INTRODUCTION

Johnson is engaged in the impersonal task of compiling a dic-

tionary; but he has made that task personal to himself has rooted

himself in the centre of the work that is to be done, partly by the

length and arduousness of his labours but even more so by his

unreserved acceptance of his own destiny as an English man of

letters.

--John Wain, Samuel Johnson (1974)

The first Baker s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians appeared in

1900. Its editor, Theodore Baker, was an American, born in

New York in 1851, who went to Leipzig to do a dissertation

on Native American music. Returning to his homeland in 1890, he

worked for the New York publishing house of G. Schirmer, producing

not only the first edition of Baker s but a second in 1905, among other

books. Nicolas Slonimsky arrived in the 1940s to produce a Supple-

ment to the fourth edition, which appeared in 1949. Taking charge,

he published a completely revised fifth edition in 1958, a sixth in

1978, a seventh in 1984, and an eighth in 1991. Ever larger than its

predecessors, the last has 2115 pages with double columns; containing

approximately two million words, it weighs eight pounds. As a one-

volume compendium, it has no competitors and probably never will.

Some expository writers produce books; others favor essays. A

rare few excel at the art of the entry. What Nicolas Slonimsky

(1894-) shares with Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is the production