Photo of Gabe M. Wiener Music & Arts Library, courtesy Columbia Libraries
Some of these online encyclopedias and reference sources may be good starting-points for research!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
While the largest collection of books on music is at Columbia's Music & Arts Library, Barnard and Butler both have collections of music books. In the Library of Congress Classification system the majority of music books and sheet music fall within three areas:
While many sound recordings and videos are available online, the majority of classical, jazz, folk, pre-21st century popular music, and video recordings are still only available in hard-copy, most often due to licensing and rights issues. In addition, streaming quality is often lower-quality more compressed. You can find CDs, LPs (records), VHS and DVDs in CLIO.
It's not always obvious what format a recording is in. The collection contains some LPs, LaserDisc, and VHS. LPs will include in their description the phrase "analog, 33 1/3 rpm" while CDs will be listed as being 4 3/4 in. The call numbers for recordings will also normally include their format. See screenshots below for examples.
Sound recordings can come in four formats in CLIO:
Barnard Library has portable CD/DVD drives that can be checked out at the circulation desk for four hours at a time. The drives work on both Macs and Windows, and connect via an attached USB cable. No software is required to use them! They can be used with a personal computer or a library lab computer.
The Barnard Library has four media viewing stations on the south side of the Milstein Center second floor (see floorplan) - these are able to play both VHS and DVDs.
Viewing stations are located in Butler 401 (the Periodicals & Microform Reading Room) and support the playback of multiple visual and audio formats. Equipment includes multi-standard VCRs, multi-standard and multi-code DVD players, audiocassette players, and a laserdisc/DVD/CD player. Two viewing stations are equipped with Blu-ray players.
Priority is given to patrons viewing course-related films.
"Sheet music" and "music score" are often used interchangeably, although "scores" can also be used to refer to sheet music that is bound together and contains multiple parts on one page (e.g., vocals and instrumentals all printed together). This guide refers to "sheet music" as the more generic form.
The sheet music collections are housed at Columbia's Gabe M. Wiener Music and Arts Library.
Offering over 40,000 sheet music titles, Naxos Sheet Music delivers digital sheet music in all classical genres, spanning music from Medieval to the 21st century and composers from Bach to Arvo Pärt. Music can be downloaded and printed, and many works can also be transposed into any key or clef.
NOTE: Use the "Search" tab to find scores and articles. A database of music scores and commentary containing representative vocal and instrumental compositions from antiquity through the nineteenth century. The database has been designed for customized use in music history classes. Searching criteria include composer, title, genre, language, historical period and language. All selections are available for printing.
BabelScores is a French-based structure arising from the need to diffuse and promote contemporary music from the last 40 years, rendering information more easily available to everyone worldwide. Looks into and selects the works of the most creative, original and innovative composers of the past few decades offering a wide catalogue and setting up a powerful circulation platform without any restrictions and especially addressed to instrumentalists, ensembles, orchestras, composers, musicologists, conservatories, universities and festivals throughout the world
These databases also contain some digital sheet music/scores, but in addition to other document types.
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.
One of the biggest problems in searching for pieces of music is that the titles are tricky. A distinctive title such as Lincoln Portrait is easy enough—but how many works are called Symphony? Thousands! How about variations such as Sinfonia, Symphonie, Sinfonie? What about arrangements of that work for piano four-hands or for wind band?
The uniform title was developed to help with this problem. If you want to know more, please see this tutorial on using preferred titles:
Some of these online encyclopedias and reference sources may be good starting-points for research!
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.
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.
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
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.
These are some selected streaming music & audio databases available to the Barnard/Columbia community. When off-campus, you'll need a UNI to log-in to the databases.
For a full, up-to-date list of video databases that Barnard/Columbia subscribe to, click this CLIO link.
Contains over 7,000 compositions, including classical, folk, opera, jazz, country, early rhythm and blues, musical theater, experimental music, electronic music, early rock and Native American music from the United States. Labels include New World Records, CRI, Albany, innova, Cedille, XI, Pogus, Deep Listening and Mutable.
Contemporary world music contains 50,000 tracks that delivers the sounds of all regions from every continent. Contains important genres such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz and other genres such as traditional music - Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku and more. This database is a complementary database to Smithsonian global sound for libraries - it includes a blend of contemporary and traditional world music recordings from many labels throughout the world
Delve into the cultural study of music and explore content from across the globe with this diverse and comprehensive collection. Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the material in this collection includes thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, slides, correspondence and ephemera from over 60 fields of study.
Has over 100,000 tracks of jazz music from over 260 labels. The search and play are the same as Naxos Music Library, but to create your own playlists, Naxos Jazz has a separate account.
A performing arts video collection with operas, ballets, documentaries, live concerts, and musical tours of historic places. Users may create their own playlists and custom video clips.
These databases encompass the humanities and other sources in general.
These are just a small selection of music databases. For a more complete listing follow this link.
Contains annotated citations to articles on music and musical life in the nineteenth-century. Provides a cumulative index to international periodicals.
Catalogs music sources of works by individual composers in manuscript format after 1600 and print format before 1800, stored in libraries, archives, monasteries, schools and private collections throughout the world. Database searchable in English, French, Italian, and Spanish.