Music: Reference Resources

Covering over 1300 artists, this comprehensive and detailed reference source will be of great value to anyone researching art and its history. The dictionary is made up of alphabetically arranged entries for painters (such as Monet), architects (such as Aalto), and sculptors (such as Brancusi) from pre-Christian times to the present.

Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World's 'Locations' is the most authoritative reference work on the history and current practice of popular music ever published. It covers nation states and is organized according to continental regions. Each discusses the history, development and current practice of popular music in cities, districts, cross-border regions, nation states and diasporic communities around the world.

This title contains two major sections: 'Social and Cultural Dimensions' and 'The Industry'. The former contains many entries on social phenomena of relevance to the practise of popular music : entries such as class, deviance, fashion, gender and sexuality, love and courtship, politics, race, religion, spirituality, and youth. It also includes entries on three other sets of phenomena that provide contexts for the practise of popular music: institutions and practises that document popular music; the study of popular music; and stylistic and textual practices that are not themselves musical in nature.

As its title suggests, this book aspires to be at once a guide to the world of opera, prepared under the auspices of the Metropolitan Opera Guild (a “Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia”), and a compendium of information specifically related to the Metropolitan Opera, its history, repertory, and performers (a “Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia”). While intended to answer a wide range of questions about this international art form, its composers and librettists and their works, its singers and conductors, designers and producers, its terms and the places where it has been most notably practiced, the book also offers, where appropriate, greater detail about their Met-related aspects (and, as the first such book compiled in the United States in some years, also a more generally American focus).

An introduction to four hundred years of opera and its composers with recommended key recordings for the key opera singers.

The Faber Companion to 20th Century Pop Music has established itself as the classic reference work in this area. From Abba to ZZ Top, through Noel Coward, the Skatalites and The Stone Roses, this book covers the major players in the vast history of popular music in the twentieth century. With varied entries covering everything from bebop to western swing by way of psychedelic rock, Phil Hardy's indispensable book maps out a stimulating and informative cultural history of the century in popular music.

An incomparable guide to the thousands of characters, from humble artisan to lofty genius, who people the unfolding history of music, this volume brings together all the pertinent biographical information about composers, performers, music theorists, and instrument makers from the days of praise chants to the bop and pop of today. A long-awaited companion to The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, and compiled with the same meticulous scholarship and delight in detail, this biographical dictionary emphasizes classical and art music, but also gives ample attention to jazz and blues, rock and pop, and hymns and showtunes across the ages - with unusual care devoted to coverage of the twentieth century.

The New Penguin Dictionary of Music is the essential A-Z of some 1,000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a huge range of composers, and examines such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Written by an award-winning music critic, and blending scholarship with personal insight and opinion, this dictionary is both a pleasurable read and an invaluable and authoritative reference book for all lovers of music, whether amateur or professional.