The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is the most comprehensive and up-to-date body of musical knowledge ever gathered together. The New Grove composer biographies have been selected from the dictionary to bring the finest of the biographies to a wider audience. Each has been expanded and updated for book publication and contains a comprehensive work-list, index, and fully revised bibliography, in addition to the definitive view of the subject's life and works.

Three seminal figures in 20th-century music are considered in this volume. First, the life and works of Béla Bartók, the Hungarian composer who drew deeply on the folklore of his homeland to bring a fresh vitality into 20th-century music, are treated by László Somfai and Vera Lampert, working with resources of the Budapest Bartók Archive. Second, Igor Stravinsky, whose life―from his upbringing in prerevolutionary Russia, through the intellectual crucible that was the Paris of the 1920s, to his final years in Los Angeles and New York―is charted by Eric Walter White, while his works are tellingly set in context by Jeremy Noble. Third, Paul Hindemith, the craftsman/composer par excellence, is considered by Ian Kemp. Taken together, these articles brilliantly illuminate the forces bearing on Western music in the early to mid-20th century.