• Grove Music Online

The primary English-language reference source for music. Over 47,000 articles provide comprehensive coverage of music of all styles, periods, and geographic regions.  Comprises the full text of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed. (2001), the New Grove Dictionary of Dictionary of Opera (1992) and the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2d ed. (2002), plus more recent updates to some articles.

Tips: Use the toolbar options to find Related Articles, Illustrations, and Sound (files), and for navigating. Each article contains a link to "How to cite Grove Music Online": note that the examples use British pratice for punctuation, rather than American.

 

• Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online

An encyclopedia of more than 700 articles covering the music of the world's peoples, from the earliest known traditions to current practices.  Includes articles on geographic areas, nations, and ethnic groups, as well as discussion of scholarly trends and issues.  

Browsing is recommended:

• Click on the BROWSE button.
• Select the volume you want.
• Scroll to the bottom of the screen, find the contents listing that interests you
• Expand the contents list by clicking on a plus sign (+).
• Click on a listing to access the text.

This database currently doesn't yet offer advanced types of searching. 

AUDIO EXAMPLES are not yet available online, but may be accessed on CD in the Music and Media Library. 

 

• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature

A "comprehensive, ongoing guide to publications on music from all over the world," RILM Abstracts covers all literature on music—books, journal articles, articles in collections of essays, dissertations, and other publications. Entries include abstracts in English. Coverage begins with 1967. The online version is more up to date than the print version (MM-REF ML1 .R5). RILM stands for Répétoire International de Littérature Musicale. For more information, see www.rilm.org.

Search Tips

• Truncation symbol: *. Wildcard: ?, *.
• To switch between Quick and Advanced searches, click Change Search & Display Level—the gray button on the far right
• Use Advanced Search to limit results to English.

• Music Index Online

  Index to periodical articles on music. Coverage begins with 1979, is international in scope, and includes music of all periods and genres, musical instruments, composers, performers, the music industry, and other music-related topics. In addition to comprehensive coverage of periodicals devoted to music, provides selective indexing of journals in related disciplines and of some general titles. The print version of Music Index (Musicmedia REF ML 118 .M84) goes back to 1949.

  Search Tips

  • Do not use any punctuation other than quotation marks in searches. It may cause a null result.
  • Use quotation marks to indicate exact phrases.
  • $ may be used as a truncation symbol or to replace any number of characters in a term.

    In Expert Search

  • To find citations about a person, search the name as a Subject.
  • To find citations about a composition, search the work's title as a Title.
  • If you leave the Word Form Options set to Boolean (the default), all forms of the search term will be retrieved. E.g., a search on sing will include results also for sings, sang, singer, and singing.
  • With the Boolean option mentioned above, you may use operators (such as and, or, not) in your search.

• International Index to Music Periodicals

  Indexes articles from more than 430 music periodicals from about 20 countries, and selectively indexes some newspapers. Coverage begins with 1996 except for selected journals which are indexed in their entirety. Abstracts are provided for articles published after 1995.

• RISM: International Inventory of Musical Sources, Series A II: Music Manuscripts after 1600

An inventory and index to extant music manuscripts created between 1600 and 1800 that can be attributed to a single composer.  Identifies the holding library for each manuscript.