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.

Musicological research on nineteenth-century music blossomed during the 1970s. The surge was solidified with the founding of the journal 19th-Century Music in 1977, roughly a year after the establishment of the Sonneck Society and a decade before the appearance of AmeriGrove I. During this decade, the journal published seven articles on nineteenth-century American subjects (all on the United States, not other American regions or countries). By contrast, the official journal of the Sonneck Society, American Music, published nearly twice that number between 1983 and 1986 alone. Although this simple metric has sociological explanations exceeding the scope of this review, it suggests that work on nineteenth-century music in the Americas stood at some remove from general musicological discourse in the Sonneck Society's early days.

In May 2014, then book review editor John Koegel asked if I wanted to be part of the team of eight scholars with varied interests and specialties to review the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter AmeriGrove II), edited by Charles H. Garrett (what a Herculean task!) and published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Specifically, John wondered if I would be “willing to review the coverage of American traditional music.” As one who has used and appreciated the first edition of this monumentally ambitious work, I was curious to see the updated edition, so the next day I naively wrote back, “This sounds interesting, and I'll take on the assignment.”

The eight-volume second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music is an extraordinary achievement, embodying the contributions of nearly 1500 scholars, many of whom regularly read and publish in the present journal. It was therefore with some trepidation, and a great deal of humility, that I accepted John Koegel's invitation to review the encyclopedia's coverage of twentieth- and twenty-first-century “art music.” The more I delved into this gargantuan task, the more impressed I became with the encyclopedia's scope, the high quality of writing, and the sensitivity to difficult conceptual issues in the field. (And as a side benefit, I learned about a host of people I'd not previously known.)

On the evening of March 8, 2014, I became the most envied person in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Marriott Heritage Ballroom (perhaps the whole of Lancaster County). For my own part, I snoozed. But there on the nightstand, my cell phone danced with texts of more energetic colleagues: “Sherrie, you won the Grove! Where the @#! are you?” It seemed I had hit the jackpot in the SAM 2.0 raffle. In (quite literally) the blink of an eye, I had gone from a run-of-the-mill scholar of American music with pretty much the same books on the shelf as others with my particular set of research interests, to one of the few people on the planet to own the entire eight-volume AmeriGrove II. In that same life-changing moment—as I learned the next morning—I had also become the person least able to politely decline John Koegel's invitation to contribute to this multipart review.