Research Subject Guides: Music: Get Started with Research

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Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window
Emphasis on classical music: encyclopedia-type articles about music history, instruments, technology, and people. At its core is the esteemed Grove Music Online, formerly Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Comprises the full text of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London, 2001), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie (London, 1992), and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, second edition, edited by Barry Kernfeld (London, 2002) plus additional resources.
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window
Organized geographically, this is a good starting point for ethnomusicology and comparative music studies.
Sage Research Methods This link opens in a new window
How to do research: project planning and strategies, methods, timelines, ethics, and more.*Recommended:SAGE Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods (Opens in new window).

Use Scholar OneSearch (Opens in new window) to search the Northeastern library's books, articles, audio and video from one search box.

Tip: You can paste the title, author, or DOI of a work into the search box to find a specific citation.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
US and UK trade magazines (1880-2000) covering the vaudeville era to the internet era. Includes Billboard, Variety, Broadcasting, Melody Maker and much more

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
Offers citations and abstracts of articles on international subjects including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, instruments, voice, dance and music therapy. Scholarly journals included. Covers 1969 – the present.
RIPM Jazz Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Facsimiles of 105 full text American jazz journals published between 1914 and 2006. Significant journals include, among others, Cadence, Down Beat, Mississippi Rag, and Record Changer. Images, advertisements included.
Scite.ai This link opens in a new window
An AI-powered research platform that analyzes and provides citation context for scientific papers, helping researchers evaluate the credibility and impact of scholarly articles. Account registration is necessary for some features.
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Archives of African American Music and Culture (Indiana University) (Opens in new window)
A repository of materials covering a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions from the post-World War II era.
Bach Digital (Opens in new window)
Scores, translations of vocal libretti, and secondary research on Johann Sebastian Bach and his sons.
Chopin Early Editions (Opens in new window)
Over 400 first and early editions of Chopin's printed compositions.
Choral Public Domain Library (Opens in new window)
A crowdsourced collection of thousands of choral scores, all of which can be downloaded royalty-free.

Classical Scores Library (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window
Hundreds of thousands of pages of classical music scores. Pages can be printed and annotated.

Digital Scores and Libretti fromthe Loeb Music Library (Harvard University)(Opens in new window)
IMSLP (Opens in new window)
Ad-supported and crowd-sourced library of musical scores and sheet music.
Jewish Choral Music (Opens in new window)
Jewish Choral Music is a comprehensive resource center for anyone interested in discovering a variety of styles: folkloristic, popular, and classical. Chronology spanning ancient chant, baroque motets and cantatas and oratorios, classic/romantic majestic synagogue music, twentieth-and twenty-first-century secular and sacred music.From Zamir Chorale of Boston (Joshua Jacobson).
Juilliard Manuscript Collection (Opens in new window)
Browsable resource presenting digitized versions of 138 original holograph manuscript sources held at the Juilliard Library.
Library of Congress Performing Arts Databases (Opens in new window)
Library of Congress' unsurpassed collections including silent film scores, sheet music, concert recordings, IMSN database, photographs, and more.
Musical Scores (Eastman School of Music) (Opens in new window)
New Mozart Edition (Opens in new window)
Musical text and the critical commentary of the entire New Mozart Edition (Neue Mozart Ausgabe). For personal use, some restrictions apply to the reproduction and reuse.
Sheet Music Consortium (Opens in new window)
A group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music