Music and its Contexts

Grove Music Online is a music encyclopedia that covers people, places, subjects, styles, genres, instruments, and more. Its focus is on European classical music, so remember to search other sources listed below for popular and world music articles.

• Access is incorporated through Oxford Music Online
• Remember to consult the "Bibliography" at the end of the article

Oxford Bibliographies acts as an online recommendation service that provides you with original scholarly content written and used by academics across a wide range of disciplines, and are great examples of what an annotated bibliography looks like.  

• Music - Oxford Bibliographies
• Gender and Sexuality in Music (one specific example of a bibliography)

Published by Cambridge University Press, the Cambridge Histories offer a big picture perspective in each subject area, making them essential reading for anyone researching or studying a subject that has an historical element. Of the over 400 titles, the following titles deal specifically with music:

• Eighteenth Century Music
• Seventeenth Century Music
• Fifteenth Century Music
• Medieval Music
• Musical Performance
• Western Music Theory

• Search Omni to identify books at Laurier and other Omni libraries
  • Use facets at left of results to focus your search
  • e.g, books and ebooks

• view more Omni help tutorials

• Search Omni to identify articles
  • Use facets at left of results to focus your search
  • e.g, Articles, peer-reviewed

Sometimes it is hard to narrow down results in Omni. Consider the following databases that provide direct access to scholarly articles in just music

• RILM abstracts of Music Literature
  • international coverage of music publications. 
• Music Periodicals Database
  • articles from popular music publications.

For more detailed searching, and/or for more obscure topics, try searching across the full text through these databases:

• JSTOR
  • full text collection of ejournals, searchable across all the full text; you can also limit to music journals
• Periodicals Archive Online
  • another full text collection of ejournals, searchable across all the full text; you can also limit to music journals

Think outside the box, you may find journal literature in other databases, e.g,

• ATLA Religion Database
  • Church music, etc.
• Historical Abstracts
  • musical issues related to historical and political events
• Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
  • includes extremely obscure citations​​​​​​

• ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (also a great place to find other sources in the bibliography)
  • e.g., Grützmann Januario, L. G. (2020). The roman catholic ordinary mass from circa 1750 to circa 1820: A selected bibliography (Order No. 28187434). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2457329310).

The Library subscribes to thousands of newspapers from around the world, which can be used to locate recording or performance reviews. News articles are provided through various library subscriptions which have specific years of coverage (e.g, archival, or current), so if you get stuck, contact the Music Librarian for more help.

• New articles

• Scores in print and online.

• Listen Online (library subscriptions such as Naxos)

The Library subscribes to a number of streaming video services that may contain helpful resources for your term paper, e.g.,

• Films on Demand

• Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, complete manual
• Citing Music: Chicago Style (University of Manitoba)
  • includes examples for Naxos and YouTube
• Owl Purdue - Chicago