It's nothing if not an ambitious project: produce a comprehensive printed encyclopedia of Portuguese music in the 20th Century. But such a work has now been published, and was recently launched at Teatro S. Carlos in Lisboa.

The work, entitled "Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no século XX" represents "a labour of love" over 13 years under the direction of ethnomusicologist Salwa Castelo-Branco. The book covers pop-rock, fado, jazz, and both popular and "erudite" music. To ensure the gravity of each entry, works were considered for a period of three years before inclusion.

The encyclopedia is published in four volumes of approximately 15,000 pages, and contains 1250 entries related to musical genres, artists, composers, writers, instruments, institutes and schools, among others. The last volume contains artists from the 1990s.

Source: SIC News