Research Guides: Primary Sources in Music: Getting Started and General Tips

What's a primary source (and how do I find one)?

In historical studies a primary source is, broadly speaking, any source of information about a topic that was created at the time being studied.

For example, Beethoven's sketches on Schiller's "Ode to Joy" are a primary source for the 9th symphony; Mahler's letters are a primary source for Mahler biography; reviews written after the first performance of Rite of Spring are primary sources for Stravinsky reception.

Sources created after the fact, usually relying on primary sources, are called secondary sources.

General Tips

Check the references of scholarly secondary sources relevant to your topic. Odds are decent that primary sources useful to them will also be useful to you.
Familiarize yourself with standard reference works.
Think outside the box! Just because a source isn't primarily about music doesn't mean it can't tell you something about music or the context of music making.

Associate Music Cataloger

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

Tips for finding primary sources in the catalog

There are several terms you can use in a Subject Heading search that are helpful for identifying potential primary sources in the catalog. If you use the Advanced Search feature of the catalog, you can combine subject terms and keyword searching to narrow down your results.

You can also limit results to the Allen Music Library to further refine your results—but bear in mind there might be useful materials in other libraries, depending on your topic!

Here are some useful subject terms to try:

Correspondence
Useful for finding published collections of letters, especially collections "hidden" in biographies or other books.
Example search: correspondence + Mendelssohn
Diaries
Useful for finding diaries and journals.
Example search: diaries + composers + Russia
Description and Travel
Useful for finding travel journals.
Example search: travel and description + Germany + Allen Music Library
Facsimiles
Helpful for isolating facsimile editions of manuscripts.
Example search: facsimiles + Beethoven
Interviews
Can be used to find interviews with or about particular people or about particular topics.
Example search: interviews + Meredith Monk
Musicians as Authors
Used mostly for collections of writings about music written by composers or performers.
Example search: musicians as authors
Personal Narratives
Useful for first-hand accounts of events and situations. Usually not directly helfpul for music materials, but good for historical and cultural context.
Example search: personal narratives + Paris + World War II
Sources
A general catch-all term for source materials, most often used for items containing many different kinds of material or covering very broad topics.
Example search: sources + Venice + music

Online starting points for primary sources

Archive Finder
A directory which describes over 220,000 collections of primary source material housed in thousands of repositories across the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Archive Grid
ArchiveGrid includes over four million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more.
Digital Resources for Musicology
A project from Stanford's Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities. Contains annotated links to collections of manuscript and printed music, repertory- and genre-based projects, catalogs, historical calendars and maps, early newspapers magazines, image archives, music theory sources, and more.
MusRef
Includes a section on digital collections. Maintained by the Bringham Young Music and Dance Library.
Online Resources for Music Scholars
Large, searchable collection of resources from the Harvard music library.
Performing Arts Encyclopedia — Library of Congress
Resource guides and online exhibitions relating to over 200 performing arts collections at the Library of Congress.

General Resources

American Memory: Performing Arts and Music
Collections from the Library of Congress's American Memory project. Most collections are searchable.
Early Gramophone Records and Phonograph Cylinders
Contains over 9,000 digitized recordings from the early era of sound recording.
Gallica
A searchable library of digitized materials, including music, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
New York Philharmonic Digital Archives
A free resource containing nearly 2,000 scores marked by conductors, including Leonard Bernstein and Andre Kostelanetz, parts marked by New York Philharmonic musicians, printed programs from 1943-1970, business and planning documents, and over 16,000 photographs and images.

Periodicals

American Periodical Series
Digitized images of the pages of over 1,100 American magazines and journals published between 1740 and 1900. Covers special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals.
Readers' Guide Index Retrospective/Readers' Guide Full Text
Contains comprehensive indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States (1890-1982) and full text of similar publications in the US and Canada from January 1994-present.
Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals 1800-1950 (RIPM)
The RIPM database represents an effort to coordinate retrospective periodical indexing on an international scale and currently functions as a cumulative index to 185 volumes of periodicals of international significance from 15 countries and contains more than 467,500 annotated citations, more than 218,000 reviews, and more than 8,500 biographical citations.