Music before 1800. Issue 4 (10th November 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: GOODMAN, GLENDA
• Is Part Of: Journal of the Society for American Music. Volume 9:Issue 4(2015)
• Page Start: 470
• Page End: 476
• Publication Date: 2015-11-10
• Subjects: Music -- United States -- Periodicals; Music -- Periodicals; 780.973
• DOI: 10.1017/S1752196315000395
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1752-1963

Abstract

Abstract : Here are two important lessons about information control: first, there is always "too much to know." This phrase comes from historian Ann Blair, who argues in her book of the same title that in the early modern period the attempt to gather and systematize knowledge was already regarded as a hubristic task. Second, information control is inherently ideological. Think of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's magisterial Encyclopédie (1751–77), which in thirty-two volumes attempted to map the world of knowledge and, in doing so, determined what counted as "knowable" and what was ruled out. Equally ambitious and ideological was Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (advertised 1800, completed 1828), a monumental undertaking aimed at codifying a national language for the new United States. Both of these lessons apply to the pre-1800 articles in AmeriGrove II, and, indeed, to the eight-volume dictionary as a whole. Confronted with the problem of "too much to know, " AmeriGrove II inherits the optimism of its Enlightenment ancestor and endeavors to expand systematically the knowable world of U.S. music history, yet it leaves much uncovered. Moreover, like Webster's dictionary, the focus of AmeriGrove II is confidently national. Whether it echoes Webster's nationalistic stance is a more complicated question, particularly for the articles on pre-1800 topics.