Now, here is one for the annals of irony: I was browsing through my friendly
"neighborhood" Barnes and Noble (in a shopping mall, north of Boston) and saw a
volume from Oxford University Press, "The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music."
OUP is, of course, the publisher of Alec Wilder's classic "American Popular
Song." So I eagerly thumbed through to the W's to see what the entry on AW said
... and there wasn't any. I haven't consulted the non-concise version of this
compendium, but how "concise" do you have to be to include many composers of a
more pedantic reputation yet leave out Wilder? And from his own publisher, no
less. More proof, I suppose, that Alec's quest for obscurity was bizzarely
successful.

John Biderman