Encyclopedia or handbook of new music?

Looking over the publications of recent years, it is hard to shake off the impression that there is a kind of twilight of the gods in the traditional sectors of the music market - or at least the feeling of a "last call". On the CD market, it is the major labels that are virtually "emptying" their full archives in any form under ever new aspects and want to bring them to the public. The situation is hardly any different for publishers, who have been taking the good idea of encyclopaedias and handbooks to absurd extremes for years. This drive towards the encyclopaedic began more than two decades ago. Since then, not only composers and genres, but also individual epochs or areas have been covered accordingly - and one may ask oneself whether here and there the publisher's penchant for profit was not the father of the idea.

At the Lexicon New Music such an assumption is not immediately obvious. And yet one may be surprised when reading the introduction. Because the two editors (cleverly enough!) never tire of calling the "lexicon" a "handbook", which is exactly what it is. honni soit qui mal y pense. Thus, nine essays summarizing the subject matter (Themes, pp. 3-156) break through the persistent lack of clarity before moving on to the actual articles (Lexicon, pp. 157-635). But even these sometimes read like broader treatises in a small (better: large) space. Anyone looking for lexical information on individual composers of New Music, exemplary works, institutions or really musical facts will be disappointed. The unquestionably successful focus is rather on general orientation. Nevertheless, there are surprises - both in detail and as a whole: such as a hasty swan song to university musicology (p. 424), but also the serious reflection on humour or considerations on the canonization of the new. It is strange, however, how geographically all of this - with separate entries on Africa, India, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, etc. - revolves around the center, which is obviously included but unspoken.

Lexikon Neue Musik, edited by Jörn Peter Hickel and Christian Utz, XVII/686 p., € 128.00, Bärenreiter/Metzler, Kassel/Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-7618-2044-5