Music: Home
This guide covers search tools for research in topics related to music and music education.
Start with:
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Oxford Music OnlineAccess to Grove Music Online, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, The Oxford Companion to Music, and over 52,000 articles.
Oxford Music Online includes the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians plus other trusted music reference works. It's a great place to start exploring musicians, composers, and genres, with entries written and reviewed by experts. Many of the entries include bibliographies that can lead you to even more great sources.
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RILM Abstracts of Music LiteratureRILM Abstracts of Music Literature is a comprehensive bibliography of writings about music featuring citations, abstracts, and indexes. It covers over one million publications worldwide on traditional music, popular music, classical music, and related subjects. Coverage begins in the early 19th century and extends to the present.
RILM is an excellent bibliographical tool for finding information related to journal articles, dissertations, conference proceedings, books, and more. If you find materials in RILM that you think would be useful for your project but RILM does not include the full-text, reach out to Kathy Essmiller, OSU- Stillwater's music librarian at kathy.essmiller@okstate.edu for help.
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JSTORFull-text access for over 17 million journal articles, books, documents, and research reports in a variety of disciplines.
JSTOR's AI-based interactive research tool is currently in beta. Users can visit this page for more information and sign up to use the tool.
JSTOR is a trusted database for scholarly journal articles, books, and primary sources across many disciplines, including music. JSTOR may not have the most recent issues of journals, and it only includes a portion of the music-related literature and research that have been published. It is a good place to start your research, but it shouldn't be the only place you look. You can search by topic, author, or title. Many of the resources are available for download.
Then try any of the following
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The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
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ISBN: 0824060350Publication Date: 1997-08-01Explores key themes in African music that have emerged in recent years-a subject usually neglected in country-by-country coverage emphasizes the contexts of musical performance-unlike studies that offer static interpretations isolated from other performing traditions presents the fresh insights and analyses of musicologists and anthropologists of diverse national origins-African, Asian, European, and American Charts the flow and influence of music. The Encyclopedia also charts the musical interchanges that followed the movement of people and ideas across the continent, including: cross-regional musical influences throughout Africa * Islam and its effect on African music * spread of guitar music * Kru mariners of Liberia * Latin American influences on African music * musical interchanges in local contexts * crossovers between popular and traditional practices. Audio CD included. Also includes nine maps and 96 music examples. -
Sourcebook for Research in Music, Third Edition
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ISBN: 9780253014481Publication Date: 2015-06-01Since it was first published in 1993, the Sourcebook for Research in Music has become an invaluable resource in musical scholarship. The balance between depth of content and brevity of format makes it ideal for use as a textbook for students, a reference work for faculty and professional musicians, and as an aid for librarians. The introductory chapter includes a comprehensive list of bibliographical terms with definitions; bibliographic terms in German, French, and Italian; and the plan of the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal music classification systems. Integrating helpful commentary to instruct the reader on the scope and usefulness of specific items, this updated and expanded edition accounts for the rapid growth in new editions of standard works, in fields such as ethnomusicology, performance practice, women in music, popular music, education, business, and music technology. These enhancements to its already extensive bibliographies ensures that the Sourcebook will continue to be an indispensable reference for years to come.
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Naxos Music LibraryNaxos Music Library is an extensive catalog of streaming classical music. Supplemental material includes music notes, libretti and synopses of operas, composer and artist biographies, and an interactive dictionary.
Along the way, consider some Very Short Introductions
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Music
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ISBN: 9780198726043Publication Date: 2021-05-03The world teems with different kinds of music - traditional, folk, classical, jazz, rock, pop - and each type of music tends to come with its own way of thinking. Drawing on a wealth of accessible examples ranging from Beethoven to Chinese zither music, this Very Short Introduction considers the history of music and thinking about music, focussing on its social and cultural dimensions. Nicholas Cook balances the Western Classical traditions within the context of many other musical cultures in today's world, tracing the way in which their development since the eighteenth century has conditioned present-day thinking and practice both within and beyond the West. He also considers the nature of music as a real-time performance practice; the role of music in contexts of social and political action; and the nature of musical thinking, including the roles played in it by instruments, notations, and creative imagination. In this new edition Cook explores the impact of digital technology on the production and consumption of music, including how it has transformed participatory music-making and the music business. -
Ethnomusicology
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ISBN: 9780199794379Publication Date: 2013-12-27This Very Short Introduction examines the history of the impulses to study ourselves and others. What have ethnomusicologists learned about the nature of music? For ethnomusicologists, music creates community when performed; it embodies and in some cases creates cultural values and social norms; it constructs individual identities; it expresses large-scale economic and political structures that press upon particular local communities. This book looks cross-culturally at some of the many themes that demonstrate the way music is embedded in, reflects, and contributes to broader cultural patterns. In this Very Short Introduction, Timothy Rice describes how ethnomusicologists conduct fieldwork, examining some of the most spectacular results of these research methods as well as some of the issues that have arisen from using them, including ethical questions, questions of representation (who can speak for whom and how), what we learn when we learn to play music, the accuracy and reliability of musical notation and sound recordings, and differences between "insider" knowledge and scholarly interpretations. -
World Music
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ISBN: 0198829140Publication Date: 2020-10-01The term "world music" encompasses both folk and popular music across the globe, as well as the sounds of cultural encounter and diversity, sacred voices raised in worship, local sounds, and universal values. It emerged as an invention of the West from encounters with other cultures, and holds the power to evoke the exotic and give voice to the voiceless. Today, in both sound and material it has a greater presence in human societies than ever before. In this new edition of his Very Short Introduction, Philip Bohlman considers questions of meaning and technology in world music. He also addresses the different ways in which world music is created, disseminated, and consumed, as the full reach of the internet and technologies that store and spread music through the exchange of data files spark a revolution in the production and availability of world music. -
Country Music
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ISBN: 9780190902841Publication Date: 2019-11-11Country Music: A Very Short Introduction presents a compelling overview of the music and its impact on American culture. Country music has long been a marker of American identity; from our popular culture to our politics, it has provided a soundtrack to our national life. While this music rose from the people, it is also a product of the popular music industry, and the way the music has been marketed to its audience is a key part of its story. Key artists, songs, and musical styles are highlighted.
Also check out
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Classical Music LibraryProvides a large and continually growing database of streamed classical music recordings originally issued on a wide variety of labels.
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Music Online: Listening
Music catalog covering all major genres and time periods from medieval to contemporary, from choral works to symphonies, operas, and the avant-garde.
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Music Online: Smithsonian Global Sound for LibrariesMusic Online: Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions.
