When I was asked to prepare the 6th edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music, I was asked to concentrate on three areas: popular music and non-Western music (which had almost no coverage in the previous edition) and contemporary music (which was quickly falling out of date). For the last of these, I had room to add around 100 new entries on contemporary composers. Drawing that list up was one of the most enjoyable, but trickiest parts of the whole process. One hundred composers sounds like a lot, but there are more composers working in the Western classical tradition today than ever before. And they are working in more styles and come from more countries. 

As well as my own knowledge of the contemporary music scene, in compiling my list I also drew on The New Grove’s database of more than 4,000 20th-century composers. Once I had crossed out any composers who already had entries, I began to start transferring names from this masterlist of potential composers to my list of 100. I did so on the basis of three approaches. First there were the composers who were internationally renowned, who were at a late stage in their careers, but who had for whatever reason slipped through the cracks in earlier editions. Among them were some of the most important figures in contemporary music of the last 30 or 40 years: Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley, Salvatore Sciarrino, Gérard Grisey and others. Some other names I felt had to be included for historical interest. These are composers who are less active today, but who would have been included automatically 20 or 30 years ago. My reasoning here was to make the scope of the dictionary’s new music coverage as wide as possible – in terms of geography, style, medium and historical era – to present a broad view of modern composition, unfiltered by dogma, partisanship or contemporary trends. Electroacoustic music was another area that required attention, and again this meant including several important historical figures, such as Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari and François Bayle. Once all the retrospective gaps had been filled in, I was left with space for 30 or 40 “new” composers (I say new, but some of these had been active for some time). Once again, I was guided by the view that the coverage should be as broad as possible. In order to achieve that, I selected styles, media, geographical regions and other organising devices and picked representative figures from each. One regret is that I wasn’t able to include anyone younger than about 40, but there simply wasn’t room.

The Oxford Dictionary of Music is published by OUP