The Oxford Companion to Music is a music reference book in the series of Oxford Companions produced by the Oxford University Press. It was originally conceived and written by Percy Scholes and published in 1938. Since then, it has undergone two distinct rewritings: one by Denis Arnold, in 1983, and the latest edition by Alison Latham in 2002. It is "arguably the most successful book on music ever produced" (Wright, p. 99).
The first edition, a single-volume work, was produced in 1938, edited by Percy Scholes, and was written almost entirely by him alone.
The second edition, published 1939 includes a 64-page categorised List of books about music in the English language by Scholes.
Wherever possible, Scholes tried to use primary source material, rather than summarizing other people's work. His preface to the First Edition describes how he played and read through thousands of sheets music, as well as reading thousands of concert programs and studying "old literature and long-bygone musical journals". From this research, he produced about fifty-five volumes of notes. Each of these was devoted to a separate branch of musical knowledge. He then sought peer review of each of these volumes with specialists in the particular branch of musical knowledge. Finally, these volumes were broken up and re-constituted in alphabetical order.
Scholes' intention was to produce a work relevant to a wide range of readers, from the professional musician to the concert-goer, "gramaphonis t", or radio-listener. His work was aimed at a reader for whom it "will neither be beyond the scope of his pocket nor embarrass him by a manner of expression so technical as to add new puzzles to the puzzle which sent him to the book". The result was a work which was highly accessible to the general reader, as well as being useful for the specialist.
While scholarly and well-researched, Scholes' style was also sometimes quirky and opinionated. For instance, his original articles on some of the twentieth-century composers were highly dismissive, as were his articles on genres such as jazz. His entry on the can-can concluded "Its exact nature is unknown to anyone connected with this Companion."
He produced several revisions prior to his death (in 1958), with the last full revision being the 9th edition in 1955. The Tenth Edition, published in 1970, was a revision of Scholes' work by John Owen Ward. Ward considered it "inappropriate to change radically the characteristic rich anecdotal quality of Dr. Scholes' style." Although he brought some of the articles up to date, he left much of Scholes' distinctive work intact.
A distinctive feature of this Companion is a series of "imaginative" portraits of composers created by the artist Oswald Barrett (known as "Batt"). These consist of engravings (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Byrd, Chopin, Elgar, Handel, Haydn, Liszt, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner), [1] and a frontispiece which is a colour reproduction of an oil painting of "Beethoven in Middle Life", described by Scholes as "the artist's personal gift to the volume" (see the Preface to the First Edition).
In 1983 a wholly revised two-volume work, titled The New Oxford Companion to Music, was introduced. This was edited by Denis Arnold who made extensive use of other specialist contributors, some 90 in all. The work was significantly broader in coverage than Scholes' original (there was for instance a perceptive article on Bob Dylan), and is the most extensively illustrated of the three versions.
Arnold expressed his intention of adhering to Scholes’ principles and indeed included much of Scholes’ material in the new work. Nevertheless, he cut out much of the personal opinion and quirkiness which was characteristic of the original. For instance, he substantially increased the coverage of female composers and performers, who were almost totally absent from Scholes' work.
There were no further revisions of this version, probably due to its relative unpopularity and Arnold's own early death in 1986.
In 2002, a third work was produced. This one, edited by Alison Latham, goes back to the original title and to the single-volume format.
Latham assembled her own team of over 120 contributors, some of whom had contributed to the prior (Arnold) edition, and others drawn from her own previous editing work (for example on the Grove Concise Dictionary of Music). This edition consists of some 7400 articles and aims to bring the work up-to-date: for example, in its coverage of areas such as electronic music and computers.
The 2002 revision is more current, handier and more affordable than its predecessor.[ vague ] However, it abridges the text and eliminates most of the illustrations.
The text of the 2002 edition can be accessed online via Oxford Music Online, which is also a portal for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . As well as being available to individual and educational subscribers, it is available for use by members of many libraries worldwide. [2]
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was an Italian composer, choirmaster and string player. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theory of music. Earlier editions were published under the titles A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians; the work has gone through several editions since the 19th century and is widely used. In recent years it has been made available as an electronic resource called Grove Music Online, which is now an important part of Oxford Music Online.
Johann Christian Bach was a German composer of the Classical era, the eighteenth child of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the youngest of his eleven sons. After living in Italy for several years, Bach moved to London in 1762, where he became known as "the London Bach". He is also sometimes known as "the English Bach", and during his time spent living in the British capital, he came to be known as John Bach. He is noted for playing a role in influencing the concerto styles of Haydn and Mozart. He contributed significantly to the development of the new sonata principle.
A woodblock is a small slit drum made from a single piece of wood. The term generally signifies the Western orchestral instrument, though it is descended from the Chinese woodblock. Alternative names sometimes used in ragtime and jazz are clog box and tap box. In orchestral music scores, woodblocks may be indicated by the French bloc de bois or tambour de bois, German Holzblock or Holzblocktrommel, or Italian cassa di legno.
Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was a Dutch composer, organist, and pedagogue whose work straddled the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Baroque eras. He was among the first major keyboard composers of Europe, and his work as a teacher helped establish the north German organ tradition.
In music, a canon is a contrapuntal (counterpoint-based) compositional technique that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration. The initial melody is called the leader, while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower. The follower must imitate the leader, either as an exact replication of its rhythms and intervals or some transformation thereof. Repeating canons in which all voices are musically identical are called rounds—"Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "Frère Jacques" are popular examples.
The sarabande is a dance in triple metre, or the music written for such a dance.
In music, a subject is the material, usually a recognizable melody, upon which part or all of a composition is based. In forms other than the fugue, this may be known as the theme.
Eugène Arnold Dolmetsch, was a French-born musician and instrument maker who spent much of his working life in England and established an instrument-making workshop in Haslemere, Surrey. He was a leading figure in the 20th-century revival of interest in early music.
Stanley John Sadie was an influential and prolific British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), which was published as the first edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Along with Thurston Dart, Nigel Fortune and Oliver Neighbour he was one of Britain's leading musicologists of the post-World War II generation.
Hans Erich Apostel was a German-born Austrian composer of classical music.
Gottfried Michael Koenig was a contemporary German-Dutch composer.
Percy Alfred Scholes PhD OBE was an English musician, journalist and prolific writer, whose best-known achievement was his compilation of the first edition of The Oxford Companion to Music. His 1948 biography The Great Dr Burney was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
The Musical Times is an academic journal of classical music edited and produced in the United Kingdom and currently the oldest such journal still being published in the country.
Denis Midgley Arnold was a British musicologist.
Opéra-ballet is a genre of French Baroque lyric theatre that was most popular during the 18th century, combining elements of opera and ballet, "that grew out of the ballets à entrées of the early seventeenth century". It differed from the more elevated tragédie en musique as practised by Jean-Baptiste Lully in several ways. It contained more dance music than the tragédie, and the plots were not necessarily derived from classical mythology and allowed for the comic elements, which Lully had excluded from the tragédie en musique after Thésée (1675). The opéra-ballet consisted of a prologue followed by a number of self-contained acts, often loosely grouped around a single theme. The individual acts could also be performed independently, in which case they were known as actes de ballet.
Moresca (Italian), morisca (Spanish), mourisca (Portuguese) or moresque, mauresque (French), also known in French as the danse des bouffons, is a dance of exotic character encountered in Europe in the Renaissance period. This dance usually took form of medieval wars in Spain between Moors and Christians. Elements of moresca include blackening of the face, bells attached to the costumes and, in occasions, men disguised as women to portray fools. An example of the moresca can be seen in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 production of Romeo and Juliet, which has a scene with both, Juliet and Romeo dancing the moresca in a circle.
Adolf H. A. Weidig was an American composer who was born and raised in Hamburg. After extensive musical studies in Europe, including at the Academy of Music, Munich, he immigrated to the United States in 1892 as a young man.
Peter Gammond was a British music critic, writer, journalist, musician, poet, and artist.
Oswald (Charles) Barrett (1892–1945) was an English artist and illustrator. He also signed his work with the pseudonym "Batt". He produced a wide range of drawings, illustrations and paintings, though is best known for biographical portraits of famous composers.