"James Tobin" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> When you finish this intensely interesting and indeed worthwhile
> book I think you may find that it is not really balanced.  At any
> rate, what I was trying to get at was Ross' own aesthetic preferences,
> which have to be inferred by his emphases.  Like the good journalist
> he is, he does not express these openly.

I shudder to think how many composers represented on my shelves are not
found in Ross's book.  He wasn't trying to achieve any sort of balance,
but telling a dramatic story, and he couldn't put everybody in.  I don't
know if his choices infer anything about his own preferences.

When I worked for five years in the 1980s on the Penguin Encyclopedia
of Popular Music, somewhere between 3 and 4 thousand A-Z entries (plus
a hefty index) wasn't going to be enough.  I couldn't put in everybody
who ever made a record, and no matter who I left out, somebody was going
to be sore at me!  I put plenty of people in for whom I personally had
no use, because they had sold lots of records, and therefore would have
to be found in such a reference book.

Donald

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