The Oxford Dictionary of Music (6th ed.)

RR 2013/110 The Oxford Dictionary of Music (6th ed.) Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne Kennedy; edited by Tim Rutherford-Johnson Oxford University Press Oxford 2012 xvi + 970 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 957810 8 £30; $49.95

Keywords Dictionaries, Music

Review DOI 10.1108/09504121311308778

Previous editions of this work, from the first edited by Percy Scholes in 1952, to the fifth of 2007 edited by Michael and Joyce Kennedy, were called The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. "Readers should not worry, however, that they are getting a concise dictionary by another name. That Concise Dictionary had, by the time of its Fifth Edition [...] outgrown its supposedly bigger sibling and the simple decision was taken to drop the adjective and remove the anachronism" (Preface). In any case, a dictionary of almost a thousand pages is hardly concise!

So what else has changed? According to the new editor the previous edition focussed on updating and increasing its coverage of performers, whereas "the present edition concentrates on...