Hieronymus who?

Deane Root has been appointed editor in chief of the Grove Music programme at Oxford University Press. Professor of music and director of the center [sic] for American music at the University of Pittsburgh, he will, no doubt, bring to the post an impressive judgment, gleaned from his multi-roped, gleaming career as a professor, scholar and librarian. More importantly, it gives us the opportunity to trot out the Barlines top five questionable entries in Grove list again. It first appeared in the 19 July 2008 edition of Classical Music after we found some wildly inconsistent comment on standard subjects in the Oxford Music Online database. We felt a bit mean back then, and we still do, because, as Guglielmo Baldini would say, alla fine del giorno, Grove is our life blood – a constant fixture on the Barlines Firefox bookmarks toolbar, when blogs, cartoon strips, and Anime review podcasts come and go.

1. Esrum-Hellerup, Dag Henrik, composer for flute who was named after several small Danish Villages. Probably the most well-known spoof, we had assumed that it was a nihilartikel – a deliberate false entry inserted to reveal copyright infractions, but we have it on good intelligence that editor Stanley Sadie was not amused.
2. Baldini, Guglielmo. As above, from the 1980 New Grove – a long-running spoof before it was picked up by Grove, but some nice touches were added. The author’s name – Di Gennaro – for example, is the vulgar Italian version of the two-faced Roman God, Janus (thank-you Viola d’Odio). It is also said that the entry ‘Verdi, Lasagne’ was nearly sent to print in this volume.
   
3. Scott, John (i). Hearsay. Don’t take our word for it, but this early English organist may remind some who work in ecclesiastical circles of a more recent one.
4. Mango, Hieronymus. Likewise not confirmed as a spoof. It is in fact unlikely that a mischievous sub-editor would choose such a silly name, but all the other references to the 18th-century Italian composer we have found have, like 70% of the undergraduate music history essays in the UK, the unmistakable whiff of Grove about them. All of his operatic subjects (the complete mango) are duplicated elsewhere among his contemporaries.
5. Kathleen McMorrow, who reviewed the New Grove Second Edition for the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, insists that Burgas, a Bulgarian town the size of Warrington which sports one 800-seat theatre, has no place in the dictionary as, she says, ‘the closest accommodations are in Varna, 90km further north up the Black Sea Coast’. Finally, Barlines would like to spare a thought here for French academician Louis Bollioud-Mermet who lost out on being immortalised on the second spine from the left so that the legend on that volume would read ‘Back to Bolivia’. Also, tribute must be paid here to Mr David Fallows, author of Grove’s own article on spoof entries, for managing to begin each paragraph of his article on Gilles de Bins Dit Binchois with successive letters of the Franco-Flemish composer’s name.