A long-awaited companion to The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, and compiled with the same meticulous scholarship and delight in detail, this biographical dictionary emphasizes classical and art music, but also gives ample attention to jazz and blues, rock and pop, and hymns and showtunes across the ages - with unusual care devoted to coverage of the twentieth century.

That the Belgian composer Jean Absil was professor of fugue at the Brussels Conservatory is a little-known fact. And few are aware that Roy Acuff began his country-and-western career in medicine shows. The writings of the eighteenth-century organist Jakob Adlung may be obscure, while Theodor Adorno is widely read and studied. But they can all be found in the A's, along with 218 more entries, from Carl Friedrich Abel to Emanuel Ax. And this is only the beginning.

Here then is the information you need about 5,500 figures in the world of music - the major, the minor, the famous, the nearly forgotten, from Bach and Beethoven to Irving Berlin, Benny Goodman, and Bruce Springsteen - capsule summaries of the lives and careers behind the music enjoyed in every era. The volume is enlivened with illustrations, some revelations in themselves.