The New Harvard Dictionary of Music surely sweeps the field for its clear, succinctly detailed and almost unfailingly reliable coverage. Originally launched by the renowned musicologist Willi Apel in 1944, it was completely recommissioned by Don Randel in 1986 from some seventy leading scholars, and comes with 250 music examples and over 200 line drawings of instruments, etc. in the stoutest of cloth bindings. Indispensable.
-- BBC Music
[Moves] impressively and easily between non-Western and Western music, integrating ancient theory and modern practice into a genuinely, and invigoratingly, global survey.
-- Christopher Wintle Times Literary Supplement
This single volume [provides] as full a range of non-biographical information as most of us are likely to require.
-- Peter Heyworth The Observer
The articles are accurate, well written, and carry authority. Moreover, the larger format (577 medium-sized pages vs. 341 small ones) permits both additional entries and fuller discussions than the Concise Harvard Dictionary of Music could provide. But the main addition is biography.
-- Robert C. Marsh Chicago Sun-Times
Surely this indispensable tool needs no introduction; the first two editions, edited by William Apel, have served the music world only too well. The present volume, prepared by 70 noted scholars under Randel’s capable editorship, contains mostly new entries; the scope has been greatly expanded to include better coverage of recent music. A work for musicians, students, musicologists, and music lovers that belongs in most collections.
-- J. Richard Belanger Library Journal
The articles on topics in early music, whether a few lines or several columns, are abundant and informative, making the book once more an invaluable aid to students of medieval and Renaissance music. And the much enlarged and regrouped entries on ethnic musics gives it its other special cachet.
-- Brian Newbould Musical Times
An admirable book… The biographical information…is clearly and briskly expressed.
-- Stanley Sadie Musical Times
The New Harvard Dictionary of Music is easily the most useful of all musical dictionaries because of its accuracy, concision, and ease of reference.
-- Charles Rosen, author of The Romantic Generation