Dear Dorothy

Nicolas Slonimsky was born into a distinguished family in St Petersburg in 1894 and arrived in the USA in 1923. His legacy is one of a lexicographer of genius. He raised the acquisition of information to the highest level, all in a pre-digital age, and his publications were landmarks. Music since 1900 (1937, followed by further editions and supplements) has a wide scope and is not limited to major figures; he took over O. Thompson’s The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians in 1946 and it was here that he was shocked to discover many articles simply lifted from other dictionaries; from 1958 he made Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians into a reliable reference work, with most of its entries in his own idiosyncratic style. In 1945 he published a pioneering study, Music of Latin America (New York, 1945, 1949, 1972; Spanish trans., 1947), based on material collected during a wide-ranging tour documented in these letters to his wife.

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