Reader’s Guide to Music: History, Theory and Criticism

The Reader’s Guide to Music is a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some three to twenty titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. More than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology). Although the Reader’s Guide to Music emphasises books on western art music, many genres and topics entries include the literature on popular and folk music traditions (such as flamenco, folk music, jazz, and rock) as well as surveys of the literature on various world music traditions (such as those found in Africa, China, India, and the Middle East) and contemporary music topics (such as electronic music, MIDI, serialism, and sound recordings).