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The Oxford Companion to Music, tenth edition.

The Oxford Companion to Music is a popular music reference book in the series of Oxford Companions produced by the Oxford University Press. It was originally conceived and written (almost single-handedly) 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.

The first edition, a single volume work, was produced in 1938, edited by Percy Scholes, and written almost entirely by him alone. This work took him six years to produce and consisted of over a million words (exceeding the length of the Bible).

Scholes tried, wherever possible, to use primary source material, rather than summarising other people's work and his preface to the First Edition describes how he played and read through thousands of sheets of music, as well as reading thousands of concert programmes and studying "old literature and long-bygone musical journals". From this research, he produced about fifty-five volumes of notes, each 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 which was of relevance to a wide range of readers, from the professional musician to the concert-goer, "gramaphonist", 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 of use to the specialist.

Scholes' style, whilst being scholarly and well-researched, 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.

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" and, although he brought some of the articles up to date, he left much of Scholes' distinctive work intact.

The New Oxford Companion to Music, 1983

In 1983 a wholly-revised two volume work, entitled 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, but which increasingly appeared politically incorrect and Eurocentric. For instance, he substantially increased the coverage of women composers and performers, who were almost totally absent from Scholes' work.

There were no further revisions of this version, probably due to Arnold's own early death in 1986, and the relative unpopularity in some circles of the bulk and expense of a two volume work.

The Oxford Companion to Music, 2002 edition

In 2002, a third complete revision was produced, edited by Alison Latham—this reverted to the original title and single-volume format. Latham assembled her own team of over 120 contributors, some who had contributed to the 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 has aimed to bring the work fully up-to-date, for example in its coverage of areas such as electronic music and computers.

• Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, First Edition, Oxford University Press, 1938
• Denis Arnold, The New Oxford Companion to Music : Volume 1: A-J; Volume 2: L-Z, OUP, 1983. ISBN 0-19-311316-3
• Alison Latham (editor), The Oxford Companion to Music, OUP, 2002. ISBN 0-19-866212-2