Jargon horrors
Peter Phillips
Oite of the most heartening realisations to have come out of the binge-laden atmosphere of recent days is that globalisation has led to highly specialised foodstuffs being much more widely available than they used to be. Paradoxically it appears that because the world has shrunk in the interests of people being able to sell me the same things everywhere in the world I can now buy other things wherever I am — like cru Camembert or Ortiz saltpacked anchovies — where previously I had to live near the point of manufacture to stand any chance of finding them. Specialisation has become big business in the food industry, as the ever-increasing number of farmers' markets in our cities has shown.
This news does not seem to have got through to those responsible for specialist music publications, at least not if they work for Oxford University Press. Twice in the last month I have heard of OUP publications — even profitable ones, like Early Music — being standardised in order to make them easier and cheaper to produce, without showing any sympathy for what had made those publications different from their rivals and therefore interesting in the first place. Presumably, the hope is that their existing readers will not notice the change, while all the standardising and streamlining will somehow yield millions more readers.
The foolishness of this attitude when applied to the serious and difficult business of writing about music is only rivalled by the jargon which one hears coming out of the mouths of the executives into whose unworthy hands the fate of these publications has fallen. The horror to me is that they should be employed by OUP while other perfectly profitable businesses, like Cambridge University Press or indeed Yale University Press, have not found it necessary to panic in this way.
The most egregious is the fate of Grove's Dictionary. Having been bought by OUPUSA, with all the usual promises about increased investment leading to the overhaul of its notoriously creaky website, we now discover that the man responsible for its future is a professional website marke teer. Evan Schnittman, whose website (www.schnittman.com) bears the banner 'Unified web strategies for your bottom line', is clearly not a musician. With all the 'strategic missions' he has undertaken and 'marketing models' he has designed I doubt he has had very much energy left for the niceties of updating articles on Palestrina, or even for making sure that the bibliographies of major composers are all present and correct. Nonetheless he is the vice-president and director of the online publishing division at OUP, which means he is the man in charge of Grove.
Not that his website tells us this. Indeed, perhaps troublingly, his website is not yet able to deliver what it claims it will soon deliver, but it does speak of things which make me uneasy: 'We can cost effectively create cleaner designs, more effective navi gation, and better user interfaces for any kind of professional website', while assur ing us that 'contextual marketing helps your media planners, marketing managers, and product managers distinguish between good deals and cheap deals, opportunities and waste. Contextual marketing analyzes the array of opportunities your marketers uncover and put them into the context of your customer.' No doubt it does, but the problem for Grove is that it needs to be looked after by sympathetic and erudite people who know why Grove exists.
The last edition of it, as everyone knows, was a job botched by executives from the same training ground as Mr Schnittman, and needs extensive revision. We have been promised investment to this end sev eral times now; what we are actually getting is the full-tilt marketing of something which could be, and once was, better.
The appointment of Mr Schnittman to this role begs a number of questions. All his expertise seems to be in working with online products. Does this mean that OUP do not intend to publish Grove again in print form? This is not official policy, and one which, if adopted, would finally finish off the whole thing. Unfortunately again, though, the printed version is evidently receiving as much of the benefit of Mr Schnittman's expertise as its actual con tents. Are Oxford still setting out to be an academic publishing house? Are they really this hard-up? I don't believe it; and I also don't believe that this way of thinking is necessary even in the strictest commercial terms, let alone in ordinary quality ones.
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