Monday, May 5, 2014

Wikipedia Trumps Grove!

In my writing for Examiner.com, my rule of thumb has been to use Wikipedia for quick convenience and Grove Music Online (which I can enter through a gateway provided by San Francisco Public Library) for authority. Yesterday, however, I happened to be attending the San Francisco premiere performance of Artur Schnabel's piano trio; and I felt that this deserved digging into some background material. Schnabel's Wikipedia page provided a generous biographical account with discussions of both his performing career and his efforts as a composer. Unfortunately, the piece performed yesterday was not included in the list of his compositions; and this led me to check his Grove Music Online entry. This turned out to be a skimpy two paragraphs by William Glock taken from the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music! I am not sure who at Grove decided that Schnabel was that insignificant, but I was glad to see that the anonymous musicologists who hang out on Wikipedia felt that he deserved more attention.

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