[.ca] The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: 29 ... (ISBN 0195170679)

From Amazon.com:
This is the big one -- 20 thick volumes packed full of information on musical history, composers, artists and more. It carries a big price tag, but it's an invaluable aid for the serious student or writer. Grove has several other dictionaries, opera and jazz among them, but if you can only handle one, this is the one to get. This text refers to the 20 Volume edition of this title.

dumbed down:
Four stars for what has been carried over from the 1980 version, zero stars for what has been appended to it. We can't entirely blame the dictionary for the poor quality of most of these additions. The dictionary depends on a large pool of contributors, most of whom hold academic positions, and our academies are beset with insufficiently acknowledged problems. One problem is the graduate-school analogue of what in secondary schools has been called "grade inflation". We might call it "degree inflation". Unqualified candidates are routinely pushed through graduate school; mediocre minds are awarded doctorates and assume faculty positions. This is partly the result of a misguided egalitarianism and partly the result of a quid-pro-quo cronyism. In any case, it is self-perpetuating and self-proliferating. It manifests itself here most obviously in rambling pseudo-intellectual essays on such empty buzzwords as "postmodernism". Another problem is commercialization. It manifests itself here most obviously in vacuous and clumsily written (and randomly strewn with rock journalism cliches) extended accounts of various pop music figures, such as, for example, Bob Dylan and David Bowie. (Both Bob Dylan and David Bowie have composed interesting song lyrics and are worthy subjects for popular culture historians, but neither have any particular MUSICAL significance.)

Don't believe that you are getting 20 books.:
Although the announcement makes you think that maybe yo will be getting 20 books for a song, you will be singing a different tune when it arrives. You will get one (yes, 1) volume selected apparently at random. I got volume 13.

For the intelligent progressive musician!:
If you think that Bach and Berio are the only musicians worth listening to and learning about, than this might not be for you. All Univeristies worth going to, have this edition in their libraries. Definitely worth it!