The final push is on!… and here are some reminders of a few music reference resources that may assist you in your work. Please remember that you can contact us by phone (212-854-4711), by email (music@libraries.cul.columbia.edu), or in person during library hours in the Music & Arts Library, 701 Dodge. Please let us know if we can help!
Many basic resources are gathered together in our Quick Reference Guide, including print resources, and electronic text and audio databases, and indexes to music periodical literature. Try starting with this, and if you have further questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Here, in addition, are some more recent resources, not yet listed in our Quick Reference Guide:
- African American Music Reference – includes “…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.”
- Encyclopedia of Popular Music – covers popular music genres and periods from 1900 to the present day, including jazz, country, folk, rap, reggae, techno, musicals, and world music.
- Garland Encyclopedia of World Music – 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.
- Music Online: Classical Music Reference Library – “… brings together more than 30,000 pages of essential reference materials, spanning the entire history of Western classical music, in a unified online database. Included are the authoritative reference titles Baker’s Dictionary of Music, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and Baker’s Student Encyclopedia of Music, which are available for the first time in electronic form”.
- Opera in Video – database of streaming video of full operas, currently comprising 42 titles.
- Rock’s Back Pages – rock reviews, articles and interviews from the late 1950s to the present day.