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The Oxford Junior Companion to Music
An illustrated guide to all aspects of music - from classical to rock. Age group 12 plus.
- GenresMusicReferenceNonfiction
464 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1938
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 9, 2023
The best reference book for classical music, as any musician will tell you, is “Groves”. This encyclopaedic dictionary of music and musicians has gone through several editions since the 19th century. It began as 4 volumes in 1879, had grown into 9 volumes by 1984, during the time I started to use it in libraries and academic institutions, and kept on increasing in length to 20 volumes, when it was renamed as “The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians”. It eventually stopped at 29 volumes. Since many booklovers’ shelves are already groaning under the weight of their personal library, and keeping an annually issued copy of “Groves” up to date represents quite an expense, most people settle for consulting Groves in a library, whilst owning a different work. What they usually turn to is The Oxford Companion to Music.
Some of the same problems pertain, of course. Any art form such as Music is constantly evolving, so that any single book is bound to soon become out of date, with glaring omissions. My copy is from 1970: the 10th edition of the original The Oxford Companion to Music by Percy Scholes, which was first published in 1938, and edited by John Owen Ward. More recent editions are edited by Alison Latham.
The Oxford Companion to Music is one of the most famous music reference works of all time. It is a comprehensive encyclopaedic reference book providing definitions of musical terms, biographies of major and lesser composers, and synopses of opera plots. There are line drawings by Batt, and black and white photographs of portraits of key composers and instruments. It is a little idiosyncratic, as unlike most encyclopaedias (or even wiki!) the style is not scrupulously impartial, but reflects Percy Scholes’s viewpoint. A reader can feel Scholes’s enthusiasm for his subject, and how he wishes to bring it to everyone.
The book is meticulously researched, and covers the evolution of music throughout the ages, with special emphasis on the church. Entries on Jazz and popular music are limited, even bearing in mind that this is a 1970 edition, and the work is extremely culturally biased. However, there are interesting entries on 20th century classical music and composers, as well as oddities such as synaesthesia. You can swing from an article about Sir Michael Tippett or Alexander Scriabin to one on Scots wha hae, tonic sol-fa, or Elizabethan madrigals. One glaring omission is that the article on birds and music totally ignores Messiaen! Perhaps he was not a favourite composer of Percy Scholes, but Messiaen is most definitely the composer most associated with this. Presumably he has been reinstated in the most recent edition. The short summaries of the lives of major composers are not likely to date, although some will fall out of favour, and others emerge as time goes on. I would also expect that later editions do not draw a tactful veil over the fact that many of the Romantic composers died from the long term effects of diseases such as syphylis. Percy Scholes’s book does, but then it is of its time.
The most recent edition of The Oxford Companion to Music was published in 2002. It is over a million words in length, and boasts that it is “the biggest, most authoritative, and most up to date single-volume music reference book available”. It draws on both the classic Oxford Companion to Music by Percy Scholes reviewed here, and the two-volume “New Oxford Companion to Music”, edited by Denis Arnold (1983), but has been brought up to date with entries for the 21st century.
Instead of one personal voice, this new edition edited by Alison Latham has many contributors. There are still comprehensive articles on composers, performers, conductors, individual works, instruments and notation, forms and genres. However the focus is broader.
The subjects covered include a wider field, such as 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. The book looks at the way music is performed and disseminated, providing comprehensive, accessible coverage of music in all its artistic, historical, cultural, and social dimensions. Entries range from brief definitions to in-depth essays on subjects such as politics, religion, psychology, and computers. It is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible source of information on all aspects of Western music.
There is also an online-only edition of The Oxford Companion to Music from 2011, with over 120 international contributors, and more than 8,000 articles. It has new and updated biographies, with a particular emphasis on contemporary composers; new terms; and improved cross-referencing. Its articles range from clear, concise definitions of musical ideas and terms, to extended surveys of musical forms and styles, covering virtually every musical subject within the Western classic tradition, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
The “Times Educational Supplement” calls The Oxford Companion to Music: “probably the best one-volume music reference book going”, but note the “one volume”. Nothing will ever beat Groves, and obviously that is now online too, and called “Grove Music Online”. In addition to the 29 volumes of “The New Grove”, it incorporates the four-volume “New Grove Dictionary of Opera” (1992), the three-volume “New Grove Dictionary of Jazz”, (2002), “The Grove Dictionary of American Music” and “The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments”. Altogether there are more than 50,000 articles.
“Grove Music Online” is regularly updated, and those who subscribe to it also receive the Oxford Companion to Music. If you want the latest articles, Grove online is your best resource, but for those who would like a one-volume work, I recommend trying the most recent edition of the Oxford Companion to Music you can afford. For many people it remains their first choice for authoritative information on all aspects of music. Revised and updated numerous times since 1938, it used to be invaluable for musicians. Many will feel attached to their copy, but personally, since the advent of the internet, I now feel it is less essential.
Some of the same problems pertain, of course. Any art form such as Music is constantly evolving, so that any single book is bound to soon become out of date, with glaring omissions. My copy is from 1970: the 10th edition of the original The Oxford Companion to Music by Percy Scholes, which was first published in 1938, and edited by John Owen Ward. More recent editions are edited by Alison Latham.
The Oxford Companion to Music is one of the most famous music reference works of all time. It is a comprehensive encyclopaedic reference book providing definitions of musical terms, biographies of major and lesser composers, and synopses of opera plots. There are line drawings by Batt, and black and white photographs of portraits of key composers and instruments. It is a little idiosyncratic, as unlike most encyclopaedias (or even wiki!) the style is not scrupulously impartial, but reflects Percy Scholes’s viewpoint. A reader can feel Scholes’s enthusiasm for his subject, and how he wishes to bring it to everyone.
The book is meticulously researched, and covers the evolution of music throughout the ages, with special emphasis on the church. Entries on Jazz and popular music are limited, even bearing in mind that this is a 1970 edition, and the work is extremely culturally biased. However, there are interesting entries on 20th century classical music and composers, as well as oddities such as synaesthesia. You can swing from an article about Sir Michael Tippett or Alexander Scriabin to one on Scots wha hae, tonic sol-fa, or Elizabethan madrigals. One glaring omission is that the article on birds and music totally ignores Messiaen! Perhaps he was not a favourite composer of Percy Scholes, but Messiaen is most definitely the composer most associated with this. Presumably he has been reinstated in the most recent edition. The short summaries of the lives of major composers are not likely to date, although some will fall out of favour, and others emerge as time goes on. I would also expect that later editions do not draw a tactful veil over the fact that many of the Romantic composers died from the long term effects of diseases such as syphylis. Percy Scholes’s book does, but then it is of its time.
The most recent edition of The Oxford Companion to Music was published in 2002. It is over a million words in length, and boasts that it is “the biggest, most authoritative, and most up to date single-volume music reference book available”. It draws on both the classic Oxford Companion to Music by Percy Scholes reviewed here, and the two-volume “New Oxford Companion to Music”, edited by Denis Arnold (1983), but has been brought up to date with entries for the 21st century.
Instead of one personal voice, this new edition edited by Alison Latham has many contributors. There are still comprehensive articles on composers, performers, conductors, individual works, instruments and notation, forms and genres. However the focus is broader.
The subjects covered include a wider field, such as 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. The book looks at the way music is performed and disseminated, providing comprehensive, accessible coverage of music in all its artistic, historical, cultural, and social dimensions. Entries range from brief definitions to in-depth essays on subjects such as politics, religion, psychology, and computers. It is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible source of information on all aspects of Western music.
There is also an online-only edition of The Oxford Companion to Music from 2011, with over 120 international contributors, and more than 8,000 articles. It has new and updated biographies, with a particular emphasis on contemporary composers; new terms; and improved cross-referencing. Its articles range from clear, concise definitions of musical ideas and terms, to extended surveys of musical forms and styles, covering virtually every musical subject within the Western classic tradition, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
The “Times Educational Supplement” calls The Oxford Companion to Music: “probably the best one-volume music reference book going”, but note the “one volume”. Nothing will ever beat Groves, and obviously that is now online too, and called “Grove Music Online”. In addition to the 29 volumes of “The New Grove”, it incorporates the four-volume “New Grove Dictionary of Opera” (1992), the three-volume “New Grove Dictionary of Jazz”, (2002), “The Grove Dictionary of American Music” and “The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments”. Altogether there are more than 50,000 articles.
“Grove Music Online” is regularly updated, and those who subscribe to it also receive the Oxford Companion to Music. If you want the latest articles, Grove online is your best resource, but for those who would like a one-volume work, I recommend trying the most recent edition of the Oxford Companion to Music you can afford. For many people it remains their first choice for authoritative information on all aspects of music. Revised and updated numerous times since 1938, it used to be invaluable for musicians. Many will feel attached to their copy, but personally, since the advent of the internet, I now feel it is less essential.
June 16, 2026
This is an excellent reference book, and one of the few reference books which has a personality behind it.
E.g. the article on Jazz: "Jazz is to serious music as daily journalism is to serious writing."
The articles are concise, to the point, and well written. I looked at the new edition of the Oxford Companion, which has bloated to two volumes, but it lacked in vigour where it professed to excell in rigour.
E.g. the article on Jazz: "Jazz is to serious music as daily journalism is to serious writing."
The articles are concise, to the point, and well written. I looked at the new edition of the Oxford Companion, which has bloated to two volumes, but it lacked in vigour where it professed to excell in rigour.
September 9, 2026
Useful for pre 21st century English music and especially English church music
April 6, 2011
The ninth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music, first published in 1955 and still under the control of the original editor, is authoritative, idiosyncratic and certainly of its time. A typical example of Percy Scholes’ writing style can be seen in the Preface to the original edition of 1938:
Following this preface will be found the long list of the many who have tried to save the author from, at least, the faults of his own ignorance or inadvertence, but should the reader chance to discover that the author is anywhere insufficiently saved he should not take it that the blame necessarily falls on those enumerated in the list.
A footnote helpfully tells us that In the present edition this long list, with its many additional names from the seven intervening editions, has been merely summarised. This circumloquacious tendency may appear to explain the nearly twelve hundred pages of this hardback, but in truth they are packed with detailed information and references. The detail includes entries on composers, styles, genres, countries, foreign musical terms, instruments, synopses of operas and much else. Interwoven are close on two hundred monochrome plates illustrating different themes, using old prints, photographs and diagrams.
The text is, naturally for its time, opinionated. The article on Jazz for example, while reasonably well-balanced in its analysis, can still offer displays of prejudice that one hopes would not nowadays appear in an authoritative work of this nature:
There was much that a cultured musician could enjoy in [Swing Music] were it not that the jazz convention still demanded a great deal of deliberate out-of-tune playing and of sour or harsh tone.
While largely superseded by seventy-five years of research and the general availability of internet resources, it’s still useful for its historical take on once-contentious issues, for obscure composers who rarely feature elsewhere now, and for its lovely composer portraits by Oswald Barrett (‘Batt’) of Bach and Schubert, Brahms and Liszt, Mozart and many more. The vigorous portrait of Beethoven ‘in middle life’ which now hangs in the Royal Academy of Music features as a frontispiece, the only one of the pictures in full colour and completed by the artist eight years before his death in 1945 at the early age of 53. When, as a teenager, I was given this volume by my parents the Batt illustrations struck me forcibly, particularly this one of Beethoven: Barrett aimed to research this composer
‘until I filtered out the very essence of the man and arrived at an aspect which must have been some phase of his existence as a human being, without any superimposed romance, legend or imagination. Then on top of this comes psychology…’
A relic of a bygone era when one man (and it usually was a man) could claim to be the repository of all useful information and opinion on any given topic without too much recourse to advisors and committees, the overarching principles of the one-volume ninth edition are to be found in the most recent incarnation of the Companion, according to the most recent editor, Alison Latham: ‘to be wide-ranging, to be complete in itself, and to be intended for a broad spectrum of readers’. However, ‘it become clear’, she says, ’that one person could not now be expected to command the breadth of knowledge and interest that allowed music historians of an earlier generation to cover the topic as comprehensively as had Scholes.’
At least Scholes’ verbosity had been retained. But it could also be said that the present reviewer, with a corresponding love of verbosity, is also a relic of a bygone era.
http://wp.me/p2oNj1-CY
Following this preface will be found the long list of the many who have tried to save the author from, at least, the faults of his own ignorance or inadvertence, but should the reader chance to discover that the author is anywhere insufficiently saved he should not take it that the blame necessarily falls on those enumerated in the list.
A footnote helpfully tells us that In the present edition this long list, with its many additional names from the seven intervening editions, has been merely summarised. This circumloquacious tendency may appear to explain the nearly twelve hundred pages of this hardback, but in truth they are packed with detailed information and references. The detail includes entries on composers, styles, genres, countries, foreign musical terms, instruments, synopses of operas and much else. Interwoven are close on two hundred monochrome plates illustrating different themes, using old prints, photographs and diagrams.
The text is, naturally for its time, opinionated. The article on Jazz for example, while reasonably well-balanced in its analysis, can still offer displays of prejudice that one hopes would not nowadays appear in an authoritative work of this nature:
There was much that a cultured musician could enjoy in [Swing Music] were it not that the jazz convention still demanded a great deal of deliberate out-of-tune playing and of sour or harsh tone.
While largely superseded by seventy-five years of research and the general availability of internet resources, it’s still useful for its historical take on once-contentious issues, for obscure composers who rarely feature elsewhere now, and for its lovely composer portraits by Oswald Barrett (‘Batt’) of Bach and Schubert, Brahms and Liszt, Mozart and many more. The vigorous portrait of Beethoven ‘in middle life’ which now hangs in the Royal Academy of Music features as a frontispiece, the only one of the pictures in full colour and completed by the artist eight years before his death in 1945 at the early age of 53. When, as a teenager, I was given this volume by my parents the Batt illustrations struck me forcibly, particularly this one of Beethoven: Barrett aimed to research this composer
‘until I filtered out the very essence of the man and arrived at an aspect which must have been some phase of his existence as a human being, without any superimposed romance, legend or imagination. Then on top of this comes psychology…’
A relic of a bygone era when one man (and it usually was a man) could claim to be the repository of all useful information and opinion on any given topic without too much recourse to advisors and committees, the overarching principles of the one-volume ninth edition are to be found in the most recent incarnation of the Companion, according to the most recent editor, Alison Latham: ‘to be wide-ranging, to be complete in itself, and to be intended for a broad spectrum of readers’. However, ‘it become clear’, she says, ’that one person could not now be expected to command the breadth of knowledge and interest that allowed music historians of an earlier generation to cover the topic as comprehensively as had Scholes.’
At least Scholes’ verbosity had been retained. But it could also be said that the present reviewer, with a corresponding love of verbosity, is also a relic of a bygone era.
http://wp.me/p2oNj1-CY
December 30, 2014
A good reference
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews