We have a range of resources to support you when researching for your assignments or exploring your discipline. There are theory-based books and articles but we also have handbooks for practice and professional aspects of the subject. 

Welcome to our guide to library resources for Music students. As the Learning and Research Librarian for Creative Arts and Industries, I am here to support you in your learning and assignments.

Learning & Research Librarian for Creative Arts and Industries

We have numerous books on the shelves, which provide an overview or introduction to a topic. You will find the majority of the Music book collection at classmark 780-792 (on the 3rd floor at Augustine House). Don’t forget, our library houses lots of resources covering a variety of subjects which are also here for you to access, check LibrarySearch to see if there are other areas that could be useful, e.g. education.

  • 780- Music
  • 781- General principles and musical forms
  • 782- Vocal music
  • 783- Music for single voices
  • 784-788- Instruments

To find a book, use LibrarySearch either by typing in words from a title or a topic. Once you have found a book, remember to check if it is available and if it is a 7-day loan or 4-week loan. This is important as the shorter loan books are on the open shelves in the middle of each floor and the 4-week loans are in the moving shelves.

Journals are regular publications and include articles written by different authors on their specific research. These can be challenging to read; however, they are great for finding up-to-date information for your literature reviews and for learning about current developments in your field.

You can browse printed copies of journals on the 2nd floor of Augustine House in the silent zone (west wing).

You can see what online journals are available by using LibrarySearch. Try entering the title in to the search box or using the Find e-journals link.

Examples of Music journals include:

  • Computer Music Journal
  • Music Perception
  • Music and Letters
  • Musical Quarterly
  • Popular music
  • Psychology of Music
  • Twentieth Century Music (2007-10)

Run a quick search in LibrarySearch to find full-text journal articles to read online. Try searching for a key word or phrase connected with your research topic i.e. “punk rock” or “teaching piano” or “vocal training”. See our LibrarySearch quick guide for more information.

Open Access Journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals includes journals such as Performance Philosophy. Open access journals are often scholarly, but the difference is, they believe in making their research accessible to anyone with an internet connection. This means that you (or your institution) don’t have to have a subscription to the journal to be able to read the articles they publish.

CDs are shelved in a separate sequence after the 780s on floor 3 and are filed alphabetically by composer.

Printed musical scores follow these and again are filed alphabetically by composer on the first row of moving shelves near the door and open PC quiet study space on floor 3.

We have databases that are collections of academic resources organised by subject. These are great for more detailed searches for your research. You can access these via the Find databases A-Z link in LibrarySearch. The following are databases which relate to Music:

Archival Sound Recordings: Hosted by the British Library, Archive Sound Recordings is an extensive collection of unique sound recordings, which come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound: music, drama and literature.

Cecilia: an online guide to music collections in archives, libraries and museums in the UK and Ireland

Concert Programmes Database: A database of collections of concert programmes held in European libraries, archives and museums:
a resource for the history of musical life from the eighteenth century to the present day

Digital Resources for Musicology: provides links to substantial open-access projects of use to musicians and musicologists.

Early Music Online: Links through the British Library to the Royal Holloway Digital Repository of Early Music. You can search their repository using key words, be beware that a lot of their material is in a foreign language.

Golden Pages for Musicologists: announcements for forthcoming conferences in musicology and related disciplines, an archive of dissertation abstracts, links to music departments worldwide, and other links of interest to musicologists.

Oxford Music Online/ Grove Music Online: Provides Web access to the entire text of the 29 volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians [second edition] and offers sophisticated search capabilities and an ever increasing network of web-links to musical sites around the world. It also includes the full text of the Oxford Companion to Music, the Oxford Dictionary of Music and the Encyclopaedia of Popular Music. See the Grove Music Online guide.

International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance International: IBTD with Full Text covers theatre, drama, acting training, ballet, modern dance, choreographers, music, opera, popular music, film and visual arts. A significant number of dance journals are available in full text via IBTD. See the IBTD guide.

JSTOR: A full-text archive of core scholarly journals, dating from the first issue up until two to five years ago. Subject coverage includes Art and Art History, Music, Performing Arts, Film Studies, Communication Studies, and other many other topics. Includes titles such as Journal of Music Theory, Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, , Perspectives of New Music, Tempo and Theory and Practice.

MusRef – A guide to over 11,000 print and internet music reference resources.

Oxford Scholarship Online Music Collection: OSO Music Collection provides full text access to over 200 Music e-books published by Oxford University Press. See the Oxford Scholarship Online guide.

RILM (Abstracts of Music Literature): An index that covers a wide variety of musical fields, including classical, popular, world music, voice and instruments, performance, theory, pedagogy, therapy and liturgy. Abstracts (summaries) are provided with each reference and all publication types are included. See the RILM guide.

Rock’s Backpages: An online library of pop music journalism. Over 34000 classic articles crossing a number of genres by the finest music writers of the past 50 years.

Bate Collection: A collection of musical instruments held at the University of Oxford. Over 2000 instruments from Western orchestral music from the renaissance to baroque, classical to modern.

British Library Music Collection: With a British Library reader card you could have access to all this and more. There are also online guides and resources.

Ethnomusicology Musical Instrument Collection: Via the University of Washington, this collection holds over 400 musical instruments from around the world.

IMSLP (Petrucci Music Library): This is the International Music Score Library Project started in 2006. It contains music scores that you can access without a subscription and are copyright free.

Mutopia – a searchable online database of public domain music scores that can be downloaded, printed out and performed. You can also browse the database by composer, instrument, or musical style.

Open Music Library: from Alexander Street helping to build the world’s largest free index of digital resources for the study of music.

Operabase: over 45000 opera performances

UK Music: Represents the collective interests of the UK’s commercial music interest. Lots of useful reports.

Kanopy is a great video-streaming service which includes a number of documentaries such as Debussy and le français in Musical Action.

Plus, we have access to Box of Broadcasts (BoB) which archives British TV and radio broadcasts. You can search for a topic and find BBC, Channel 4 and Sky documentaries. Another great feature is that you can take clips of programmes and put them in your presentations or analyse the transcripts. Visit the Learning on Screen How to Videos or look at the CCCU Box of Broadcasts guide.

Lynsey Blandford
Learning and Research Librarian