning.
Edited by Theodore Baker (1851–1934)
Edited by Theodore Baker and Alfred Remy (1870–1927)
Edited by Nicolas Slonimsky (1894–1995)
Edited by Laura Diane Kuhn, PhD (born 1953)
Other editions
Nicolas Slonimsky, born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy, was a Russian-born American musicologist, conductor, pianist, and composer. Best known for his writing and musical reference work, he wrote the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns and the Lexicon of Musical Invective, and edited Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.
Eduardo Mata was a Mexican conductor and composer.
Harold Victor Bauer was an English-born pianist of Jewish heritage who began his musical career as a violinist.
Stanley John Sadie was an influential and prolific British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), which was published as the first edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Along with Thurston Dart, Nigel Fortune and Oliver Neighbour he was one of Britain's leading musicologists of the post-World War II generation.
Victor Nicholas Alessandro was an American orchestral conductor.
Theodore Baker was an American musicologist.
Barry Shelley Brook was an American musicologist.
E. Robert Schmitz was a Franco-American pianist, teacher, writer, editor, and organizer.
Mack Kendree Harrell, Jr. was an American operatic and concert baritone vocalist who was regarded as one of the greatest American-born lieder singers of his generation.
Adolf H. A. Weidig was an American composer who was born and raised in Hamburg. After extensive musical studies in Europe, including at the Academy of Music, Munich, he immigrated to the United States in 1892 as a young man.
Harry Newton Redman was an American composer, writer, and artist, born in Illinois. He wrote mainly chamber music, including two string quartets, and composed some songs. He was also active as a painter, and wrote a musical dictionary.
Heniot Lévy was an American composer, teacher, and pianist of Polish birth. A native of Warsaw, he trained at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin with Oscar Raif and Karl Heinrich Barth, both pupils of Tausig; the latter also trained Arthur Rubinstein. Lévy made his debut touring with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1898. He came to the United States in 1905, settling in Chicago, Illinois. Lévy taught at the American Conservatory of Music; he toured and performed with the orchestras of Chicago and Minneapolis. As a composer he wrote mainly chamber music, and he recorded a handful of piano rolls, including some of his own work.
Julia Frances Smith was an American composer, pianist, and author on musicology.
David Park McAllester was an American ethnomusicologist and Professor of Anthropology and Music at Wesleyan University, where he taught from 1947–1986. He contributed to the development of the field of ethnomusicology through his studies of Navajo and Comanche musics, and he helped to establish the ethnomusicology department and the World Music Program at Wesleyan. His recordings of Navajo and Comanche music led to the establishment of the World Music Archives at the University.
Édouard Jacobs was a Belgian cellist. He was a pupil of Joseph Servais, at the Brussels Conservatory. He played in the Weimar court orchestra for some years. In 1885 he succeeded his teacher as cello professor at the Brussels Conservatory. He also played viol da gamba in concerts of early music. Among his pupils was Fernand Quinet.
Ernest Charles was an American composer of art songs.
Florence Austin was an American violinist.
Oscar Rasbach was an American pianist and composer and arranger of art songs and works for piano.
Richard John Dufallo was an American clarinetist, author, and conductor with a broad repertory. He is most known for his interpretations of contemporary music. During the 1970s, he directed contemporary music series at both Juilliard and the Aspen Music Festival, where he succeeded Darius Milhaud as artistic director of the Conference on Contemporary Music. He was influential at getting American works accepted in Europe, and gave the first European performances of works by Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Jacob Druckman, and Elliott Carter as well as younger composers like Robert Beaser. Dufallo, as conductor, also premiered numerous works by European composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, and Krzystof Penderecki. He was a former assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and worked closely with Leonard Bernstein from 1965 to 1975. He also served as associate conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic.
Elizabeth Quaile was an American piano pedagogue of Irish birth.
Works cited