The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Brass Instruments. Ed. by Trevor Herbert, Arnold Myers, and John Wallace

Summary, in English

Creating a work today that claims to be encyclopedic is a daunting task. In the age of instant access to online resources and the pervasive reach of Wikipedia, what purpose can an old-fashioned encyclopedia seek to fulfil? In the case of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Brass Instruments (part of an ongoing series of musical encyclopedias from CUP), the answer is evident after any casual conversation with the average musicologist, organologist, or composer: their general level of awareness, experience, and confidence with brass instruments will normally be significantly lower than with other instrumental families. Brass instrumentalists are, of course, not entirely blameless in this situation; in the predecessor to this work, the Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments (Cambridge, 1997), Simon Wills refers to ‘inward looking societies’ of brass players that have created ‘ghettos of interest’ (p. 176). This new book is a powerful attempt to bridge this divide, a highly ambitious undertaking to cover the usage of brass instruments across the world from ancient times to the present day in one volume. That such a project even came to fruition is indeed impressive; however, much like its open-sourced competitor, the resulting publication has great responsibility thrust upon it.

• Author: Jack Adler-McKean
• Publishing year: 2020-04-10
• Language: English
• Pages: 757-760
• Publication/Series: Music and Letters
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcz078
• Document type: Review
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Topic: Music
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 0027-4224