The bibliography lists nearly 5,000 compositions by 200 composers of jazz and "art" music, indicating where scores or realizations can be purchased, rented, or borrowed, and which Boston area libraries have them in their collections.

Music in Boston: Composers, Events, and Ideas, 1852–1918 is a history of the city’s classical-music culture in the period that begins a decade before the American Civil War and extends to the close of the Great War. The book provides insights into the intellectual foundation of Boston's musical development as revealed in the writings of its significant critics and thinkers, including John Sullivan Dwight, John Knowles Paine, William Foster Apthorp, and others. It also examines the influence of outsiders—Patrick Gilmore, Theodore Thomas, Richard Wagner, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and Richard Strauss—on Boston’s performance and composition scene while also considering events that affected music in Boston, such as the building of the Music Hall, the acquisition of its Great Organ, the National Peace Jubilee, Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, Boston’s first Wagner Festival, and the rise and fall of the Boston Opera Company. Music in Boston also accounts for the ascent of the Second New England School of composers—John Knowles Paine, Edward MacDowell, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach and others—and discusses their key compositions and legacy. Finally, the book explores Boston itself: its transformations via immigration, its ever-changing topography, and its economy.

A young girl and her grandmother find a chipping sparrow with a broken wing and nurse her back to health so that she can return to the wild.