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From the Preface: THE book herewith offered the musical public has one aim, which is utility-practical use. While there is already a considerable number of small dictionaries, the publishers of the present work believe that there is still room for another, which, as far as possible, should combine the advantages of all the best ones and avoid their prominent defects, such as obsolete and often incorrect phraseology, reduplication of terms, redundancy of obsolete terms, and the like. Accordingly, the work was committed to the present editors, who have agreed upon the selection of terms and information following. Its special points of usefulness are these: 1. The vocabulary, while not so large as two others, is more complete and modern, aggregating nearly 10,000 terms. 2. The definitions have been amended where necessary, and same hundreds of important topics have been entirely rewritten, such as Accent, Consonance, Dissonance, Temperament, and the like. 3. Pronunciations have been affixed to all terms from foreign languages. These are very necessary by reason of the totally different principles of pronunciation which govern terms from the French, German and Italian respectively. The pronunciations are approximate only, but they will be found of great assistance. 4. At the beginning, in place of an Introduction, we have placed a general view of Musical Notation, not alone the topics which ordinarily are included under that head, but also those rarer matters of the signs employed in different departments of manuscript music and score-writing. As far as we have been able to collect them, this summary includes every sign liable to be met with by the student, no matter in what department he may work. 5. At one point the work is not consistent with itself. In several of the small works now before the public, long lists of terms are found beginning with the German article die, a principle of lexicography as false as would be the inclusion of a series of phrases in an English dictionary beginning with the. Accordingly these have been relegated to their proper places, under their leading terms. In other cases, however, entire phrases have been included under their leading word, such as those beginning with Allegro, Andante, etc., because these combinations are of constant occurrence, and the complex term possesses an individual significance which is not in all cases exactly the same as the sum of its elements. 6. A large amount of editing has been devoted to rectifying the faulty phraseology of former definitions. We cannot hope to have fully succeeded at this point. Careless habits of speech (and of thought as well) retain in colloquial use such erroneous expressions as note for tone, bar for measure, time for measure, tone and semitone as names of interval, and the like, until scientific musicians pass over such expressions without noticing their defective and misleading form. It is altogether likely that many such examples still remain in the present volume, despite the care that has been taken to remove them.

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