LibGuides: Music: Getting Started

Music Research at Barnard

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.

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

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.

Columbia's Music Library also hosts a series of free (for students and faculty) Music Technology Workshops each semester. Examples of Spring 2019 workshop topics include Ableton Live, digital sampling, guerrilla recording techniques, digital signal processing, mixing workshops, and more.

For other guides in the performing arts, see the links below:

Theatre
by Meredith Wisner Last Updated Apr 4, 2022 98 views this year
Dance
by Meredith Wisner Last Updated Apr 4, 2022 106 views this year
Film Studies
by Meredith Wisner Last Updated Jan 14, 2022 312 views this year

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.
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.
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.
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
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.

Music

Research Librarian

Janet Cardiff - Forty Part Motet

Music Research at Barnard

General Reference Sources