Subject Guides

Databases

Academic Search Premier
The world's largest scholarly, multidiscipline, full-text database designed specifically for academic institutions. Contains indexing and abstracts for over 8,450 journals, with full text for more than 4,600 of those titles. Over 3,600 journals are peer-reviewed.

African American Music
Listen online to recordings of jazz, blues, gospel, and other forms of African American musical expression. NEW: Content from African American Music is now a part of American Song.

African American Music Reference
This database offers text reference, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies which chronicle the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music. It is constantly expanding to include comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.

American Song
American Song is a history database that contains 50,000 tracks from America's past. The database includes songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests and more.

Classical Music Library
Classical Music Library is a fully searchable classical music resource—a comprehensive database of distinguished classical recordings.

Classical Music Reference Library
This database offers comprehensive coverage of all classical genres, spanning music from the Medieval period to the 21st century, including definitions of musical terms and biographical information on the major classical composers and artists.

Contemporary World Music
This database from Alexander Street Press contains important genres such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, and other genres such as traditional music - Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more.

International Index to Music Periodicals with Full Text
Provides indexing and abstracts for more than 440 international music periodicals, plus full text for 130 journals.

Jazz Music Library
Thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres.

Music Online
Online music resource that cross-searches all of the library's Alexander Street Press music databases. Includes African American Music, American Song, Classical Music Library, Contemporary World Music, Jazz Music Library,  and Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries.

Music Online: Classical Scores Library
A comprehensive database of classical scores, representing the major composers output, spanning all genres and time periods from the Western classical canon. 

Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries
An encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions, with 35,000 tracks of music, spoken word, and natural and human-made sounds.

Web resources

I Hear America Singing
A digital library of music and performing arts, provided by the Library of Congress.

The MHN Instrument Encyclopedia
A joint project of the University of Michigan's School of Information and School of Music. Instruments are divided into several basic categories (percussion, strings, etc). You can search by category, by geographic region or use a Search form. Entries include a description, a list of references, illustrations and links to related instruments.

Now what a time
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress presents music and contextual information from the Fort Valley (Georgia) State College Folk Festivals in the early 1940s (the only American folk festival featuring African American performers that was organized entirely by African Americans). The music played includes traditional folk, blues and gospel from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. The documentary collections include 108 songs and instrumental pieces in a downloadable mp3 format.

Rhythmweb
This site covers the world of rhythm and percussion based music including jazz, reggae, African pop, samba and more. Contents can be searched by culture or instrument type. The Rhythmweb Radio offers sound files.

SoundJunction
Award-winning site for listening to, exploring, discovering and creating music.

The Symphony: An Interactive Guide
This site has composer biographies, a time line and guides to musical instruments, forms and structures. Sound files are available via RealAudio. The text is drawn from standard music reference sources.

Virtual Instrument Museum
Provides information and multimedia offerings for musical instruments from Wesleyan University’s World Music Instrument Collection

Dictionaries

Baker's biographical dictionary of musicians (electronic resource)

Baker's dictionary of music

Concise Oxford dictionary of music (electronic resource)

The Harvard dictionary of music

The Oxford companion to music (electronic resource)

Encyclopedias

Cambridge History of Music (electronic resource) includes:

• The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music
• The Cambridge History of American Music
• The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music
• The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music
• The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory

Encyclopedia of contemporary Christian music

Encyclopedia of world pop music

The Garland encyclopedia of world music (electronic resource)

International dictionary of black composers

Musicians & composers of the 20th century (electronic resource)

The new Grove dictionary of jazz

The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians

The Oxford companion to music (electronic resource)

Professional organizations

The College Music Society

MENC: The National Association for Music Education

Musical Organizations & Societies

National Association of Schools of Music

Finding books

By subject search

Below are some links to various subject searches in the catalog. The subject search is a specific and helpful way to find materials about your area of interest. Explore these or try some of your own subject searches using the "Subject" tab in Foxtrax. For more information on "power searching" by subject, ask your reference librarian.

By call number

If you want to browse for books in the library, use the call numbers below to find the subject areas that are of interest to you. You can use them to browse the reference section or the main stacks. The Library of Congress website may have a more detailed outline of call numbers for your subject area.

Google search: Music

This Google Custom Search engine searches quality, discipline specific web sites selected by the librarians.