Music History Resources
Encyclopedias & Dictionaries | Online Indexes | Related Resources | Selected Internet Resources | Internet Indexes to Sources | Professional Organizations | Composer Specific Resources | Other Online Musicology Resources
Encyclopedias & Dictionaries
Online Indexes to Musicology Literature
Related Resources
Tutorial
List of journals included.
Selected Internet Resources
AfriClassical.com : African Heritage in Classical Music - contains biographies, works lists, and discographies of the major composers and performers.
American Music Resource - provides a multi-dimensional source of reference information about all styles of music indigenous to the Western Hemisphere.
American Popular Music before 1900 - A Chronological Subject Guide from Kingwood College Library. This chronologically arranged page is intended as an overview of American History through its music.
ARChive of Contemporary Music - archive, library and research center collecting popular music of all cultures and races from 1950 to the present
Baroque Music - includes information on Baroque performance practice, history, biographies of well-known Baroque composers and musicians and a composers portrait gallery.
Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums online (Bibliography of Music Literature on-line) is an international and interactive bibliography of literature on music. (Staatliches Institut fur Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)
Black Composers Scores - a companion website to Professor Richard Greene's Classical Music Recordings of Black Composers that provides a list of composers names and works that link to WorldCat holdings for each work.
Blackgrooves - provides readers and subscribers with monthly updates on interesting new releases and quality reissues in all genres, including gospel, blues, jazz, funk, soul, and hip-hop-as well as classical music composed or performed by black artists (Archives of African American Music and Culture, Indiana University)
Classical Music Recordings of Black Composers : a Reference Guide - a comprehensive guide to the recorded works available on compact disc from 1990 to the present compiled by Professor Richard Greene.
Contemporary Music - The gateway to contemporary music in France is a search engine for art music resources from 1945 to this day held by French institutions.
Diaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collection - the collection has approximately 100,000 items that span the history of popular Cuban and other Latin Music. (Florida International University Libraries)
Gallery Music - English church and chapel music of the 1700s and early 1800s.
Gilmore Performing Arts Library Letters Database - this online collection includes unique letters from/to composers and musical performers, from the Performing Arts Library's Miscellaneous Letters and Documents collection. The collection constitutes of manuscript letters from many of the greatest names of the classical music canon such as Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, and Tchaikovsky as well as famed American composers like Elliott Carter, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, and many others.
Harmonia : Early Music - a weekly one-hour radio program, that brings the music of earlier periods to life for radio audiences, as performers of today cast new light on the music of the distant past. (Indiana Public Media)
Hautboy.org - Stephen Hammer's Baroque oboe site ; a resource site for the community of hautboy players and builders
Historic Brass Bibliography, 1988-96 - covers writings about Western brass instruments and their makers, making, original performance situations, performers, performance practices, repertory, and depiction in works of art through the nineteenth century. (Compiled by David Lasocki, Indiana University)
Jazz Research Guide (Harvard College Libraries)
Lied and Art Song Texts - first-line index with full texts (when permissible), browseable by composer or poet.
MetOpera Database - information on all performances since 1883. (Metropolitan Opera Archives)
Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (University of Copenhagen, Institute for Greek and Latin)
Music Information Centre Norway - contains information on Norwegian music, muscians and composers.
Musical Instruction and Musical Learning (MIML), 1450-1650 - a bibliography of secondary sources on how music was taught and learned during the two-century period 1450 to 1650, elucidating aspects such as the institutions, traditions, and practices of musical pedagogy in the Early Modern Period. (Vanderbilt University)
Musikanalyse.de - bibliographies, discographies, and works summaries for individual musical compositions. (Forum Musikbibliothek)
OperaGlass - libretti, synopses and sources, performance histories, discographies. (Stanford University)
Perspectives on Medieval Repertory (by Todd M. McComb)
Pop and Rock Music Subject Guide (MIT Libraries)
Rap and Hip Hop Resources (Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago)
Sixteenth Century Ballads - the goal of this project is to produce a collection of "interesting" ballads from before 1600, containing sheet music and lyrics, both in their original form, and in a form intelligible to a modern listener (by Greg Lindahl)
Smithsonian Jazz Portal - oral histories, research collections, jazz education resources
Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum - an evolving database of the entire corpus of Latin music theory written during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. (Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music)
Wesleyan Virtual Instrument Museum - descriptions, photos, audio, video (Music Department, Wesleyan University)
Internet Indexes to Sources
British Song - index of songs composed from the late 16th century to the present
Canadian Music Periodical Index - Citations from over 600 Canadian music periodicals, from the late 19th century to the present
CANTUS - A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant
Cleveland Orchestra Program Notes - an index of the complete program notes (and subsequently, the performances) of the Cleveland Orchestra.
Concert Programmes Project Online Database - descriptions of collections in the UK and Ireland
Hymn Tune Index - tunes associated with pre-1821 English-language hymns (University of Illinois)
Medieval Manuscripts in Dutch Collections - index of pre-1550 western medieval manuscripts (Koninklijke Bibliotheek)
Medieval Music Database - 14th century music and liturgical chant; transcriptions, links to digital copies (La Trobe University)
Renaissance Liturgical Prints - a database of information about worship books printed before 1601. (University of Michigan in Ann Arbor)
Professional Organizations
American Institute for Verdi Studies
American Institute of Musicology
American Musical Instrument Society
American Musicological Society
Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Inc. (ARSC)
The Banff Centre Music and Sound
Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation
Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities
Center for Black Music Research (CBMR)
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA)
Centro Studi Giacomo Puccini (Lucca, Italy)
Gesellschaft der Orgelfreunde (The Society of the Friends of the Organ)
International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM)
International Association for the Study of Popular Music
International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA)
International Computer Music Association (ICMA)
International Musicological Society
IRCAM: Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Paris, France)
Music, Mind, Machine: Computational Modeling of Musical Knowledge and Cognition
Music Publishers Association (includes Copyright Clearing House)
Repertoire International de la Litterature Musicale (RILM)
Repertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM)
Society for Eighteenth-Century Music
Society for Seventeenth-Century Music
Composer Specific Resources
Leroy Anderson -- American Composer of Light Concert Music
Johann Sebastian Bach
- Bach Archiv Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany)
- Bach Bibliography (by Malcolm Vincent)
- Bach Digital - a digital library of autograph manuscripts and original parts
- J.S. Bach Archive and Bibliography (by Jan Koster)
- J.S. Bach Catalog of Works and Sources - Database of the works of Bach and their handwritten Sources till 1850. (Gottinger Bach-Katalog; Bach-Archiv Leipzig)
- J.S. Bach Home Page (by Jan Hanford and Jan Koster)
Leonardo Balada (catalan)
Sir Arnold Bax Web site (by Richard Adams)
Bela Bartok (Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography)
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (Library of Congress)
Ludwig van Beethoven
- Beethoven Gateway - index of books, articles, scores, and other materials (The Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies - San Jose State University)
- Digital Beethoven House
Leonard Bernstein
- Official Leonard Bernstein Web Site
- Leonard Bernstein's Boston Years - Team Research in a Harvard Classroom (Havard University)
- Leonard Bernstein Collection (Library of Congress)
Benjamin Britten
- Benjamin Britten (by Scott Eric Smith)
- Benjamin Britten Thematic Catalog BETA (developed and hosted by the Britten-Pears Foundation)
- Britten-Pears Foundation
- Britten Concert Programmes Catalogue and Performance Database (developed and hosted by the Britten-Pears Foundation)
Anton Bruckner
John Cage
- James Pritchett's John Cage Page - texts about Cage, including a book-length survey of his entire work.
- John Cage : About the Composer (PBS.org)
- John Cage Database
- John Cage (New Albion Records)
- SILENCE : the John Cage Discussion List
Marc Antoine Charpentier (French)
Carlos Chavez (by John Craton)
George Crumb : the Official Home Page
Cesar Cui (Opera @ Stanford)
Gabor Darvas (Hungarian composer)
David Dzubay (Composer/Conductor)
Edward Elgar (Elgar Society and Elgar Foundation)
George and Ira Gershwin
GlassPages: Philip Glass on the Web
Percy Aldridge Grainger
- International Percy Grainger Society
- The Grainger Museum - The University of Melbourne Library (Victoria, Australia))
- The Percy Grainger Society (Bardic Edition Music Publishers)
Mark Gresham (composer/conductor)
George Frideric Handel
- Gfhandel.org
- Handel Reference Database (Compiled/transcribed by Ilias Chrissochoidis)
David Earl Holt Collection (University of North Texas Performing Arts Library)
Charles Ives (The Charles Ives Society)
Leos Janacek
- Leos Janacek (by Gavin Plumley)
- Leos Janacek Memorial (Archives at The Moravian Museum)
George Lloyd (The George Lloyd Society)
Jean-Baptiste Lully Collection (University of North Texas Performing Arts Library)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- European Mozart Ways - Mozart's life and travels; translated, annotated editions of his letters
- The Mozart Project (by Steve Boerner)
- Neue Mozart-Ausgabe -- informations about the status of the edition and a database of all autographs by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (going to be ampliated), plus an index of his works as edited by the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe
Juan Orrego-Salas (Indiana University School of Music)
Vernon Perdue Davis Collection (Old Dominion University Library)
Serge Prokofiev (The Serge Prokofiev Association)
Sergei Rachmaninoff (The Rachmaninoff Society)
Arnold Schoenberg
- Arnold Schoenberg Archives (University of Southern California)
- Arnold Schoenberg Center
Franz Schubert (The Schubert Institute, London, England)
Clara Wieck Schumann (by David Kenneth Smith)
Alexander Scriabin (Scriabin Society of America)
James Sellars (Hog River Music)
Dmitri Shostakovich (DSCH Journal)
Jean Sibelius
- Jean Sibelius (Sibelius Museum)
- Jean Sibelius (Finnish Club of Helsinki)
Robert Simpson (The Robert Simpson Society)
John Philip Sousa (Sponsored by the Dallas Wind Symphony)
William Grant Still (Special Collections Library,Duke University)
The Strauss Family : Johann Strauss I, Johann Strauss II, Joseph Strauss, Eduard Strauss
Ralph Vaughan Williams (The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society)
Heitor Villa-Lobos
- Heitor Villa-Lobos (by Dean Frey, Director of the Red Deer Public Library )
- Villa-Lobos Museum
Kurt Weill (Kurt Weill Foundation for Music)
