Beginning Music Research

Books and Media

ALEPH: Reed Library's online catalog -- find books, scores and sound recordings owned by Reed Library.
WorldCat: Locate materials in other libraries worldwide. Especially useful when requesting materials through InterLibrary Loan.
SUNY Union Catalog: Search additional library catalogs within SUNY.
IDS Search: Find books & media from your library, New York state libraries, or worldwide. Especially useful when requesting materials through InterLibrary Loan - searches "Quick Delivery" libraries by default.

The Music Index (via EBSCOHost): Look for article citations in over 800 international music journals. Indexes articles from 1975 to the present. Includes links to some full-text articles.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (via EBSCOHost): Search for peer-reviewed article citations in over 500 international scholarly journals, book chapters, and other resources. Each citation includes a full abstract of the material in English. Indexes materials from 1967 to the present. Includes links to some full-text articles.
JSTOR: Provides a comprehensive full-text backfile of major scholarly journals in the Arts and Sciences, including Music. The most recent volumes of each journal are not available, however; most journals have a "moving wall" or "embargo" of three to five years, depending on the publisher.

Oxford University Press Databases

Oxford Music Online (NEW gateway to Grove Music Online): The most comprehensive English language music reference resource on the web. Offers users the ability, for the first time ever, to access and cross-search the vast resources of Oxford's music reference collection in one location. The cornerstone of Oxford Music Online, Grove Music Online, has been completely redesigned with a number of functional enhancements and new content. Updated monthly. Reed Library's subscription includes access to Grove Music Online, Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., revised, and Oxford Companion to Music.
A Dictionary of Opera Characters, 2nd edition: A unique and authoritative A-Z reference work that will answer all your questions on who's who in opera.
The Grove Book of Operas, 2nd edition: This reference work contains a collection of plot synopses and descriptions for over 250 operas.
The New Grove Book of Opera Singers, 2nd edition: A companion work to the Grove Book of Operas, this volume is an alphabetically arranged collection of authoritative biographies of opera singers.

Alexander Street Press Databases

African American Music Reference: Offers essays covering blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of African American musical expression.
Classical Music Reference Library: Contains reference materials spanning the entire history of Western classical music. Included are the authoritative reference titles Baker's Dictionary of Music, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music.
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online: A comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world's peoples. More than 9,000 pages of material, combined with entries by more than 700 expert contributors from all over the world, make this the most complete body of work focused on world music.

Print Dictionaries in Reed Library's Music Reference Collection: The Music Reference Collection contains most of the standard music reference dictionaries for music (e.g., New Grove Dictionary, The Harvard Dictionary of Music, Dictionary of Music Education, etc.). Click on the link to find a complete listing of music dictionaries from the library's online catalog.

Naxos Music Library: Listen to streaming audio of classical and other music from the Naxos label and from many other independent labels. Huge database of classical works.
DRAM: DRAM offers high-quality streaming audio, complete and original liner notes and essays from New World Records, Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI) and other important labels.The focus of this resource is on music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Classical Music Library: The world's largest multi-label database of Classical music recordings for listening and learning in libraries. The ever-expanding collection of 50,000-plus tracks includes recordings from some of the world's greatest labels. Coverage includes music from the Medieval period to the present.
Jazz Music Library: This database is the largest and most comprehensive collection of traditional and contemporary jazz available online.
Smithsonian Global Sound - A virtual audio encyclopedia of the world's indigenous musical and aural traditions.
American Song - A historical database of the music from America's past.
Contemporary World Music - This database delivers the contemporary sounds of all regions from every continent.

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