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Music Library Guide: Music Databases

An introduction to the Brandon University Music Library.

Oxford Music Online is "the gateway to Grove Music Online, with access to search The Oxford Dictionary of Music and The Oxford Companion to Music." 

Grove Music Online is "the world’s premier online music encyclopedia, offering comprehensive coverage of music, musicians, music-making, and music scholarship." It is "the authoritative resource for music research with over 52,000 articles written by nearly 9,000 scholars charting the diverse history and cultures of music around the globe." 

(Oxford Music Online - HomeOxford Music Online - About)

Music Periodicals Database (or Music Database), formerly known as International Index to Music Periodicals Full Text, "supports music scholarship, theory, and practice with access to approximately 220 full-text titles and citations sourced from more than 600 music periodicals" and over half a million indexed articles from 1874 to the present. 

This database covers a comprehensive range of subject areas in both scholarly and popular music journals. "Articles examine the full spectrum of subjects and all aspects of music, including music education, performance, ethnomusicology, musical theatre, theory, popular music forms and composition. You can find articles on a diverse array of musical genres, from the liturgical chants of medieval monks to the eclectic sounds of contemporary alternative rock musicians."

(Music Periodicals Database- About)

RILM (International Repertory of Musical Literature) Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text is a music database that is committed to documenting the world’s knowledge about all musical traditions” and includes “the music scholarship of all countries, in all languages, and across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries.” Its collection of resources includes articles on music from the early 19th century to the present about traditional, popular, and classical music, as well as selections from related subjects and interdisciplinary contexts. Our subscription give us access to over 400,000 PDFs from 184 countries and in more than 140 languages.

(RILM - About Us)

RIPM (Le Répertoire international de la presse musicale) Jazz Periodicals database is "an essential, unique collection of American jazz periodicals, of great importance to any lover of jazz and its history, and a primary source reference and research tool for all libraries." This database has high-quality digitized PDF images of these historical journals and currently contains 105 jazz journals, covering the period from 1914 to 2006. They also regular update and add additional journal titles to their collection."

(RIPM Jazz - Home; Jazzways Cover)

 

 

 

RRIMO, or Recent Researches in Music Onlineprovides online access to critical performing editions of music in seven ongoing series of music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque Era, Classical Era, Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, American Music, and the Oral Traditions of Music. Most editions "are devoted to works by a single composer or in a single genre." Users can print, save, or read online these PDF-based published volumes and scores. The text of these resources is also fully searchable.

(Recent Researches in Music - AR Editions)

A-R Music Anthology is a database with "an extensive collection of music and articles designed expressly as the textbook and anthology for music history and theory courses." It has over 600 music works in their entirety from various periods of music history, which "are newly edited and typeset." The contents of this database are searchable "by composer, title, style period, genre, nationality, language, and other parameters."

(About A-R Music Anthology)

IPA Source, or International Phonetic Alphabet Source, is "the web’s largest library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions & literal translations of aria and art song texts." It contains an "extensive catalog of 15,761 arias, art songs and liturgical texts in Italian, French, German, English, Spanish and Latin."

(IPA Source)

We subscribe to two audio streaming databases: Naxos Music Library and Naxos Music Library Jazz

Naxos Music Library has "the world´s largest online classical music library" of online audio recordings, with over 2,700,000 tracks and "more than 174,543 CDs" (as of January 2023). Naxos Music Library Jazz "offers a wide range of jazz music, from jazz legends to contemporary jazz" with over 32,000 artists represented. 

Naxos Music Library also has "over 900 aural training exercises" (under Resources) as well as "in-depth analyses of selected works" and an "interactive music dictionary with music examples and notation." Both Naxos Music Library and Naxos Music Library Jazz have "work details with instrumentation, publishers, duration, year of composition and available recordings of the work," with liner notes provided for many albums. 

(About Naxos Music LibraryBrandon Music LibGuides- Music - Streaming Audio Databases 

medici.tv is a video streaming database with "the largest on demand library of classical music." This database "features over 1,800 programs (3,000 original works), such as operas, ballets, classical and jazz "concerts and archived historical concerts," "documentaries, artist portraits and educational programs," and masterclasses. It also hosts live concert streaming events. 

(Medici.tv - About Us)

Are you tired of paying for movie streaming services and looking for a good film to watch? Audio Cine Films (ACF Streaming Video) is a movie database that the library subscribes to. It has a variety of films from classic movies to the latest Disney releases.