The Oxford Companion to Music

Scholes' intention was to produce a work relevant to a wide range of readers, from the professional musician to the concert-goer, "gramaphonist", or radio-listener.Ward considered it "inappropriate to change radically the characteristic rich anecdotal quality of Dr. Scholes' style."A distinctive feature of this Companion is a series of "imaginative" portraits of composers created by the artist Oswald Barrett (known as "Batt").These consist of engravings (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Byrd, Chopin, Elgar, Handel, Haydn, Liszt, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner),[1] and a frontispiece which is a colour reproduction of an oil painting of "Beethoven in Middle Life", described by Scholes as "the artist's personal gift to the volume" (see the Preface to the First Edition).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.This edition consists of some 7400 articles and aims to bring the work up-to-date: for example, in its coverage of areas such as electronic music and computers.