Looks at the lives and achievements of thousands of composers and examines key topics such as music history, theory, and jargon.

The New Penguin Dictionary of Music is the essential A-Z of some 1,000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a huge range of composers, and examines such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Written by an award-winning music critic, and blending scholarship with personal insight and opinion, this dictionary is both a pleasurable read and an invaluable and authoritative reference book for all lovers of music, whether amateur or professional.

Bursting with witty one-liners of comedians, the pronouncements of politicians, references from films, literature, song lyrics, tabloid headlines, and even the occasional piece of graffiti, this irresistible resource brings together 8,000 of the pithiest and most provocative quotations from 1914 to the present. To help put the quotations in context, this volume includes biographical sketches of everyone quoted, citing their views on themselves and their often caustic remarks regarding others. In addition there are illuminating insights into individual remarks that clarify who said what (did James Cagney ever really say "You dirty rat"?), why they said it, and how they often wished they hadn't (Andy Warhol's coming to regret his "famous for fifteen minutes" remark).