Music: Encyclopedias, Dictionaries & Reference

Oxford Music Online, 2nd edition, (formerly Grove Music Online) is a scholarly encyclopedia of music including biographies of composers, performers and writers on music, as well as articles on styles, terms, genre, concepts, acoustics, notation, and instruments, their makers and performance practice. Coverage ranges from classical music to ancient music, opera, church music, popular music, light music, jazz, and world musics from many regions, countries and cities. Articles are accompanied by links to digital images, digital sound and related Internet sites.

Searches The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2 ed.), The Grove Dictionary of Instruments (2 ed), The Oxford Companion to Music and The Oxford Dictionary of Music

Comprehensive online encyclopedia devoted to music research of all the world's peoples. Each volume has an overview of a geographic region; a survey of the region?s musical heritage, traditions and themes; and a description of its musical genres, practices, and performances. Detailed photographs show musicians, musical instrument, and the cultural context of dances, rituals, and ceremonies. Other images include drawings, maps, and musical examples for further study.

Comprehensive collection of materials for the study of music, covering every time period, genre, cultural group, and geographic region. Includes reference works for world music, African American Music and classical music.

Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical aesthetic position with respect to individual works, a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. It also describes how the context of each stylistic period--key cultural, historical, social, economic, and scientific events--influenced and directed compositional choices. [from Oxford University Press website]

IPA Source provides singers access to over 2,300 phonetic transcriptions of operatic arias and art song texts and, where appropriate, literal translations of foreign language texts. Phonetic transcriptions utilize the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols. The goal of IPA Source is to promote the comprehension and accurate pronunciation of foreign language texts in art song and opera in order that the singer may imbue each syllable with the appropriate emotional content.?

Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, this database is comprised of over 60 field collections from ethnomusicologists dating from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. The audio recordings, videos, field notebooks and journals in this resource document musical traditions and how music interacts with different societies and cultures all over the globe. There are recordings from Alaska to the Pacific Islands, West Africa to Indonesia, including religious music, secular music, celebrations and funerals. There are interviews with musicians, slides and photographs of field sites and photographs of instruments.

RISM Series A/II: Music Manuscripts after 1600 is the most comprehensive annotated index and guide to music manuscripts produced after 1600. RISM (Repertoire International Des Sources Musicales) brings together more than 380,000 works by over 18,000 composers into one database which can be easily searched. The manuscripts are found in over 595 libraries and archives in 31 countries including: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Russia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, Uruguay and USA.

The Music manuscript database is linked to three other databases providing additional information: Composer, Library Sigla and Bibliographic Citations. (Occasionally, these databases include information from other RISM series too.) Individual manuscript citations also include musical incipits of individual movements of the cited work.

Key resources include

• RISM A/II: Music Manuscripts After 1600
• RISM U.S. Libretto Database
• RISM Library Directory
• RISM Bibliographic Citations Database

Biography and Genealogy Master Index (in Gale Directory Library) helps you determine where to find biographical information on people from all time periods, geographical locations, and fields of endeavor. BGMI indexes thousands of biographical encyclopedias that are mostly available in hardcopy in the library.

These biographical entries are given context with links to related figures as well as published articles about the person.