This new edition of The Oxford Companion to Music is a comprehensive and authoritative reference work, which, like its famous predecessors, will be invaluable to both professional and amateur musicians, and general music lovers. A distinguished and international team of contributors covers a broad sweep of musical subjects, ranging from composers and performers to instruments and genres.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.