LibGuides: Music: Getting Started

Research Librarian

She/Her

Email Me

Contact:

Meredith Wisner
Research & Instruction Librarian for the Arts
Office: 306 Milstein

Mon & Wed: Zoom only
Tues, Thurs, Fri: In-person/Zoom

212.854.7652

Subjects: Architecture, Art History, Dance, Film Studies, First-Year Writing, Music, Theatre

Get an NYPL Card!

As a Barnard student you can sign up for New York Public Library (NYPL) card! They're free!

Online (You’ll need to stop by a branch to get the actual card)
At any NYPL branch (bring your student ID)
Or with a Barnard Personal Librarian! PLs all have NYPL cards in our offices (your card won’t be active for about a week)

The NYPL has more than 6 million items circulating, including books, e-books, audiobooks, music, and movies. Thank you to our friends at the George Bruce branch for working with us to make on-campus card signups happen! The NYPL has 92 locations in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The closest branches to Barnard are the Morningside Heights and George Bruce branches.

Gabe M. Wiener Music & Arts Library at Columbia

About the Music and Arts Library

While Barnard does have books about music and many videos of musicals/operas, our friends across the street at Columbia's Music & Arts Library (7th floor of Dodge) have a massive collection of books, sheet music/scores, and sound recordings on CD, in addition to a digital music lab. Books and sheet music are lent out for a semester at a time, while recordings are available to be checked out for 4 weeks at a time.

Photo of Gabe M. Wiener Music & Arts Library, courtesy Columbia Libraries

General Reference Sources

Some of these online encyclopedias and reference sources may be good starting-points for research!

African American Music Reference
African American Music Reference is bringing togther text reference, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies which chronicle the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music. The database is constantly expanding to include comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.
The Garland encyclopedia of world music online
A comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world's peoples. Each volume contains an overview of a geographic region, a survey of its musical heritage, and a description of specific musical genres, practices, and performances. Articles include detailed photographs that show musicians, musical instruments, and the cultural context of dances, rituals, and ceremonies. Other images include drawings, maps, and musical examples for further study. Contains the full text of the 10 volume print encyclopedia.
Music Online: Classical Music Reference Library.
The Classical music reference library brings together reference materials, spanning the entire history of Western classical music. Included are the reference titles Baker's dictionary of music, Baker's biographical dictionary of musicians, Baker's student encyclopedia of music and Women composers: music through the ages. Provides coverage of all classical genres, from the Medieval period to the 21st century.
Oxford Music Online
Includes Grove Music Online, The Oxford Companion to Music, and The Oxford Dictionary of Music, all searchable in one place. Also has detailed subject guides on specific topics within music, each with bibliographies. Articles from specialist dictionaries such as The New Grove Dictionary of Opera and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed.
RILM Music Encyclopedias
A full-text compilation of 45 seminal titles published from 1775 to the present and comprising nearly 80,000 pages, the majority of which are not available anywhere else online. It provides comprehensive encyclopedic coverage of the most important disciplines, fields, and subject areas, among them popular music, opera, instruments, blues, gospel, recorded sound, and women composers. Its content spans multiple countries and languages