A Dictionary of Music and Musicians

The New Grove is often used by English-speaking musicologists who are conducting studies or seeking information on a wide range of musical topics. It is highly useful to any scholar with a decent understanding of the English language because of its range and depth of coverage, as well as extensive bibliographies.

A Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians were the titles of earlier versions. Grove Music Online, which is now a major part of Oxford Music Online, has just made it available as an electronic resource.

The New Grove

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is a comprehensive reference work on the subject of music and musicians. It is one of the most thorough reference sources on music history and theory. The work has gone through numerous editions since the 19th century and is actively used. It contains 29,499 articles in total, 5,623 entirely new articles, 20,374 biographies of composers, performers and writers on music, 1,327 articles on world music, 1,221 articles on popular music, light music, and jazz and much more.

First Edition

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians was first published in 1980 and later enlarged to 20 volumes with 22,500 entries and 16,500 biographies. The New Grove was also published in compact sets and as standalone volumes on certain themes. Individual and group composer biographies, a four-volume dictionary of American music (1984), a three-volume dictionary of musical instruments (1984), a four-volume dictionary of opera (1992), and a volume on female composers were among the items that were commonly improved with increasingly broad and revised content (1994).

Second Edition

In 2001, the second edition of this work (the seventh overall) was released in 29 volumes. Grove Music Online, a subscription-based service, also made it available on the internet. Stanley Sadie edited it once again, and John Tyrrell served as executive editor. It was also supposed to be released on CD-ROM, but that idea was scrapped. "The covering of 20th-century composers has been the largest single extension in the present edition," Sadie says in the foreword. Grove Music Online, a Web-based version of The New Grove, was released to coincide with the publication of the second edition.

Grove Music Online

Grove Music Online users get access to the whole text of The New Grove. It has been updated with several modifications and new articles. It includes the four-volume New Grove Dictionary of Opera (ed. Stanley Sadie, 1992) and the three-volume New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, second edition (ed. Barry Kernfeld, 2002), The Grove Dictionary of American Music, and The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, totalling more than 50,000 articles. Deane Root, a University of Pittsburgh professor, is the current editor-in-chief of Grove Music, the term given to the whole array of print and online materials that make up the Grove brand. In 2009, he took over as editor.

Oxford Music Online

The dictionary was sold to Oxford University Press in 2004 after it was initially produced by Macmillan. Grove Music Online has been a cornerstone of Oxford University Press's broader online study tool Oxford Music Online since 2008, and it is still a subscription-based service. It is accessible for use at many public and university libraries throughout the world through institutional subscriptions, in addition to private and educational users. Grove Music Online claims to be the seventh version of the whole piece.

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