from the bookshelf: The Billboard Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music

Guess what? Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of this blog! (Like, yay, and stuff!) Since I haven't gotten around to writing up my thoughts on any more of the new albums I've acquired lately, I thought it would be somehow appropriate to write an all-encompassing sort of entry befitting this blog's overarcing, music-without-borders theme ... besides, it's high time that I wrote about another book anyway.

"THE BILLBOARD ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MUSIC"
by PAUL duNOYER
(Watson-Guptill, 2003)


Not being much of an actual reader, I tend to gravitate more toward "coffee-table" kinds of picture books and the more concise, browse-worthy reference volumes; this title fits neatly into both categories. It's quite literally everything (basic) you always wanted to know about all varieties of music, organized sensibly and attractively, with sections covering all the general genres (rock, jazz, country, etc.), each broken into chapters by subgenre (prog rock, jam bands, bebop, acid jazz, bluegrass, honky tonk, and countless others). Did you know there are almost a dozen types of reggae music alone? This book covers eleven of them!

Each chapter of this work provies a brief history of the subject genre, lists key artists in each field, provides entertaining and enlightening quotes from music luminaries, and even prints a bar or two of music from a typical work in each subgenre to illustrate its composition. As if that weren't enough, the book includes a glossary of musical instruments, and even a primer on how to read sheet music. At only 448 pages, it can't possibly go into a whole lot of depth, but it does cover an impressive amount of territory.

Since this book is strictly an encyclopedia and not a history of music, its coverage might seem a bit uneven -- dance music, which has been around for only a few decades, gets almost as many pages devoted to it as classical, which has existed for over three centuries. And then of course comes the categorization issue ... for someone like me, who knows how very blurred the lines between genres have become in recent years, the classifications of certain artists can seem somewhat arbitrary, if not downright inaccurate ... but that's a moot point to an extent, since specific artists aren't often mentioned except in short lists in the margins of each chapter, cited as rough examples of their respective genre.

The odd melange of items under the "popular and novelty" section can be a little irksome (Shouldn't Contemporary Christian be a part of the Gospel section? Why isn't Easy Listening at the beginning of the Pop section? And what exactly defines "Nostalgia"?), but that's a small complaint, given the wealth of information in the book as a whole. For anyone who's even a little curious about all the different kinds of music out there, or is otherwise unafraid to broaden their musical knowledge, this is a handy resource to have around and casually thumb through. Hey, music is a "continuum", after all.