At times Pendle's book meets this challengeespecially in the chapters on early European music and on nineteenth-century America. But elsewhere, even when the authors seem to have good intentions, the post of composer remains sacred. Such information can be useful, but when overdone it subverts a truly innovative approach. The book has been shaped by a firm editorial hand. Most of the chapters follow a uniform format, aiming to summarize the current state of scholarship on a given topic.
History can come alive here as an engaging process rather than a petrified preserve.
For the European Renaissance and Baroque periods, a list of available scores also appears. Given the link to Briscoe's anthology, this is especially lamentable in the sections that move outside the concert tradition. Put succinctly, the authors in Bowers and Tick write as specialists on specialized topics while those in Pendle take broad strokes and aim for a less sophisticated reader. Therefore the two books are complementary. Yet its relationship to Pendle is not without friction.