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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2015
Cue: Lalo Schifrin's “Theme from Mission: Impossible.” If the return of Tom Cruise, explosions, and fast-paced chases to the screen this summer is any indication, Americans (and the global audience for Hollywood action film) love an impossible mission. Certainly, U.S. music scholars do. Reading the eight reviews of the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter, AmeriGrove II), edited by Charles Garrett (with a large and distinguished editorial team and nearly fifteen hundred contributors), as well as dipping frequently into its entries, we were deeply impressed both by the quality and ambition of the eight-volume, 5.4 million-word encyclopedia and by the “gargantuan” task (as Leta Miller puts it) with which the reviewers had been charged.
1 Crawford, Richard, “Amerigrove's Pedigree: On The New Grove Dictionary of American Music,” College Music Symposium 27 (1987): 174–75Google Scholar, quoted by Berndt Ostendorf and Wolfgang Rathert in their review of AmeriGrove II in this issue.
2 Many thanks to John Koegel for envisioning this multipart review and engaging in the persuasive tour de force involved in recruiting this outstanding team of reviewers. Thanks also to Karen Ahlquist for arranging to publish all of the reviews in a single issue. Finally, our deep appreciation to all the reviewers for taking on this tremendous task and carrying it out so well!
3 Stéfan Sinclair, Geoffrey Rockwell, and the Voyant Tools Team, Voyant Tools (2012) (web application), http://docs.voyant-tools.org. Our ability to carry out this analysis was enabled by Anna-Lise Santella of Oxford University Press, who facilitated our access to text files for both editions of AmeriGrove. We also received significant support in facilities and expertise from the Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University and its administrative director, Dale Askey. A special thank you to Dr. Paige Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the centre, whose expertise and helpfulness were invaluable throughout our research process.
4 Ramsay, Stephen, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 16–17, 78–79Google Scholar. Many thanks to Dr. Jennifer Askey for recommending this book.
5 “Chamber” fell from 2474 occurrences in AmeriGrove I to 2195 in AmeriGrove II, but “symphony” grew from 1289 to 2395.