Research & Subject Guides: Music and Music Education: Getting Started

Databases

Interdisciplinary Databases

African American Music Reference This link opens in a new window
African American Music Reference chronicles the history of African American music: blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights and slave songs, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other musical expressions. The resource also includes discographies and bibliographies along with songsheets, images, and other print resources.
Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
Consists of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures covering 250 years of history. Also presents previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trail transcripts.
International Index to Black Periodicals Full Text This link opens in a new window
IIBP Full Text draws its current content from international scholarly and popular periodicals in Black Studies and contains full-text coverage of core Black Studies periodicals. The database covers a wide array of humanities-related disciplines including art, cultural criticism, economics, education, health, history, language and literature, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and sociology among others.
Music Periodicals Database (Formerly International Index to Music Periodicals Full Text) This link opens in a new window
This database provides indexing and abstracts for several hundred international music periodicals from over 20 countries, plus full text for more than 140 of the indexed journals. The database currently includes over 1.3 million records, the majority from the most recent ten years of publication. Some complete journal runs are included, with indexing back to 1874. Covers the full spectrum of subjects and all aspects of music, including music education, performance, ethnomusicology, musical theatre, theory, popular music forms and composition.
Performing Arts Periodicals (formerly International Index to the Performing Arts Full Text) This link opens in a new window
This database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 395 international periodicals, plus full text for more than 160 of the indexed journals. The database currently includes almost a million records, the majority from the most recent ten years of each journal. Performing Arts Periodicals Database covers a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, circus performance, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television and more.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Currently, Project MUSE Premium Collection offers 300 humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers. Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.
ProQuest Arts & Humanities Database This link opens in a new window
This database features hundreds of titles covering Art, Architecture, Design, History, Philosophy, Music, Literature, Theatre and Cultural Studies. It is designed to complement the following indexes: ABM, Avery, BHA, BHI, DAAI, Index Islamicus, MLA, Philosopher's Index and RILM.

Streaming Audio and Video

Classical Music Library This link opens in a new window
Classical Music Library is an ever-growing, fully searchable database of distinguished classical recordings. It includes tens of thousands of licensed recordings. Included is music from Medieval to contemporary, from choral works to symphonies, operas and the avant-garde.
Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
Films on Demand contains around 1500 videos related to music, including performances, documentaries, music appreciation, music history, and world music.
Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window
Academic Video Online (AVON) contains more than 3,400 videos related to the performing arts. These include performances across a variety of genres, documentaries, and instruction.

Scores

International Music Scores Library Project
An online repository of scores that are available in the public domain.
New York Philarmonic Leon Levy Digital Library
The New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives was launched in February 2011, and currently comprises more than 1.3 million pages, including almost 14,000 printed programs, marked conducting scores, business documents, and photographs. When completed, the online collection will contain every document in the New York Philharmonic Archives from 1842 through 1970, more than 3 million pages — including correspondence, marked scores and parts, contracts, and minutes from meetings of the Board of Directors — as well as all public documents from 1970 through today, including marketing materials, press releases, and annual reports.
Open Music Library
The Open Music Library is an initiative from Alexander Street to build the world’s
largest free index of digital resources for the study of music.
Choral Public Domain Library
Free choral/vocal scores, texts, translations, and other useful information
Sibley Music Library
Scores and books in the public domain. Many of these are unique to the Sibley Music Library collection. From the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.
African American Sheet Music from the Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship
The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. The full collection consists of approximately 500,000 items, of which perhaps 250,000 are currently available for use. It is one of the largest collections of sheet music in any library in the United States. The sheet music, primarily vocal music of American imprint, dates from the 18th century to the present day, with the largest concentration of titles in the period 1840-1950.
Historic Sheet Music Collection (Library of Congress)
This sheet music collection consists of approximately 9,000 items published from 1800 to 1922, although the majority is from 1850 to 1920. The bulk was published in many different cities in the United States, but some of the items bear European imprints. Most of the music is written for voice and piano; a significant minority is instrumental. Notable in this collection are early pieces by Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, as well as music by other popular composers such as Victor Herbert, Jean Schwartz, Paul Dresser, Ernest R. Ball, Gussie L. Davis, Charles K. Harris, and George M. Cohan. Numerous arrangements of classical tunes by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and other famous classical composers are also well-represented.
Open Score Project
OpenScore aims to digitize and liberate all public domain sheet music, including the great classics of Mozart, Beethoven and Bach. With the help of our community, we aim to transfer history’s most influential pieces from paper into interactive scores which you can listen to, edit and share.