Subject Guide: Music
Find Books, Printed Music and Audio-Visual
Materials:
- Use the Library Catalogue
- Tip: to search for a score or recording of a specific musical work, try the Advanced Keyword Search. You can limit your search by type, e.g. AUDIO CD; PRINTED MUSIC; SCORE
- Tip: to search for a score or recording of a specific musical work, try the Advanced Keyword Search. You can limit your search by type, e.g. AUDIO CD; PRINTED MUSIC; SCORE
- Our holdings may also be searched using WorldCat Local.
- Tip: enter a keyword search such as <beethoven piano sonatas>. Your search will retrieve books and articles about the works, as well as recordings, scores, videos, etc. On the left side the screen, use the check boxes to limit by format, and/or choose other ways to refine your search.
- Sheet Music & Mount Allison Music Recordings Collections
- Not finding what you need? We can help! Contact the Music Librarian (Laura Snyder): 506-364-2214; musiclibrary@mta.ca
Find Articles and Reviews:
- Use a Journal Index to find articles on a given topic.
- HELP: How do I search for articles?
Web Resources:
- A select list of resources available on the Web.
Citation Guides:
- Use these guides (Citing Music Resources in Your Essay and Bibliography, Other guides) to learn how to cite the materials you find and create a bibliography.
More Subject Guides:
Sheet Music & Mount Allison Music Recordings Collections (InMagic Databases)
The Alfred Whitehead Music Library has in its collections some materials which do not appear in the Libraries' catalogue. These include two growing collections of sheet music and non-commercial recordings indexed in online databases. The recordings and sheet music found in these databases are housed in the Whitehead Music Library and may be borrowed by students, staff, faculty and community borrowers from the music library circulation desk.
Mount Allison Music Recordings Index
An index to the music recorded since 1980 on audiocassette or compact disc of Department of Music concerts by faculty, guests, departmental ensembles, and students. Over 5000 works can be found in the Mount Allison Concert Recordings database. Concert programs are included with each recording.
Sheet Music Collection
An index to the 7000-piece collection of sheet music in the Music Library. Holdings, not entered into the Libraries’ catalogue, include choral sheet music, popular songs, and pieces of classical sheet music organized by type (either keyboard, solo vocal, or instrumental pieces).
Web Resources:
Oxford Music Online
Naxos Music Library
Classical Scores Library
Bibliographies
Music Libraries
Music Library Associations
Music in Canada
Recording Online Collections
Score Online Collections
Electronic Journals
Miscellaneous
Oxford Music Online:
- Access* from On-Campus or Off-Campus
The cornerstone of Oxford Music Online, a gateway for online music reference sources, is Grove Music Online, the most comprehensive and authoritative English-language reference source for music research. Oxford Music Online also includes The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Oxford Companion to Music.
*Restricted to authorized Mt. Allison University users
Naxos Music Library (Music Streaming)
- Access* from On-campus or Off-campus
This streaming audio service provides access to more than a million tracks of music across a broad spectrum of styles and periods. Important note: we have a limited number of user spaces for this resource. Please log out when you’re done so that others may have access to NAXOS.
*Restricted to authorized Mt. Allison University users
Classical Scores Library
- Access* from On-Campus or Off-Campus
This collection contains 400,000 pages of classical scores from both in-copyright and public domain editions. The major composers are represented, as well as many lesser known composers and works, from the Renaissance to the 21st century.
*Restricted to authorized Mt. Allison University users.
Bibliographies
Doctoral
Dissertations in Musicology
DDM is an international bibliographic database of completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, as well as related disciplines.
MusRef
This site, created by the Music & Dance staff of the Brigham Young University library, is devoted to bibliography and reference in the areas of music and dance. It includes an online bibliography of more than 7,000 sources, basic introductions to reference tools, links to unpublished bibliographies, and a blog
RISM
The new catalogue of the International Inventory of Musical Sources (RISM) offers around 700,000 mainly manuscript sources, which are stored in hundreds of libraries and archives around the world. The catalogue entries include information about the composer, title, instrumentation, as well as references in the specialist literature. The manuscripts are described in detail in respect of scribe, and place and time of origin, and almost every work can also be unambiguously identified by means of a music incipit.
Music Libraries
Institute
of Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music, Paris, Library
The Multimedia Library consists of the following collections, put
together by IRCAM and the CNRS - CID-RM: paper documents, multimedia
documents and (hyper)text documents.
Library and Archives Canada: Music and Performing Arts Collections
Discover LAC’s extensive collections of research materials on Canadian music, through databases, research aids, and virtual exhibitions.
Music Treasures Consortium
This alliance of several libraries’ (currently including the British Library, Harvard University’s Loeb Music Library, Library of Congress, Julliard School Wallace Library, Morgan Library, and the New York Public library) consortium web site exhibits holdings of unique music resources, including music manuscripts, prints, and first and early editions. The Web site which gives bibliographic information on each item and access to the digital items provided through links to the holding library’s own Web site.
Sibley
Music Library
The Sibley Music Library (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester) is the largest academic music library in the United States, with vast resources for performance and historical research. Many of their unique printed music holdings are now being made available through their digitized collections.
William
and Gayle Cook Music Library
The Cook Library at Indiana University is among the top academic music libraries in the United States. The collections include more than 700,000 items. Other significant music research collections at IU include the Archives of African American Music & Culture, Archives of Traditional Music, and the music collections of the Lilly Library.
Music Library Associations
Canadian Association
of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (CAML)
The Canadian branch of the International
Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML). Founded in 1971 CAML draws together the interests of academic,
research, public, broadcasting, orchestra libraries, especially those
interested in Canadian music and music librarianship (see also the
listserv CANMUS-L).
Music Library Association
MLA is the professional organization in the United States devoted to music librarianship and all aspects of music materials in libraries. It is also the US branch of IAML.
Music in Canada
Canadian Music
Centre (CMC)
The Canadian Music Centre is a source of scores, parts and recordings
of music by close to 500 Canadian composers; the website includes
enhanced catalogues of the holdings.
The
Encyclopedia of Music in Canada
The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada describes the full breadth and
depth of Canada’s musical culture, including the historical and
current aspects of popular, folk, religious, concert and other forms
of music.
Musican:
Repertory of Canadian Musical Works for Performers
Musican is a database of selected Canadian musical works, searchable by composer, title, subject, instrumentation, duration, and other attributes.
Sheet Music from Canada’s Past
Source of sheet music published in Canada before 1921, selected from the digitized portion of Library and Archives Canada’s historical collection.
The Virtual Gramophone: Canadian Historical Sound Recordings
Multimedia website of digital audio recordings, images, biographies of musicians, and histories of music and recorded sound in the Canadian 78-rpm era.
Recording Online Collections
CentreStreams (Canadian Music Centre)
CMC provides streaming audio access to archival recordings of several thousand works by Canadian composers. From the main CMC page, click on ‘Find A Composer’. You can then browse by composer or by type of music (solo piano, choral, songs, orchestra, etc.) You can also search for specific works through ‘Find Music’, but streaming audio is available for only a portion of the works listed there. Access to the audio files is free, but you must create your own account and log in to listen.
National Jukebox
Streamed historic recordings from the Library of Congress including over 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925.
Score Online Collections
Bodleian
Library Broadside Ballads
Access to digitised copies of 30,000 ballads from the sixteenth- to
the twentieth-century.
Early Music Online
About 10,000 digitised compositions from the British Library’s collections of sixteenth-century music anthologies including part books of vocal polyphony and printed tablatures of keyboard and plucked string instruments from Italy, Germany, France and England.
Indiana
University Sheet Music Collections
From the sheet music held in several repositories at Indiana University,
this web site allows you to search some of the holdings from the Lilly
Library's approximately 150,000 pieces of sheet music, including those
for which digitized images are available.
Lester
S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music
Part of Special Collections at The Johns Hopkins University it contains
over 29,000 pieces of music and focuses on popular American music
spanning the period 1780 to 1960. See also Music
for the Nation, American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 and the Historic
American Sheet Music 1850-1920.
The Petrucci Library: the International Music Score Library Project
This open access website aims to create a virtual collection of all public domain music, as well as music from composers willing to freely share their work. The growing downloadable collection currently includes almost 90,000 scores of over 5,000 composers as well as almost 2000 recordings.
Sheet Music Consortium
This site provides access to the sheet music collections of more than twenty music libraries, including those of York University, the Library of Congress (US), Indiana University, the National Library of Australia.
Sheet
Music from Canada's Past
This website currently features sheet music published before Confederation
(1867) and during the era of the First World War (1914-1920), selected
from the over 20,000 items in the historical collection of the National
Library of Canada.
Sibley Music Library: Musical Scores
Free access to an extensive collection of digitized publications, mostly scores not held widely or digitized elsewhere, from the collections of the Sibley Music Library, the largest academic music library in North America.
Electronic Journals
Analytic approaches to world music (AAWM)
Electronic journal embacing ethnomusicology, musicology, and music theory in attempting to document the ethnosphere.
Journal of Music and Meaning (JMM)
On-line peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal of research on conceptions of music and the notion of meaning through the study of musical phenomena.
Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music (JSCM)
A refereed forum for scholarly studies of the musical cultures of the seventeenth century including historical and archival studies, performance practice, music theory, aesthetics, dance, and theatre as well as reviews and listings of recently published materials.
Miscellaneous
allmusic
This site covers all genres and styles of music from the most commercially
popular to the most obscure and includes biographical information
of musicians, descriptions of musical styles, discographies, and details
and reviews of recordings.
Classical Net
Covers all aspects of classical music with over 4200 files and 2500
commercial and noncommercial links.
Gaylord
Music Library Necrology File
Reports death announcements and obituaries as they arrive through
the music media. Updated daily.
The Lied
and Song Texts Page
This site houses an extensive archive of thousands of texts to Kunstlieder
and other art songs in most European languages. Includes indexes of
texts by first line or title, by poet and by composer.
Music
Publishers and Vendors
This site has links to many music publishers and vendors from around
the world.