The Oxford Companion to Music

by Alison Latham (Editor)

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 single-volume 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.

Genres: Music, Reference, Nonfiction, Classical Music

1448 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 1955

Reviews

[William Schram · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Oxford Companion to Music is a massive and comprehensive tome for all things Classical Music. When I say all things Classical Music, I don’t just mean that it covers famous composers, since it does that adroitly; the book also covers the instruments used in producing such works, it has various entries on musical notation, it has entries on large countries and how they relate to music, and finally, it has entries on the various eras that exist in Classical Music. So if you need information on the Baroque Era just turn to page 101. Do you want to know how the Early Americans saw music? Turn to page 1312 for all the information you need.

As I said, the book focuses on Classical Music, so it mainly covers composers and their works. Depending on how influential a composer was, they might have more than a paragraph of text devoted to them. If you are looking for several pages on Antonio Vivaldi for instance, you might want to look elsewhere, but if you need a lot of information on Ludwig Van Beethoven this book has you covered. It discusses his birth, his musical contributions as related to his increasing deafness, his eventual originality, and his three major periods of work. So it covers the major composers more heavily, but I don’t really know the requirements the editor put forth to have a larger amount written on a certain composer. Maybe if the composer had developed in their style or changed enough? As I said, Beethoven has an arc to his pieces. Then again, I could not imagine this book without long entries on Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven.

As a reference guide, this book is pretty difficult to beat. However, that leads to a weakness in my personal enjoyment of it. The book is a reference guide, that means it wasn’t printed to be read from cover to cover. You could do that if you wanted to, but this book works much better as something that you use to look up a term or instrument that you have never heard of. So if you were looking at some sheet music and found a term like ‘veloce’, or you were going to a symphony and heard that there was an instrument known as the euphonium, or if you have to do a report or essay on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then this is a good place to start.

[Lauren]

Going to see if I can read the grey entries, at least, by summer and @chq!