Musical scores are invaluable for performing as a musician but are also important when it comes to music research. The Library has options for both physical and e-scores to help meet your performance and research needs!
As part of your library assignment for MUSC 1201, you need to find examples of scores related to your research topic. To keep things simple, try looking for scores of the piece or by the composer who is the focus of your research.
When choosing between physical and digital scores, much of it comes down to personal preference and how you will use the score.
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Like the books in the library, scores are organized using the Library of Congress classification system. Call numbers for books will start with ML or MT, but scores start with only M so they are all grouped together
Searching for scores can be done via Novanet and is very similar to searching books, though with some differences. There are a few tips to keep in mind:
From the Library homepage, click the Advanced Search link below the Novanet search box.
To limit our search just to what we have at MtA, choose Mount Allison in the top search criteria. Unlike books, scores don't have a Material Type filter in the Advanced search, so we will need to add it after we run the search.
Let's say we are looking for a score of Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro. In the first search line, I included the title of the work, both in Italian and English. I separated these by using OR, meaning I want to search for one or the other (you could also search using AND but that would mean it is looking for where both the English and Italian titles appear, which might leave out some results). The second line is where I added Mozart's name as the composer of the work.
You can use the search filters at the start of each line to refine the search, like by title or author. For the first line, we could change the filter to Title and for the second, Author. This would give a more precise search, but let's leave it as is.
As you can see, this search gave us over 18,000 results! This is because it is searching all formats, like books and videos. We can use the Resource Type filter on the left side to filter by format. You might notice that scores isn't there, so we will have to click Show More to expand the list.
Now that the Resource Type filter list is expanded, we can see the option to filter by scores as a format.
We now have a more manageable 46 results. You can see that we have availability info that shows that some scores we have on the shelf with a call number or scores we have online with links to access them. What about the second result where it says "15 versions found"? Let's investigate!
You'll see now that among those 15 grouped results, the first 5 are videos! What's going on?
Novanet tries to automatically group items it thinks are of the same work (in this case The Marriage of Figaro). Sometimes this is helpful but sometimes it can make things a bit confusing. In the Resource Type list on the left, you can see this list includes 1 audio recording, 3 books, 6 scores, and 5 videos! Because we want only scores, let's filter for that format.
You will find this happen in Novanet with scores, but sometimes also books with multiple editions or sound recordings where it will group recordings of the same work together. If you don't immediately see what you need, don't give up! You might just need to filter the results again!
Now we have our six scores and we can see that we have lots of different editions of the score in the library! Like the books, scores will include a call number to find it on the shelf and clicking the title or availability links will open a more detailed record for the score with more information, just like books.
