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Brooks Library Research Guides: Music
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This title now includes over 775 maps, with locator, physical and political maps for each country, over 120 island maps, state maps for North America, Canada, and Mexico, and more than 100 city maps. It is part of a suite of reference materials available through the subscription database Oxford Reference Online. The database is available in full from the CWU library's homepage under "Research" -- "Databases by Title".
For digital collections of original maps, see also the research guide section "Images Online & in Databases".
Brief biographies of composers/performers with links to information on specific works.
Print Location: Third Floor, CT213 .A68 1999
American National Biography is a comprehensive biographical dictionary of American history; it contains over 17,500 biographic profiles of historical figures along with a bibliography. The scope of the work is from the earliest recorded European explorations to the very recent past.
Check at the Reference Desk on the First Floor for suggestions on searching for biographies of people from specific cultural groups and people outside of the United States. Another possible place to look is in a Subject Search for ‘Biography’.
Print Location: Music Reference ML 105 B16 2001
The most authoritative and extensive biographical dictionary in English, with its main emphasis on musicians and musical figures in the world of art music.
Print Location: Music Reference ML 105 I54 2005
This current biographical directory provides biographical information on over 8,000 prominent people in the fields of classical and light classical music, including composers, instrumentalists, conductors, singers, arrangers, writers and managers.
Print Location: Music Reference ML 105 N38 1994
A dictionary which includes entries on nearly 900 women composers writing In the Western (notation-based) tradition.
Information about the Pulitzer prizes for American journalism, letters, drama and music can be found here with the lists of prize winners since 1917.
This site, operated by the Biography Channel, contains tens of thousands of biographies, some quite detailed. Biographical video and short biographical video clips are also available. There is also a page with examples of how to properly cite this site.
Oxford Reference Online, with over 2 million entries, many of which are illustrated, is a superb cross-searchable resource to use when you are at the 'looking for a clue' or 'needing verification' stages of your research. Oxford Reference provides quality, up-to-date reference content from its extensive series of well-respected books - and unlike Wikipedia you can cite Oxford Reference in a paper!
The Quick Reference materials include information on many Subjects, a series of informative Timelines, a wide variety of Quotations, as well as English Dictionaries, and Bilingual Dictionaries.
The Reference Library is divided into Subject Categories, drawn from the 308 volumes of the Oxford Reference Library. Those categories are:
at this link, and by contacting your friendly neighborhood Brooks Library Librarians.
Notes: The Search Box is in the upper right corner of each Oxford Reference page, with additional options on the left-side and in the center of the page before you scroll down. Most Oxford Reference results pages are scrollable lists of information, and scrolling is worth doing.
There is also an Advanced Search available.
To cite an entry click on the individual entry, the Citation Tool is now visible - it is the 'little pencil' to the right and above the entry that you wish to cite.
Oxford Reference Online is a suite of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and reference companions published by the Oxford University Press and available online through the CWU "Databases by Title" page (see homepage.) Within the "Performing Arts" section are music, dance and theater resources.
Summit is the unified library catalog of 37 universities, colleges, and community colleges in the Pacific Northwest. Through Summit you have access to over 9.2 million distinct books, CD’s, DVD’s, and more (that the Summit unified collection is over 28.7 million items virtually assures you of access to a copy of what you want or need). The unified catalog enables you to find with a single search books and other items at any of the 37 member libraries.
(Note: It generally takes between three and five days for a physical item to be sent from one Summit Library to another so please plan ahead.)
In addition to Books, CD’s, DVD’s the Summit Catalog is also one of the many ways that you can locate useful journal articles. In order to find an article through Summit, type a keyword, a subject, or an article title in the Search Box near the top of the Summit page (an ‘Advanced Search’ is also available). Select the “Full text articles” box (next to the Search Box or on the left side of the page). The Results List will be initially sorted by ‘Library & Relevance’, but you can also sort by Author, Title, and Date. Click the title link of the article or the “View Now” or “View Full Text” link to see more of the article and then download a pdf of it. (You can also click “Find It @ Your Library”, select ‘Central Washington University’ and find out what access we have to that article here.)
If the article, book, DVD, CD, etc. that you wish or need to acquire appears to not be available through Summit please consult one of our talented Help Desk Librarians. It is quite possible that we have access to the article through one of our other databases, or that the book, article, etc., can be gotten through Interlibrary Loan.
Cattrax is the online catalog that describes nearly all the materials held by the Brooks Library: books, government documents, maps, microforms, journals, and other items. Below is everything you might want to know about how to use Cattrax - but all you need to know to start searching is summarized in the numbered items and note directly below:
Using Cattrax to find an item in the Brooks Library:
1. Enter a search term – a word, a phrase, whatever – in the search box.
2. Use the drop-down menu to select whether you wish to do a keyword/word search, a title search, a subject search, an author search, or one of the other options. Click 'Search'.
3. Results that are 'relevant' to the search term that you used will be retrieved. Examine the results. Repeat steps 1 through 3 as needed.
*** Note: Information is often described in several different ways; you may need to try a variety of terms before you find ones that provide you with the information you are looking for. And spelling counts.***
More Information about Cattrax:
You can sort the results by 'relevance', date or by title, by clicking on those words below the Search Box.
Click on a title to see a detailed bibliographic record about that title. The ‘bib record’ will contain a variety of additional information about the book: the author, location, call number, often a summary, status, subject terms, etc. Any and all of that information can be important clues.
The ‘bib record’ will also have a link to a location map, two ways to send the information to your mobile phone, a citation tool, and will often have book cover images.
You can also save the ‘bib record’ to either ‘My Lists’ (requires you to use your ‘Library Log-in’) or you can ‘Save to Bag’ and remember to email, save, or print the resulting list of titles before you finish your session with Cattrax.
Once you have saved the useful results of your first search you can perform more searches – perhaps starting by opening the author link, the subject terms (towards the bottom of the ‘bib record’), or the 'Call #', in a new browser tab, or using the search box to start a totally new search using what you have learned so far from your search.
(Note: the books are in Call Number order on the shelves and clicking on the "Call #" will display a list of books in something like 'shelf order', which can help you find some good ideas for searching Cattrax. It is also a good idea to look on the shelves, discovery happens in many ways.)
When you finish your session with Cattrax remember to email, save, or print the ‘Save to Bag’ list of items that you found.
Additional Cattrax Information:
- Note: the “Request” service located in the upper left of a 'bib record' page is only available for Center Campus Students. This is because the Center Campus Students would need to use more than the stairs or the elevator to get the book from the Brooks Library. (If you are a Main Campus student wishing to check out a book in a Center Library please consult the Circulation Desk.)
- The ‘Modify Search’ link at the top of any Cattrax page is almost the same as the ‘Advanced Search’ option. The ‘Modify Search’ option is very useful for narrowing down your list of results. The "Limit/Sort Search" option is a way to narrow your Subject, Author, or Title search results.
- If you have the citation for an article you can select Journal/Serial Title to find out what kind of access (print/digital, which issues/years) we have to a particular journal. We often have access to a journal through more than one database. If you do not succeed in locating the journal or article that you need please consult one of our charming Brooks Library Librarians, or submit a request to our very resourceful Interlibrary Loan Department.
- If your professor said that something you needed to read was 'on Reserve' (the professor may have said 'in the library' or something else roughly equivalent) you can check our Reserved List by searching in Cattrax by course name or by the professor's name.
- Last, but certainly not least, if what you are looking for is not available in Cattrax try repeating your searches in Summit. Summit enables you to search the catalogs of 37 academic libraries in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and request materials owned by those libraries; a courier service provides near-daily delivery of library materials here to Central Washington University.
- Summit Notes: There is usually a three to five day interval between your making a request and receiving the book, DVD, or other item. Summit is part of Worldcat. Each result will have a notation "Libraries that own this item:". Items owned by a Summit member library can be requested by clicking the purple 'Request Summit Item' button. Items owned by a Worldcat Library will need to be requested through Interlibrary Loan.
The book collection is shelved on the 3rd (A-J) and 4th (K-Z) floors of the main campus library and shelved by Library of Congress subject classification. The Government Documents, Maps, and Microforms are on the 3rd floor. The Music Library is on the 4th floor. Our physical journal, magazine, and serials collection is on the 2nd floor. DVDs, video tapes and films are on the 1st floor. Children's Books are on the 4th floor. Cattrax also contains links to a variety of e-books, and links to digital materials located elsewhere.
The Brooks Library has permanent access to 3037 digital books from the EBSCO eBook Collection. EBSCO eBooks are digital full-text versions of books in the areas of:
You can copy and paste from these ebooks, you can access them from off-campus, and you can save portions of them as a pdf.
WorldCat is an essential service run by the imaginatively named Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs.
WorldCat aspires to be a library catalog for the entire world; it contains all the records cataloged by the more than 72,000 OCLC member libraries around the world. WorldCat offers millions of bibliographic records and includes records in 400 languages.
The more than 179 million records cataloged by OCLC member libraries include books, manuscripts, websites and internet resources, maps, computer programs, musical scores, films, slides, videotapes, DVDs, newspapers, journals and magazines, sound recordings, articles, chapters, and papers. The dates covered in WorldCat range from before 1000 BCE to literally earlier today.
The Basic Search is useful when you know precisely what you are looking for. The Advanced Search is the default search and works well for most everyone. There is also an Expert Search available in which you can write your own Boolean Search Expressions.
Assistance is available from WorldCat at this link, and from Brooks Librarians at this link.
The World News (WN) Network was founded with the goal of being the most comprehensive, one-stop news resource on the Internet. Currently World News has over 130 million pages indexed covering news about, among many other topics, Film, Sport, Entertainment, Science, Business, Health and every Region on Earth.
World News Network presents news from more than 1000 reputable sources including mainstream providers (BBC, CNN, Reuters, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, etcetera) and more regional and local sources (The Independent, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Times of India, etcetera). This aggregation from other sites provides a wide variety of perspectives and different interpretations of breaking news events.
Information is available in two ways through the WN site. News links that open in a new tab go directly to the headlined article on its original site. Links that open in the same tab provide you with a link to the article on its original site, there are also links to the left and elsewhere on the page to information that helps you put the news article in context, as well as links to other version of the story or to related stories.
Finding Scholarly Journal Articles
A scholarly, multi-disciplinary database containing more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed, scholarly journals, and with indexing and abstracting for more than 9,300 journals. Academic Search Complete is an EBSCO database, and like most EBSCO databases it includes a "Choose Databases" link near the top of the page that enables you to search multiple EBSCO databases at the same time (an EBSCO multi-disciplinary database that is good to search at the same time as ASC is "MasterFILE Premier").
If the article whose title and abstract you found is not available in the Academic Search Complete database try clicking on "Search for Full Text". If that option does not provide you with the full-text of the article please consult a librarian or submit an Interlibrary Loan Request. Many articles are readily available in another database or through Interlibrary Loan and we are here to help you get the information you need!
The Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) provides this index of more than 27,000,000 of the articles published since 1990. The articles are from over 16,000 journals, covering nearly all fields of knowledge. The items indexed include every article, news story, letter, or other item listed on the table of contents page of the journal. This database also provides, for most items, a list of libraries that have the journal title – information that makes finding the article in the Brooks Library Collection, or through Interlibrary Loan, much easier.
Please ask the Reference Help Desk, on the 1st Floor of the Brooks Library, or at (509) 963-1021, for any assistance you might wish in searching this index or searching for citations found in the index.
eHRAF World Cultures – the digital version of the Human Relations Area Files – is a cross-cultural database that contains more than 350,000 pages of descriptive information on cultures, diversity and ethnic groups of the world. The annually-growing eHRAF database is unique in that the information is organized by cultures and ethnic groups and the full-text sources are subject-indexed at the paragraph level. The diversity of information includes full-text books, journal articles, and dissertations.
This database supports CWU curricula across a variety of disciplines -- anthropology, social studies, history, sociology, geography, language, multicultural studies, political science, human development, arts, and medicine - if you are in one of these programs this database will be your friend!
Please ask the Reference Help Desk, 1st Floor Brooks Library or (509) 963-1021 for aid in searching this resource, and / or try the tutorial materials available from the homepage of eHRAF (look under "Using HRAF" on the left) or at this link.
This is a bibliographic database that cites essays, articles contained in collections of essays, and miscellaneous works published in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The database now includes nearly 86,000 essays drawn from almost 700 collections. Essays from more than 300 volumes and more than 20 annuals and serial publications are added annually. Full bibliographic information on the collective titles indexed is included.
The focus is on the humanities and social sciences, with subject coverage ranging from economics, political science, and history to criticism of literary works, drama, and film. Citations include articles published as early as 1985. Each citation links to a list of other works in the collection, others by the author, and others on the subject, as well as to an entry for the source collection. Works of literary criticism are searchable by names of fictional characters and by the titles of literary works.
The database is searchable by personal and corporate author, title, subject, and keyword, and also by Dewey and LC classification numbers, publisher, publication year, ISBN and ISSN, series, and country of publication.
For aid in locating the full text of articles found within this index, please stop by the 1st Floor Reference Help Desk or call the desk at 509.963.1021.
Print Location: Ref Index AI 3 H83 1974-
Indexes topics on performing arts, archaeology, classical studies, folklore, history, literature, philosophy in over 450 journals.
Project MUSE contains scholarly journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies. Currently MUSE includes: 274,848 articles and 479,457 chapters by 199 publishers, and probably has some useful information about your topic.
The Brooks Library has a partial subscription to Project MUSE, thus some items are available to you in Project MUSE and some items are only available elsewhere. You can do a Journal Title Search, a Book Title Search, a Summit Search, a Google Scholar Search, or contact the Reference Desk to access a fulltext copy of any citations that might be unavailable in Project MUSE.
Project MUSE can be searched by Keyword (options for narrowing your search will be to the left of your results), browsed by Research Area, by All Title, by Publisher, by Book Title, and by Journal Title. An option for displaying "Only content I have full access to" is usually available, but since we often have access to that content through another database, Summit, or Interlibrary Loan, you should probably search Project MUSE both ways.
International index of scholarly writings on music as well as music-related disciplines. Dating from 1967 through the present, this database offers indexing of sources published in over 140 languages.
USA.gov is the U.S. government web portal to all federal, state, tribal, and local government web resources and services. USA.gov is intended to help people navigate government information, procedures, and policies.
Through USA.gov you can apply for benefits online (including grants), contact a government agency or department, or use the most comprehensive search of government websites. You can also search for Government Publications, for information specifically relevant to you, and for contact information for government employees and officials.
The Library of Congress provides this resource as a means of access to its vast collections in the performing arts. This well-organized site allows browsing by name, subject, or specific collection. Users may further explore each grouping and locate abstracts and general descriptions of the physical collection. When available, a link to the finding aid for the physical collection is present, along with links to online digitized resources and databases. Users may also search the site for specific performers or keywords. Additionally, the home page offers links to featured events and Webcasts of performances and events sponsored wholly or in part by the Library of Congress. The site is reliable and loads quickly. It will be extremely useful to those who know of its location, but it is difficult to find from the Library of Congress's home page. Anyone researching music, theater, or dance will find it invaluable.
American Memory is the Library of Congress’s digital collection of American historical materials. Containing more than 9 million items, American Memory is organized into more than 100 thematic collections based on the original format, subject, or who first created, assembled, or donated them to the Library.
The original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Each online collection is accompanied by a set of explanatory features designed to make the materials easy to find, use, and understand. Collections may be browsed individually, searched individually (including full-text searching for many written items), or you may search across multiple collections, by region, and by date.
American Memory will continue to expand online historical content as an integral component of the Library of Congress’s commitment to its mission "to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations".
Digitized images of over 3000 pieces of American sheet music from 1850 to 1920 are presented, along with their full-color cover art and advertisements, in this searchable index. From Duke University.
"This sheet music collection consists of popular songs and piano compositions that portray technologies (old and new alike) as revealed through song texts and/or cover art." Technologies include automobile, airplane, radio, and telephone, and most items date from 1890-1920. A small number of entries include sound files (such as "Kissing Papa through the Telephone"). Browsable by title. From the Lewis Music Library, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music is part of Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University. It contains over 29,000 pieces of music and focuses on popular American music spanning the period 1780 to 1960. All pieces of the collection are indexed on this site and a search will retrieve a catalog description of the pieces. An image of the cover and each page of music will also be retrieved if the music was published before 1923 and is in the public domain.
Contains more than 62,500 pieces of historical sheet music registered for copyright: more than 15,000 registered during the years 1820-1860 and more than 47,000 registered during the years 1870-1885. Included are popular songs, operatic arias, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra. The collection documents the attitudes and tastes of a bygone era with music of many varieties and sources, all of it published in the United States.
The American Musicological Society was founded in 1934 as a non-profit organization to advance research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship. At present, 3,600 individual members and 1,200 institutional subscribers from forty nations participate in the Society.
Book Index with Reviews™ (BIR) is a comprehensive database that provides information on over 5 million book titles. BIR also contains almost 800,000 full-text searchable book reviews from some of the most trusted reviewers: Library Journal, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Times Book Review.
Fiction and non-fiction book titles are included in the database, in all genres, to help you find books to read for fun, for information, or for research. BIR’s subject headings/genres and flexible search engine can help you find out about popular titles that are currently available, along with those that will soon be published or released.
A program of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Interesting and sometimes educational websites are featured on this annotated, topical gateway of websites. Each website is recommended and annotated by a librarian working for the Librarians Internet Index as a quality resource. You can also quickly group resources by domain type, so it is easy to see which sites are commercial, from organizations, and from the government.
An extensive original collection of text, images, and audio clips of great works of Western classical music. From the Internet Public Library.
OAIster is a catalog more than 25 million records of open access digital resource. The Catalog was built by harvesting information from open access collections around the world The digital resources in OAIster include items such as digitized books and articles, born-digital texts, audio files, images, and movies.
The OAIster Catalog is searchable by title, author/creator, subject, language, keyword and several other forms of metadata. Searching in the OAIster Catalog is by Boolean Search (And, Or, Not). Like playing chess the best way to become good at boolean searching is to do a lot of boolean searching. Here are the 'basic moves' for searching the OAIster Catalog:
Combining the search terms 'Cat' and 'Dog' (Boolean)
Cat and Dog
Cat or Dog
Cat not Dog
Note: 'and', 'or', & 'not' are in drop-down boxes to the left of the search boxes.
Plurals, truncation, and wildcards
Use + for plurals (s and es)
Use * for truncation
Use # for a wildcard character
Use ?N for up to N characters
Adjacent terms (proximity)
Cat w Dog (Cat is followed by Dog)
Cat wN Dog (Cat is followed by Dog with at most N terms between)
Cat n Dog (Cat is next to Dog, either order)
Cat nN Dog (Cat is within N terms of Dog, either order)
The available Limiters are Year, Document Type, and Language. A Basic Search and an Expert Search interface is also available. You can also create an account that will enable you to save searches.
NOTE: Sometimes OAIster may direct you to items that are access restricted. The Librarians in the ARC or at any of the service desks can help you with accessing information that is ‘access restricted’ and with any questions that you might have.
The Sheet Music Consortium is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music using the Open Archives Initiative:Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI:PMH). For more sheet music, see also the subject guide category "Images and Primary Resources".
Large annotated collection of Internet resources related to the visual and performing arts. Resources have been determined to be of use as a scholarly information resource in research or educational activities at the university level.
COS Funding Opportunities has been replaced by COS PIVOT.
This database provides access to funding opportunities as well as scholar profiles, with the ability to add your own scholar profile and to view the profiles of various research organizations. PIVOT allows you to also prioritize and save your searches to receive weekly alerts.
You must register your own account and log in thereafter in order to use PIVOT. Registration and log in is in the upper righthand corner of screen.
Previous CWU users of COS Funding Opportunities may log in with their existing username and password, as the accounts have been transferred over into PIVOT.
NOTE: For some opportunities, sponsors accept only a limited number of proposals or applications from an institution, or require an institution to rank or prioritize applications before submission. Please contact the Office of Graduate Studies and Research before applying if an opportunity is marked "Internal Coordination Required".
= Restricted resource
= Some full text
= OpenURL enabled
= Images
= Video files
= Audio files
Mary Wise
Librarian
Tel: (509) 963-1044
