LibGuides: Music: Online Resources

Core Resources

Oxford Music Online
Incorporating Grove Music Online (the definitive music reference source in the English language) Oxford Music online provides access to more than 57,000 articles written by some 6,000 scholars. This is a great starting point for almost any music research project.
Music Periodicals Database (ProQuest)
Music Periodicals Database is the only electronic index with abstracts to current music periodicals. New journals are added with the advice of the MPD Advisory Board. The database contains over 600,000 records, with complete runs of over ten important titles, such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Notes. MPD provides both current and retrospective coverage. IIMP offers the most extensive backfile available electronically, with over 235,000 records from 1874 to 1996.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (EBSCO)
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, a comprehensive, ongoing guide to publications on music from all over the world, is an indispensable tool for scholars, students, librarians, performers, teachers, and music lovers.
JSTOR
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. Recent articles are generally not available.

Video

Medici.tv
Video on demand. Includes hundreds of concerts, recitals, operas, documentaries, master classes, etc. Performances are from classical music festivals all over the world.
Met Opera on Demand
Enjoy unlimited access to more than 450 extraordinary Met performances.
Music Online: Opera in Video
This database will contain 250 of the most important opera performances, captured on video through staged productions, interviews, and documentaries. Selections represent the world’s best performers, conductors, and opera houses and are based on a work’s importance to the operatic canon.

Audio Online

Naxos Music Library
Naxos Music Library [NML] is the world's largest online classical music library. The library offers the catalogs of more than 50 classical, jazz and world music labels with more labels joining every month. Among the labels whose catalogs are included in the service are leading independent classical labels such as BIS, Chandos, CPO, Haenssler, Hungaroton, Marco Polo, Vanguard Classics, VOX, and of course Naxos. World music content is provided by ARC, Celestial Harmonies and others.
Music Online: Classical Music Library
This database is the world's largest multi-label database of Classical music recordings for listening and learning in libraries.Coverage includes music written from the earliest times (e.g. Gregorian Chant) to the present, including many contemporary composers. Repertoire ranges from vocal and choral music, to chamber, orchestral, solo instrumental, and opera.
Music Online: Jazz Music Library
Music Online: Jazz Music Library is the largest and most comprehensive collection of streaming jazz available online — with thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres.
Music Online: Popular Music Library
Music Online: Popular Music Library from Alexander Street contains a wide range of popular music from around the world, including hundreds of thousands of tracks from major genres in pop music, including alternative, country, Christian, electronic, hip-hop, metal, punk, new age, R&B, reggae, rock, soundtracks and many more.
Music Online: Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries
This database is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. The collection provides educators, students, and interested listeners with an unprecedented variety of online resources that support the creation, continuity, and preservation of diverse musical forms.

International Phonetic Alphabet for Singers

SingersBabel
Great singers throughout the centuries have shared a common goal: to gain an awareness of the synergy of words and music in order to communicate a deeper understanding of the work with the audience, to be expressive, and to sing beautifully. SingersBabel is dedicated to helping musicians achieve this fundamental goal by integrating traditional teaching tools with established technology.
IPASource
IPA Source is the web's largest library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts.

Musical Scores Online

Music Online: Classical Scores Library
This database contains 400,000 pages of the most important classical scores and manuscripts, allowing for the study and analysis of more than 15,000 scores.
IMSLP: International Music Score Library Project
A virtual library containing all public domain musical scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge.
LibraryMusicSource.com
LibraryMusicSource.com is assembled from catalog of CD Sheet Music, LLC. Includes masterworks for piano, organ, classical guitar, strings, winds, voice, chorus and study scores. Includes performance parts!
Neue Mozart-Ausgabe / Digital Mozart Edition
The digitized version offers the musical text and the critical commentaries of the entire Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, edited by the Internationale Stiftung Mozart in cooperation with the Mozart cities of Augsburg, Salzburg, and Vienna

Primary Resources

Library of Congress - Music Treasure Consortium
The Library of Congress Online Catalog is a database of books, serials, computer files, manuscripts, cartographic materials, music, sound recordings, and visual materials in the Library's collections.

New York Philharmonic Digital Archives

Works by Ludwig van Beethoven
Features explanations and listening samples as well as important documents related to the pieces and now owned by the Beethoven-Haus: 300 manuscripts from Beethoven (autographs), copies by professional copyists and drafts, 800 first publications as well as work related letters and pictures. For each document, visitors can read and listen to scientific and interesting information.

Reference and General Information

Oxford Music Online
The authoritative resource for music research with over 57,000 articles written by over 6,000 scholars charting the diverse history, theory and cultures of music around the globe.
Oxford History of Western Music
The Oxford History of Western Music online offers an unmatched account of the evolution of Western classical music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time, Richard Taruskin.

Jazz History Timeline
A chronological outline featuring some of the most influential figures in Jazz

Credo Reference Music
Credo Reference helps you start your research in music with subject-specific dictionaries, biographies of musicians, and guides to famous works.
Music Online: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online is the first 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.
WorldCat
WorldCat, or World Catalogue, developed by OCLC, is North American-centric, covering collections of small and medium-sized libraries, as well as those of larger ones. It includes some libraries abroad as well. It is the mega-database libraries turn to for definitive citation information and information on interlibrary loan availability.

RISM
The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) - International Inventory of Musical Sources - is an international, non-profit organization that aims to comprehensively document extant musical sources worldwide: manuscripts, printed music editions, writings on music theory, and libretti that are found in libraries, archives, churches, schools, and private collections. The RISM Catalog of Musical Sources contains over 1.2 million records and can be searched at no cost. RISM was founded in Paris in 1952 and is the largest and only global organization that documents written musical sources. RISM records what exists and where it can be found.
Vocal Music Instrumentation Index - Baroque
Over 3000 movements of Baroque music, browsable by instrumentation and text.

Music Theory

Guitar Junky's Music Theory Fundamentals
Some music theory basics, viewed through guitar-colored glasses.