Databases
Best Bets for Music
Not sure where to begin? Try these first.
A comprehensive guide to music periodicals and literature featuring digitized content from 1970 to present. Formerly The Music Index Online, this database contains cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts of articles about music, musicians, and the music industry for more than 475 periodicals, as well as book reviews, obituaries, news, and selective coverage for more than 230 periodicals.
Topics concerned with every aspect of the classical and popular world of music are thoroughly categorized and organized according to the framework of an internal Subject List which includes both Geographical and Subject Headings. The thoroughness of indexing and subject heading research, along with comprehensive coverage of the music field, makes Music Index an invaluable resource for both the novice scholar and the experienced academic.
Music Online: Listening provides high quality streaming audio to support the teaching and research of music. It currently provides over 11 million audio tracks, across all the key musical genres, and is growing as new recordings are added. Users will find recordings of classical, folk, world, jazz, and popular music from the world’s best labels, including Hänssler Classic, Chandos, Smithsonian Folkways, and more.
This resource incorporates Smithsonian Global Sound as well as these other collections:
Online collection of recorded sound, including folk, popular, classical and world music, speeches, and oral histories, delivered via streaming audio.
Browse by musical instrument, geographic area, or topic, e.g. American folk traditions, blues, bluegrass and old-time country, American Indian traditions, world traditions (by continent), jazz, classical, spoken word, sound effects.
Historical content includes: ballads from the American Revolution, War of 1812, or the American Civil War; freedom and protest songs from the Civil Rights era; songs from the Slave Coast; Canada's history in song. Spoken word content includes: speeches, biography, memoir, drama (e.g. ancient Greek tragedies), poetry, language instruction.
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