Research Guides: Music in the US II: The somewhat hidden universe

Music Quick Links

Allen Music Library Home Page

Frequently Used Resources

Academic Search Complete
A general periodical index that includes music and interdisciplinary topics among many others.
Chicago Manual of Style ONLINE
Dissertations and Theses
Google Scholar with FSU full-text links
Google Scholar can be a useful searching tool, particularly when it checks against the electronic full text holdings at FSU. This link requires you to log in with your FSU e-mail information-- but it's worth it!
Interlibrary Loan
Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a service where a student, faculty, or staff of Florida State University may obtain books or obtain photocopies of articles from other institutions.
JStor
Main Campus printing plus print drivers
Download drivers to your computer; you can then send a print job to a campus printer and release it/print it on campus!
Music Index Online
Indexes major music periodicals from 1970 to the present.
Oxford Bibliographies
Great resource to target the top readings and resources on specific topics.
Oxford Handbooks Online
Choose "Music"
Oxford Music Online
Great first stop for composer, genre, period, instrument information and more. Article bibliographies get you to the next step in your research. Includes Grove Music and other relevant titles.
more...less...
Contains Grove Music and more.
Purdue Online Writing Lab: Chicago Manual Style
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
The main scholarly index to articles about music.

Oxford Reference (5 concurrent user limit) This link opens in a new window
includes Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed., Grove Opera, and more
Please note: Oxford Reference only allows access for 5 FSU users at one time. If you are being asked for a username and password, please try to access the database later.

Subjects:
Archaeology
Art & Architecture
Bilingual dictionaries
Classical studies
Encyclopedias
English Dictionaries and Thesauri
History
Language reference
Law
Linguistics
Literature
Media studies
Medicine and health
Music
Names studies
Performing arts
Philosophy
Quotations
Religion
Science and technology
Social sciences
Society and culture

Resource URL: http://www.oxfordreference.com/
Abbreviation: oxfordref
Vendor: Oxford University Press
Subjects: *General / Multi-Subject
Type: Encyclopedias & Dictionaries
Oxford Scholarship Online This link opens in a new window
includes music titles
Subjects with full text:
Philosophy
Law
Religion
Political Science
Economics and Finance
Psychology

Tutorials:
Take a Tour (PowerPoint, PDF, and video available)

Resource URL: https://academic.oup.com/pages/oxford-scholarship-online
Abbreviation: oso
Vendor: Oxford University Press
Subjects: *General / Multi-Subject
Type: E-Book Collections, Indexes / Catalogs

Head, Warren D. Allen Music Library

Laura Gayle Green

Email Me

Contact:

Allen Music Library
College of Music, FSU
122 N. Copeland St.
Tallahassee, FL 32306

850-644-3999

Subjects: Music

How can you find what you don't know about?

Whole worlds of information exist in libraries, archives, rare books rooms, and special collections. Some have holdings listed online, but not all. Finding aids, inventories of collections, digitized copies may be available, but they may not. Here are a few teasers:

Programs. Community Concert Association. ML42.C66
- Who toured the US for various classical music series in the early/mid-20th century?
- What kind of music was being "fed" to classical music audiences?
- This resource is not indexed (meaning quite a bit of hands-on time for exploration and discovery).
Opperman Music Hall is named for..
- Ella Scoble Opperman
- Her papers are held in the Allen Music Library and in Special Collections, Strozier Library
Manuscript/papers collections in Allen Music Library

America's Historical Newspapers, 1690–1922 This link opens in a new window
Think reception history!
Resource URL: https://infoweb.newsbank.com/?db=EANX
Abbreviation: eana
Vendor: NewsBank
Coverage: 1690–1922
Subjects: Communication, History
Type: Historical / Primary Sources, Newspapers and Newswires
New York Times (Historical) This link opens in a new window
Offers full-page-images and article images from the New York Times newspaper from its first issue in 1851 to three years before the current date. This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand primary source accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
Resource URL: http://search.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/advanced?accountid=4840
Abbreviation: nythist
Vendor: ProQuest
Coverage: 1850–Current - 3 years
Subjects: History
Type: Historical / Primary Sources, Newspapers and Newswires
Japanese-American Relocation Camp Newspapers: Perspectives on Day-to-Day Life This link opens in a new window
One of the darker chapters in American history and one of the lesser discussed events of World War II was the forced internment, during the war, of an important segment of the American population-persons of Japanese descent. This collection, consisting of 25 individual titles, documents life in the internment camps.
Resource URL: http://go.galegroup.com/gdsc/i.do?id=4LKR&v=2.1&u=tall85761&it=aboutCollections&p=GDSC&sw=w
Abbreviation: jarc
Vendor: Gale
Coverage: 1942–1945
Subjects: Asian Studies, History
Type: Historical / Primary Sources
North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, plus 4,000 pages of previously unpublished materials.
Resource URL: https://search.alexanderstreet.com/nwld
Abbreviation: nawomens
Vendor: Alexander Street, a ProQuest Company
Coverage: Colonial times to 1950
Subjects: History, Literature, Women's and Gender Studies
Type: Datasets / Statistics, Directories, Historical / Primary Sources, Images

Geeky Librarian Tools

A few of my favorites...

The Library of Congress Authority File
Where you can see how many spelling variations exist for Mussorgsky. More importantly, this often includes a person's birth/death dates, and what resources were used for confirmation.
Musicians Necrology
Yeah, it means list of dead people. But if you need to verify if Elliott Carter's still alive (bad old musicologist's joke, as he died in 2012 at 103) or another musician active in the past 50 years, go here. Information updated daily, and includes wonderful references. (so what if the gif links are wonky; do a mouse-over and you'll see which letter to click in the lower toolbar of your browser)
Find a Grave
Continuing the theme of verifying dates. One of my favorites: Estelle Getty