This is another case where a correct presentation can misrepresent the essential musical point. The examples of typical rhythms of ars nova and ars antiqua are oddly chosen: the purpose of ars nova notation was to accommodate easily a wider and more complex range of rhythm, and the ars nova example is both simpler and more limited than the one of ars antiqua. He is unrelentingly detailed and seemingly omniscient in his assault: This somewhat barbed benevolence doesn’t last. To read again that Beethoven introduced the trombone into symphonic music (to say nothing of the triangle and the big drum) should excite more sympathy than censure, and the idea that Schoenberg actually intended his Music for a film sequence as part of the repertoire for silent films, like the pieces labeled “Help, Help,” is too ludicrous to mislead, and too engaging to wish corrected. I am as delighted as the next reader to find Ravel’s Jeux d’eau defined as Water-games, as if it were not the play of fountains but a form of water-polo. True howlers and misinformation of course abound in all dictionaries, and the Harvard Dictionary of Music is no exception, but they are to be expected and even welcomed they complement the more serious parts of a work of reference as the satyr-play sets off the tragedy. Within a paragraph he expertly punctures any pretensions to authority or even usefulness the hapless tome might have:

The object of his philippic was the second edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music, and he laid into it with a will: “The Harvard Dictionary of Music offends against decorum on the first column of its first page.” Having set the terms of engagement, he lashes about him left, right, and center, starting with “the initial entry, A,” before pulverizing con abbandono and Abbreviations.

Charles Rosen’s first review in these pages appeared just over fifty years ago, in the February 26, 1970, issue, and it was an absolute stinker.

The classical style by charles rosen