Mount A Libraries: Music Subject Guide: Web Sources

Key Online Resources for Music

Grove Music Online This link opens in a new window
Part of Oxford Music Online, Grove Music Online is the authoritative resource for music research with over 51,000 articles written by nearly 9,000 scholars charting the diverse history, theory and cultures of music around the globe.
Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window
Includes the Oxford Dictionary of Music, the Oxford Companion to Music, and Grove Music Online. Grove is the most comprehensive source of the three, and may be easier to search on its own for some topics. To do so, use the Grove Music Online link in the A-Z list.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive international bibliography of music literature including articles, books, conference proceedings, bibliographies, catalogues, theses, reviews, etc. Coverage: from 1967; currency of title coverage varies.
ProQuest (All Databases) This link opens in a new window
Search all ProQuest databases simultaneously: ABI, Canadian Research Index, CBCA, Periodicals Archive Online, the Politics Collection (PAIS, Policy File Index, Political Science Database, Worldwide Political Abstracts), Philosopher's Index, ProQuest Central, Research Library, and the Historical Newspapers collections of the Globe & Mail (1844-2013) and Toronto Star (1894-2015).
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full-text archive of journals in the Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences and Sciences. Current and recent volumes (last 2 to 5 years) not available for most titles.

Encyclopedia of Popular Music (Oxford Reference Online)
First published in 1992, The Encyclopedia of Popular Music is the largest project ever undertaken for the subject. This authoritative biographical encyclopedia of rock, pop, and jazz artists covers popular music from 1900 to the present, including folk, blues, world music, rock, heavy metal, techno, reggae, and hip hop. In addition to thousands of biographical entries, this A-Z reference also includes entries covering popular music genres, trends, styles, record lables, venues, and festivals. Key dates, biographies, and further reading are provided for artists covered, along with complete discographies that include record labels, release dates, and a 5-star album rating system. From Grateful Dead to The Killers, from Whitesnake to White Stripes, from R.E.M. to Blink-182, from The Jazz Singer to Jerry Springer - The Opera, and from Bye Bye Birdie to Rent, The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Fourth Edition has something informative and clever to say about everyone's favorite band.
Oxford Bibliographies for Music
Oxford Bibliographies provide authoritative resources on over 250 topics in music. Written and reviewed by academic experts, every article in the database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, containing original commentary and annotations.
Full list of databases for music

Naxos Music Library This link opens in a new window
Streaming audio service; 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.
Naxos Music Library Jazz This link opens in a new window
An extensive collection of jazz music available for streaming.
Naxos Spoken Word Library This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive collection of classic audiobooks and independent publisher productions,
Naxos Video Library This link opens in a new window
Extensive streaming video library of classical music performances, opera, ballet, live concerts and documentaries.
Naxos Music Library World This link opens in a new window
An extensive collection of world music recordings.
AVON via Alexander Street This link opens in a new window
Stream hundreds of informative videos and documentaries. This database provides the abilities to create and customize clips, read along with transcripts, and provides persistent linking for all your research.
Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall This link opens in a new window
**You will need to create a free account to log in and view the library.**
Streamed concerts archived and live performances. Each season, around 40 concerts are broadcast live and they can also be viewed at a later date in the concert archive. The archive contains hundreds of recordings. There are also documentaries and bonus films.
Medici.tv This link opens in a new window
This classical music channel features over 1,800 programs (3,000 original works), including concerts and archived historical concerts, operas, ballets, documentaries, artist portraits, and educational programs and master classes.

The Global Jukebox
The Global Jukebox makes available to the general public, scholars and scientists all of the data and many of the analyses of the research into the expressive arts carried out under the direction of Alan Lomax and the anthropologist Conrad Arensberg from 1960 to 1995 at Columbia University and Hunter College/CUNY. Songs are organized by geography in the Map View, and by culture in the Tree View. Access to some songs is subject to tribal permission.
The Great 78 Project
"The Great 78 Project is a community project for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records. From about 1898 to the 1950s, an estimated 3 million sides (~3 minute recordings) have been made on 78 rpm discs. While the commercially viable recordings will have been restored or remastered onto LP’s or CD, there is still research value in the artifacts and usage evidence in the often rare 78 rpm discs and recordings." Click on Discovery to listen to digitized 78 rpm recordings.

Classical Scores Library This link opens in a new window
Contains 400,000 pages of classical scores from both in-copyright and public domain editions. Works of major and lesser known composers, Renaissance to 21st century.
IMSLP: Petrucci Music Library This link opens in a new window
The International Music Score Library Project features a large and growing collection of downloadable public domain music.
nkoda
Contact the Music Library to set up your free account to get started.
Curate playlists with your favourite editions of works and view them in your personal library across all your devices. Share your markings with your students, orchestra, ensemble or friends via Whatsapp, Facebook or any of your other socials.

IPA Source This link opens in a new window
"The web's largest library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts."
IPANow! Online
IPANow! Online by PhoneticSoft is a one-of-a-kind web application that transcribes English, Latin, Italian, German, Spanish and French texts into International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols by applying rules utilized by scholarly lyric diction textbooks.

Log in information is available via the Libraries & Archives Moodle page.

Music Library Quick Links

Music Subject Guide
This guide is designed to help you find resources and research assistance for topics in Music.
Useful Databases for Music
Find music reference sources, journal articles, streaming audio, music scores online, and more!
Music Department, Mount Allison
Visit the website of the Mount Allison Music Department to find out about events and programs.
Mount Allison Libraries & Archives
Go to the main page of the Libraries and Archives.

Selected Web Resources for Music

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.
The Canadian Encyclopedia Online/ L'Encycloplédie canadienne en ligne
Online access to the full text of The Canadian Encyclopedia. In English and French.
Canadian Music Centre (CMC)
Find biographical information, scores & parts, recordings for many contemporary and historic Canadian composers.
CMC - Atlantic Region
Classical Net
Lots of information about "classical" music, and a free online radio.

Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology This link opens in a new window
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.

LiederNet
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.
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.
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 8,000 print and online sources, basic introductions to reference tools, links to unpublished bibliographies, and a blog.

RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) This link opens in a new window
Vast catalogue of musical sources, primarily manuscripts created prior to 1800, reflecting the holdings of hundreds of libraries around the world. Most entries include item description, thematic incipits, and the shelfmark identifier of the holding library.

Undergraduate Music Curriculum Research Bibliography
Early in 2018, Tegan Niziol, Gordon E. Smith, and Margaret Walker joined forces to start a team project on current and ongoing conversations around undergraduate music curriculum and programmatic design and reinvention. Starting with the observation that there has been and continues to be considerable research on a range of related issues resulting in presentations, publications, and conference round tables, we began to work on an inventory with a view to creating a living repository. This annotated bibliography including research publications and presentations on undergraduate music curricula in North America is the result.

WorldCat FirstSearch
OCLC Online Union Catalog; on-campus access only.
Library and Archives Canada: Music, Films, Videos, and Sound Recordings
Discover LAC’s extensive collections of research materials on Canadian music, through databases, research aids, and virtual exhibitions.
Voilà - Canada’s National Union Catalogue
Library and Archives Canada’s new catalogue (replacing AMICUS) also includes the holdings of libraries from across Canada.
The European Library
The European Library, part of Europeana, provides access to the holdings of nearly fifty European national libraries. Featured collections include historic newspapers, medieval and renaissance manuscripts, and images, videos, and historical documents from nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century advances in art, science, and technology.
McGill University: Music Library
The Marvin Duchow Music Library is one of the most important academic music collections in Canada. The collection consists of over 200,000 music scores, recordings, books, journals, and online resources. One of the 13 branches of the McGill Library, the Music Library provides resources and services to support the performance, composition, research, and teaching programs of the Schulich School of Music.
University of Toronto Libraries: Music Library
The largest music research collection in Canada, the UT Music Library general collection includes more than 300,000 books, scores, periodicals, and microforms; it also includes a sound archive with 180,000 recordings from cylinders to Blu-ray, and numerous significant Archives Collections.
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.

Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads This link opens in a new window
Access to digitised copies of 30,000 ballads from the sixteenth- to the twentieth-century.
Early Music Online This link opens in a new window
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 This link opens in a new window
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 Sheet Music Collection This link opens in a new window
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.
IMSLP: Petrucci Music Library This link opens in a new window
The International Music Score Library Project features a large and growing collection of downloadable public domain music.
Sheet Music Consortium This link opens in a new window
This site provides access to the sheet music collections of music libraries, including those of York University, the Library of Congress (US), Indiana University, the National Library of Australia.

Library and Archives Canada Sheet Music Collection
Source of sheet music published in Canada before 1921, selected from the digitized portion of Library and Archives Canada’s historical collection.

Sibley Music Library: Musical Scores This link opens in a new window
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.

DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music)
DIAMM "is a leading resource for the study of medieval manuscripts. We present images and metadata for thousands of manuscripts on this website. We also provide a home for scholarly resources and editions, undertake digital restoration of damaged manuscripts and documents, publish high-quality facsimiles, and offer our expertise as consultants." (website)
Gustav Mahler-Alfred Rosé Collection
Digitized versions of 5 music manuscripts from the collection at Western Music Library, including some of the earliest songs composed by Mahler, and the first movement, scherzo, and finale of the earliest extant score of Mahler's 1st Symphony.
Music Treasures Consortium
This cooperative project of several important music libraries "provides online access to the world's most valued music manuscripts and print materials, held at the most renowned music archives, in order to further research and scholarship." Each entry provides a detailed description, with links to digital images provided on the website of the holding library.

CentreStreams (Canadian Music Centre) This link opens in a new window
CMC provides streaming audio access to the archival recordings of several thousand works by Canadian composers. To use this service, you will first need to create a (free) account.
National Jukebox (U.S. Library of Congress) This link opens in a new window
Streamed historic recordings from the vast collections of the Library of Congress.

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.
The Global Jukebox
The Global Jukebox makes available to the general public, scholars and scientists all of the data and many of the analyses of the research into the expressive arts carried out under the direction of Alan Lomax and the anthropologist Conrad Arensberg from 1960 to 1995 at Columbia University and Hunter College/CUNY. Songs are organized by geography in the Map View, and by culture in the Tree View. Access to some songs is subject to tribal permission.
The Great 78 Project
"The Great 78 Project is a community project for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records. From about 1898 to the 1950s, an estimated 3 million sides (~3 minute recordings) have been made on 78 rpm discs. While the commercially viable recordings will have been restored or remastered onto LP’s or CD, there is still research value in the artifacts and usage evidence in the often rare 78 rpm discs and recordings." Click on Discovery to listen to digitized 78 rpm recordings.