True howlers and misinformation of course abound in all dictionaries, and the Harvard Dictionary of Music is no exception, but they are to be expected and even welcomed; they complement the more serious parts of a work of reference as the satyr-play sets off the tragedy. I am as delighted as the next reader to find Ravel’s Jeux d’eau defined as Water-games, as if it were not the play of fountains but a form of water-polo. To read again that Beethoven introduced the trombone into symphonic music (to say nothing of the triangle and the big drum) should excite more sympathy than censure, and the idea that Schoenberg actually intended his Music for a film sequence as part of the repertoire for silent films, like the pieces labeled “Help, Help,” is too ludicrous to mislead, and too engaging to wish corrected. Charles Rosen, 1970
