The Oxford Companion To Music

Description

The Oxford Companion to Music is one of the most famous music reference works of all time. This invaluable Companion now reappears in a completely new edition. Over a million words in length, it is the biggest, most authoritative, and most up to date single-volume music reference book available. The new edition draws on both the classic Oxford Companion to Music by Percy Scholes, first published in 1938, and the two-volume New Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Denis Arnold (1983), but is thoroughly revised and reimagined for the 21st century. Alison Latham has assembled a distinguished team of over 120 international contributors, bringing their distinctive voices to an exceptionally broad sweep of musical subjects ranging from composers, performers, conductors, individual works, instruments and notation, and forms and genres, to music scholarship and aesthetics, music education, broadcasting and publishing, all aspects of music theory, and performance practice, as well as jazz, popular music, and dance. Entries range from brief definitions to in-depth essays on subjects such as politics, religion, psychology, and computers. This is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible source of information on all aspects of Western music.

Author description

Alison Latham is a highly experienced editor of music reference works. She was a member of the editorial team for the multi-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), assistant editor of The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music (1988, reprinted 1994), co-editor (with Stanley Sadie) of The Cambridge Guide to Music and Brief Guide to Music (1994) and (with Roger Parker) of Verdi in Performance (2001). She was co-editor of The Musical Times from 1977 to 1988. From 1989 to 2000 she was Publications Editor at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and editor of the libretto series Royal Opera Texts. She now works as a freelance writer and editor on music.