Music Library & Sound Recordings Archives

The BGSU Libraries subscribe to several databases and indexes for music users.  Click on the titles below to link to these products.

See our Research Guides for detailed information on finding information for a particular topic

General Music Reference

Oxford Music Online 
Oxford Music Online is a portal that provides access to four music reference sources: Grove Music Online , The Encyclopedia of Popular Music , The Oxford Dictionary of Music , and The Oxford Companion to Music . All four resources can be searched simultaneously.  Grove Music Online contains the complete text of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition (2001), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd Edition (2001), as well as regular updates to those publications. With over 50,000 articles, it is the largest English-language music reference source. The Oxford Dictionary of Music (2006) has content geared toward undergraduates and general users, while The Oxford Companion to Music is a more comprehensive reference work with over 8,000 entries on composers, performers and musical works and genres. The Encyclopedia of Popular Music contains authoritative biographies of rock, pop and jazz artists as well as articles on a variety of popular genres, and covers popular music from 1900 to the present.

IPA Source: IPA Transcriptions and Literal Transcriptions of Songs and Arias 
IPA Source includes over 4,500 texts, including over 750 arias. Users may search by composer, poet, or title, or search specifically by opera aria or Latin text. The database also includes tools to help with diction and sound recordings of texts in Latin, Italian, German and French intended for pronunciation help for the singer.    

Rock and Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest: Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975
"Rock and Roll explores the dynamic period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. The resource offers thousands of colour images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia from this exciting period in our recent history. Explore our interactive chronology to learn a wealth of fascinating facts, take a tour of our visual resources, and watch video footage to experience the spectacular sights and sounds of the period for yourself." --website

Online Listening

Naxos Music Library 
NAXOS Music Library Includes more than 35,000 CDs from several genres, including classical music, jazz, world/folk music, new age, pop and rock, and Chinese music.  New content is added monthly.  Additional information about works includes opera synopses and libretti, composer and artist biographies, and instrumentation.  .See Naxos’s homepage for details on system requirements, and check the ML/SRA blog for troubleshooting tips.  Professors may use Naxos to create playlists centered around a course’s content.

DRAM
DRAM (formerly the Database of Recorded American Music) is a collection of sound recordings documenting music largely ignored by the commercial recording companies. Works can be browsed by work, album or track titles, as well as by artist roles, instrumentation, and date of recording and composition. Some biographical and role information are provided for artists.

American Song
American Song includes recordings of tens of thousands of songs relating to a wide range of American social and ethnic groups, social movements, and historical periods.  Included are songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys.  There are songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and anti-war protests.  The genres encompass country, folk, bluegrass, Western, old time, blues, gospel, shape-note singing, doo-wop, Motown, R&B, soul, funk, and others on a variety of labels, including Rounder and Smithsonian Folkways.  To get a persistent link, simply click on the "Embed/Link" icon when you're viewing information about an album.

 
See our Listen Online page for more information on Naxos, DRAM, and American Song as well as links to free online audio content.

Finding Music Articles

Music Index 
The Music Index Online contains citations from more than 875 international music journals including history, theory, performance, ethnomusicology, education, and popular music. It also includes citations for dissertations, reviews, and obituaries.

RILM Abstracts 
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature is an international bibliography of scholarly writings on music and related disciplines. RILM provides a broad, international coverage and concise abstracts. All scholarly works are indexed (articles, books, bibliographies, catalogues, dissertations, Festschriften, films and videos, iconographies, critical commentaries to complete works, ethnographic recordings, conference proceedings, reviews, etc.). Concert reviews, recording notes, pedagogical manuals, etc. are indexed if they are of scholarly interest.

JSTOR 
JSTOR includes image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, demography, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each title.  Once you're in JSTOR, click on the "Browse" button, then on the link for "Music" to see a list of music periodicals represented in this source.

Humanities International Complete 
Humanities International Complete includes indexing for over 2,100 international humanities journals (data from the Humanities International Index) as well as some additional full-text. Full text for over 900 journals in fields such as history, music, literature, philosophy and religion appears in this database. To see what music content is indexed, click on the "Publications" tab, type "music" in the search box, then the radial button next to "By Subject & Description," and then "Browse."

Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is a multi-disciplinary full-text database that includes more than 7,000 full-text journals, of which nearly 6,000 are peer-reviewed (scholarly). An additional 11,000 journals are indexed in this database, many of which include descriptions, or abstracts, of published articles. Indexing for an additional 11,000+ monographs, reports, conference proceedings, and other kinds of publications is also included. To see what music content is indexed, click on the "Publications" tab, type "music" in the search box, then the radial button next to "By Subject & Description," and then "Browse."

Project Muse 
Project Music is an interdisciplinary collection of over 400 high quality, scholarly (peer reviewed) journals in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. All titles are full text.  Click on the "Browse Journals by Discipline" link and select "Music" to see which music journals are included.

Rock's Backpages 
Rock's Backpages indexes "major rock music magazines" from the US and UK. BGSU does not subscribe to the full text, but articles you find here are likely to be available in print at  the ML/SRA (see our Music Periodicals research guide for more details on our periodicals holdings).  Copies of individual articles are available for purchase.
Coverage:  c. 1970 to present

RoJaRo-Index 
The RoJaRo (Rock, Jazz, Roots, etc.) Index is a free "searchable key to articles, discographies, live-/ record-reviews etc published in the music press worldwide including fanzines...."  Currently, users may only search by artist or group names.  This is an index only, but articles you find here are likely to be available in print at  the ML/SRA (see our Music Periodicals research guide for more details on our periodicals holdings).
Coverage:  1992 to present

International Bibliography of Theater and Dance 
This source indexes and provides full text for journal articles, books, book articles and dissertation abstracts on all aspects of theatre and performance in 126 countries.
Coverage: 1983 to present

Finding Music Dissertations

Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology 
Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology Online is a bibliography of completed dissertations and an index to dissertations-in-progress in music reported since 1995. Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology Online includes all records previously published in printed editions of Doctoral Dissertations in Music. Entries are arranged primarily in broad chronological categories such as Middle Ages, Baroque, etc.
Coverage: 1984 to present

Dissertation Abstracts 
Dissertation Abstracts (ProQuest Dissertations & Theses) contains more than 2 million entries for doctoral dissertations and master's theses. The database includes citations for materials ranging from the first U.S. dissertation, accepted in 1861, to those accepted as recently as last semester. Since 1997, new publications have been available electronically, and many publications can be ordered through the system for a fee. The database represents the work of authors from over 1,000 North American graduate schools and European universities.
Coverage: 1861 to present