American and Latin-American musicians were more fully represented in this issue than in any English work of the kind in its day.
In preparing the fifth edition, Slonimsky expanded the size of the work to 1,855 pages and undertook a thorough review of the existing entries, expending considerable effort verifying and correcting biographical details such as birth and death dates by reference to archival sources.
[3] The eighth edition of 1992 revised 1,300 entries and added 1,100 new ones, coming to 2,115 pages, with an emphasis on expanding coverage of female and Asian musicians, multimedia composers, performance artists, and ethnomusicologists.
The ninth edition included a focus on increasing coverage of popular music and jazz.
[5] Macmillan sold G. Schirmer, except for its reference holdings, to Music Sales Corporation of London in 1986.