A New Penguin Dictionary Of Music

Music: an art form so vast that someone, somewhere, eventually decided it needed alphabetising.

A New Penguin Dictionary of Music by Arthur Jacobs is one of those reassuringly serious reference works from a time when knowledge arrived in dense, authoritative blocks of print. Composers, instruments, terms, forms, movements, operas, symphonies, and the occasional intimidating Italian phrase all line up here, ready to be consulted, clarified, and quietly admired.

This is not a book you read from beginning to end unless you have made some very particular life choices. It is a book you dip into, returning again and again whenever a piece of music raises a question you feel you ought to understand. What exactly is a fugue? Who was that composer? Why does this sound like that? The dictionary waits patiently, as dictionaries do.

There is a pleasing irony in trying to contain music—fluid, emotional, gloriously unruly—within definitions and entries. Yet it works. Somehow the chaos of sound is translated into neat explanations, and the listener is given just enough footing to feel slightly more informed, if not entirely less confused.

This fair Penguin copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books, has the sort of honest wear that suits a reference book. A little handled, a little softened, like something that has been consulted rather than merely owned. Ideal for musicians, students, collectors of vintage reference works, and anyone who enjoys the comforting idea that even the wildest art can, at least temporarily, be filed under A–Z.

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