Humour
Two non-existent composers have appeared in the work:
Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup was the subject of a hoax entry in the 1980 New Grove. Esrum-Hellerup's surname derives from a Danish village and a suburb of Copenhagen. The writer of the entry was Robert Layton. Though successfully introduced into the encyclopaedia, Esrum-Hellerup appeared in the first printing only: soon exposed as a hoax, the entry was removed and the space filled with an illustration. In 1983, the Danish organist Henry Palsmar founded an amateur choir, the Esrum-Hellerup Choir, along with several former pupils of the Song School, St. Annae Gymnasium in Copenhagen.
Guglielmo Baldini was the name of a non-existent composer who was the subject of a hoax entry in the 1980 edition. Unlike Esrum-Hellerup, Baldini was not a modern creation: his name and biography were in fact created almost a century earlier by the renowned German musicologist Hugo Riemann. The New Grove entry on Baldini was supported by a fictional reference in the form of an article supposedly in the Archiv fur Freiburger Diozesan geschichte. Though successfully introduced into the encyclopaedia, Baldini appeared in the first printing only: soon exposed as a hoax, the entry was removed.
Seven parody entries, written by contributors to the 1980 edition, and full of musical puns and dictionary in-jokes, were published in the February 1981 issue of The Musical Times (which was also edited by Stanley Sadie at the time). These entries never appeared in the dictionary itself and are:
- Brown, 'Mother' (Mary) (b 1550; d Wapping 3 Jan 1611)
- Ear-flute
- Hameln
- Khan't, Genghis (Tamburlaine) (b Ulan Bator, c1880; d New York, 22 Nov 1980)
- Stainglit (Nevers), Sait d'Ail (fl Middle Ages) – i.e. 'Stanley Sadie', following the example of Luis van Rooten
- Toblerone
- Verdi, Lasagne (b Bologna, 10 Oct 1813; d Naples, 15 March 1867)
Read more about this topic: The New Grove Dictionary Of Music And Musicians
Famous quotes containing the word humour:
“The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“Right as the humour of melancholy
Causeth full many a man in sleep to cry
For fear of blacke bears, or bulles black,
Or elles blacke devils will them take.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)