LEXICON OF MUSICAL INVECTIVE: A CRITICAL ASSAULT ON COMPOSERS SINCE BEETHOVEN'S TIME Nicolas Slominsky Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-32009-X £10.95

'Not a kind word in 296 pages! An Invecticon winds it up - sarcasms, nasty comparisons, metaphorical indignities'. Thus ran a review of Lexicon on its first incarnation of 1953. A second edition appeared twelve years later, its 27-page supplement adding more 'biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgments by musicians and reviewers'. Those words appear on the back cover of the present volume, which has added to a verbatim reprint of the 1965 edition a fresh introduction by Peter Schickele. That a new composition, whether by Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms or Berg, should be neither immediately appreciated nor understood is a familiar enough fact of musical life, but Slonimsky's particular concoction of contemporary criticism deliberately draws only on the most damning and often, with hindsight, ill-informed critiques. It's easy to be wise after the event, to smile smugly to ourselves when we read that Moritz Hauptmann could write 'Ich glaube nicht dass von Wagner ein Stück seiner Kompositionen ihn überlebt' ['I do not believe that a single composition of Wagner will survive him', p.222]. But the comment was written in 1849, well before Der Ring, Tristan, Die Meistersinger... (still, he had produced Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser).

If you are seeking a memorable musical bon mot but of a kindly disposition you must look elsewhere, perhaps to The Wordsworth Dictionary of Musical Quotations compiled by Derek Watson (Edinburgh: W&R Chambers Ltd., 1991). The Lexicon boasts a prose so wearyingly and uncompromisingly vitriolic that it is perhaps a book to be dipped into rather than read in sustained doses (a recommendation endorsed in the new foreword, p.x). It could be a welcome addition to the library for the self-same room in your abode that occasioned Max Reger's famous retort to a Munich critic: 'Ich sitze in dem kleinsten Zimmer in meinem Hause. Ich habe Ihre Kritik vor mir. Im nächsten Augenblick wird sie hinter mir sein' ['I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me'; see pp.9 and 139].

Slonimsky's original and imaginative conception extended to an Invecticon, a 30-page index of 'vituperative, pejorative and deprecatory words and phrases'. Not surprisingly, we have headings for 'atrocious dissonances', 'bestial outcries', 'chaos', 'death of euphony' and so on. With 'ugly' he gives up: we are advised to 'Look up practically everything in the Book, from Beethoven down', while under 'noises (animal, human, inanimate)' we can cross-refer to any one of 69 headings from 'babbling' to 'yelling', their general flavour typified by 'caterwauling', 'grunting', or 'regurgitation'. The Invecticon is not comprehensive. A Boston review of February 1896 has of Till Eulenspiegel by Richard Strauss: 'The tone-picture, with all its abnormal and hideously grotesque proportions, is that of a heavy, dull and witless Teuton. The orchestration of the work is sound and fury, signifying nothing, and the instruments are made to indulge in a shrieking, piercing, noisy breakdown most of the time' [p.181]. An unnamed critic writing six days later for a New York paper also describes the work's orchestration as 'sound and fury, signifying nothing' [p.182]. 'Sound and fury' is accorded an entry in the Invecticon, but only in the context of Copland's Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.

The author, intermittently composer, pianist, conductor, lecturer and editor, died in 1995 at the ripe old age of 101. Effectively, the cut-off date for material in the Lexicon was around the middle of the twentieth century, and notwithstanding Peter Schickele's new foreword the book contrives to preserve the image of an earlier era. This is partly down to the rather old-fashioned artwork and calligraphy of its cover, and to a suspect grade of paper, which shows premature signs of yellowing. The result prompts the analogy with a pair of stonewashed, pre-shrunk denim jeans. Jeans, so they say, are comfortable; whatever else this book is, comfortable it is not. And that, surely, was Slonimsky's intention....

Peter Syrus