Compiling a music encyclopedia is always a challenging task, first and foremost for the arduous process involved in the selection of materials to include. The end result should be comprehensive, concise, and informative, and geared appropriately in its selections to the reader it seeks to address. It should also be a balance between what is known and what might be learned, and, in the best of all possible worlds, cast in a form and in language that is a pleasure to read.

Compiling a music encyclopedia for students is particularly challenging, and particularly now, for at this point in historical time, youth are remarkably sophisticated when it comes to music, and in ways never dreamed of by their parents.

To be sure, music has long played a critical part of growing up. Friendships can be formed around favorite songs and artists, and attendance at a particular concert can be the focal point of a semester. Entire weekends can be passed listening to music, and participation in music ensembles, as either course requirement or extracurricular activity, can provide a measure of sanity for teens where none otherwise seems to exist. And nothing more than music seems to define a generation, or to distinguish one generation from another. Parents often cannot fathom the musical tastes of their teens, while at the same time they themselves may hear a song, years after the fact, that evokes memories of an entire, long-ago teenage life.

Today's youth are particularly sophisticated when it comes to music in large part because of sheer access. Never before has so much music been available, relatively inexpensively and in so many forms: recorded, online, and live. Students today have easy access not only to classical and popular music, in all of its myriad genres, but to traditional and world musics as well—Indian, African, Indonesian, Japanese—in an amazing array. And composing music has never been easier, through the wide variety of sequencing software currently available for use on home computers and MIDI systems, themselves now commonplace. Students across America are composing music without the customary and often time-consuming intermediate step of learning to read and write traditional notation. This hands-on participation with the actual building blocks of music creates inroads to a kind of understanding of music not easily available to the nonparticipant.

This exposure and participation cause the youth of today to be more sophisticated with respect to music: less hierarchical in their thinking, less privileging of one type of music over another, and also more thoughtful and confident about what they know. As a result, they are also more demanding about the kind of new information they seek and the manner in which it is provided. The present Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music, in three richly illustrated volumes, means to rise to the challenge of that sophistication by presenting its readers with the most accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date entries on music and musicians across historical time and across stylistic boundaries. Entries on well-known historical figures—John Cage, Claude Debussy, Frédéric Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, among countless others—have been included and brought up to date, of course. But also included are the artists less often included in the standard dictionary format that students want to know more about, ranging from Eric Clapton, Sun Ra, and Marvin Gaye, to Ice Cube, R.E.M., and Public Enemy. Musical styles, genres, and terms, too, have been expanded to include not only those tried and true from the Western European classical past—counterpoint, chromaticism, atonality, and sonata form—but also the latest terms and trends of the contemporaneous present, ranging from rock, jazz, and reggae, to hip-hop, rap, and New Age.

All of this is cast in a language that means to maintain the eloquence and humor that have for nearly 100 years made Nicolas Slonimsky's name and his numerous Baker's volumes the music reference of choice. Entries, illustrations, and interesting sidebar facts and anecdotes, all amply cross-referenced throughout, combine in Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music to provide readers of all ages with an easy-to-use reference guide to all things musical.

LAURA KUHN
New York City, March 1999