Major Music Research Sources
- Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new windowSearch Grove Music Online here. This is the best place to begin your research, as articles include lists of editions as well as bibliographies of modern research. The site also offers access to The Oxford Dictionary of Music and The Oxford Companion to Music.
- Music Index This link opens in a new windowThis database searches over 600 international music periodicals, with a focus on current scholarship in both classical and popular music. This is the best place to find scholarly articles and reviews of both books and recordings.
- RISM This link opens in a new windowRépertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM), or the International Inventory of Musical Sources, documents extant musical sources worldwide, including manuscripts, printed music, writings on music theory, and libretti. This is where you start researching where a piece of music was first written or published.
RISM publications are divided into the following series:
A: Inventories alphabetically by composer
B: Bibliographies of materials organized by topic
C: Directories of music research libraries.
Find Materials at Blough-Weis Library
This box doesn't really search everything, but it includes the library catalog and many of the general databases to which the library subscribes.
If you're getting inaccurate results, or just too many of them, choose Advanced Search to help narrow the focus, or limit your results with the list of options down the left side of the search results page.
Find Materials at Other Libraries
Blough-Weis Library has a new ILL (Interlibrary Loan) service, and it's integrated directly into our regular catalog! For more detailed information, visit our
Already know exactly what book or article you need? Make your request with our new
Still looking for resources?
The easiest place to start is the "Library Search" box on the library homepage or just above!
After you run a search, click the "expand your search" just above the results list to find books and articles that you can request from other libraries.
Do you need to find specific information on a particular book, like which libraries own it, or details on exactly when and where certain editions were published? Visit
which integrates the catalogs of college, university, and research libraries across North America and Europe. You can also click on the "Find It" link within a record to submit an ILL request.
More Music Research Sources
- Classical Music Reference Library This link opens in a new windowIncludes Baker's Dictionary of Music, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music. These somewhat briefer reference works (compared to Grove's) will give you a quick overview of topics, terms, and people.
- Garland Encyclopedia of World Music This link opens in a new windowIncludes 9 albums, 305 tracks, over 1600 documents with over 22,000 pages.
- Doctoral Dissertations in MusicologyThe American Musicological Society hosts this international database of dissertations and theses in musicology, both completed and in progress. Note that full-text access is not necessarily available.
General Databases & Reference Works
These broad-based reference works & databases also include entries on music, with articles on composers, famous performers, and significant compositions.
- Britannica Online Academic Edition This link opens in a new windowThis is the most prominent English-language encyclopedia in existence.
- ProQuest One Academic This link opens in a new windowProQuest One Academic combines all four of ProQuest’s multidisciplinary products on the ProQuest platform (ProQuest Central, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, Academic Complete, and Academic Video Online).
- EBSCO Databases (Music)This link searches multiple databases, selected based on their relevance to music research topics. It includes the Music Index as well as databases focused on history, humanities, social science, and literature. It will return much broader and less-focused results than a search in the Music Index alone. To remove, add, or change databases, select "Choose Databases" above the search boxes.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowJSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. JSTOR offers researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. The journals archived in JSTOR span many disciplines. For more information about the JSTOR collections, please visit Currently Available Collections and Journals. Originally conceived as a project at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR began as an effort to ease the increasing problems faced by libraries seeking to provide adequate shelf space for the long runs of backfiles of scholarly journals. JSTOR is not a current issues database. Because of JSTOR's archival mission, there is a gap, typically from 1 to 5 years, between the most recently published journal issue and the back issues available in JSTOR.
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new windowIf you've found a dissertation or thesis title that looks promising, check this database to see if we have online access before you put in an ILL request.
- Project Muse This link opens in a new windowUse the search box at the top of the page or browse by subject area.
- Cambridge Journals Online This link opens in a new window
- Oxford Journals This link opens in a new window
Music Editions
- A Genealogy of Music Editions
This flowchart is a rough attempt to show the relationships between different types of musical editions.
- Music: What Are Scholarly Editions?This page, from Brigham Young University Library, gives an overview of some major types of music editions, including definitions and examples.
Citations in Music
Music scholars typically use Chicago notes and bibliography style for their citations, although some of your professors may prefer MLA style. Here is the library's guide to proper citations and formatting in multiple styles:
An outstanding resource, with numerous examples of different possible types of sources that you could need to cite, is maintained by Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL).
- MLA Formatting and Style (Purdue OWL)Almost every possible variation of something you need to cite, with full examples, can be found here.
- Chicago Notes-and-Bibliography Style (Purdue OWL)The examples for this style, which is abbreviated CMOS NB on the website, aren't quite as numerous, but are still invaluable for figuring out how to get your bibliography up to Prof. Krieger's standards.
Additional Help
Meg Garnett is the librarian for Music. You can contact her directly at garnett@susqu.edu.
