Research Guides: Music: Find Databases

Essential Music Databases

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window
Concurrent user limit: 11
Oxford Music Online offers users the ability to access and cross-search several works, including: Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Oxford Companion to Music, and Oxford Dictionary of Music (Second Edition Revised). Sources can be searched independently or together.
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music This link opens in a new window
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music contains pages of material, the full text volume print encyclopedia and articles with links to associated audio examples, musical illustrations, photographs, song texts, scores and maps of world regions.
MGG Online This link opens in a new window
Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart is a general encyclopedia of music. It provides articles on different aspects of music as well as many related areas such as literature, philosophy, and visual arts. MGG Online contains the second print edition of MGG, published from 1994 to 2008, as well as current, continuous online updates and additions.

Scholarly Article Databases

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature This link opens in a new window
RILM Abstracts contains citations on international music. The file is produced by the Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale, and covers the period 1969 to the present.
International Index to Music Periodicals This link opens in a new window
International Index to Music Periodicals provides indexing and abstracts for international music periodicals. It also includes full text journals on music education, performance, ethnomusicology, musical theater, theory, popular music forms and composition.
Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window
Performing Arts Periodicals Database (formerly International Index) provides indexing, abstracts and full text journals on dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater and performance art.
Music Index Online This link opens in a new window
Music Index Online contains indexing and abstracts for every aspect of the classical and popular world of music including musicological and organological topics, as well as book reviews, record reviews, first performances, and obituaries from 1976 to the present. Some backfile data from the period 1962-1975 is also included.

Primary Sources and More

African American Music Reference This link opens in a new window
African American Music Reference provides full-text reference, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, and discographies which chronicle the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music. The database is expanding to include coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, and other forms of black American musical expression.
Rock's Backpages This link opens in a new window
Rock's Backpages is a database of music journalism, featuring almost 50,000 articles on thousands of artists from Aaliyah to ZZ Top.

Library of Congress National Jukebox
Digitized free historical recordings in the public domain, free to listen to.

RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals This link opens in a new window
RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals is an international annotated bibliography of writings on musical history and culture, found in music periodicals published in seventeen countries between approximately 1800 and 1950.
RISM: Music Manuscripts after 1600 [via RISM] This link opens in a new window
Series A/II. Music Manuscripts after 1600. Locates the manuscripts of over 20,000 composers located in over 750 libraries.

Scores and Performance Practice

Classical Scores Library This link opens in a new window
Note: Access to Volume V is guaranteed through May 2027
Classical Scores Library contains classical music scores, manuscripts, and previously unpublished material. Temple has access to Volumes I, II, III, IV, and V. This collection covers classical musical genres and time periods from medieval to contemporary.
BabelScores This link opens in a new window
Babel Scores offers hundreds of thousands of music pages from creative and innovative composers from the last decades. Full scores are provided in an online, booklet format.
Music & Performing Arts This link opens in a new window
Music & Performing Arts (formerly Music Online) combines all of Temple's Alexander Street Press music resources: streaming audio, video, scores, and reference material. This includes the following resources: African American Music, African American Music Reference, American Song, Classical Music Library, Classical Scores Library, Contemporary World Music, Dance in Video, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online, Jazz Music Library, Opera in Video, Smithsonian Global Sound.
IPA Source This link opens in a new window
IPA Source is a library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts.

Other

WorldCat This link opens in a new window
WorldCat allows you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world. If you can't find a book, score, or recording in our library, check WorldCat to see if it's held by other libraries and place a request through ILLiad!

Related Databases

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides page images of ebooks, ebook chapters, and back issues of scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences from the earliest issues to current publication. It also offers millions of high-quality ArtStor images, curated from leading museums and archives around the world.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Concurrent user limit: unlimited
Project Muse provides access to full-text journals, ebooks, and ebook chapters from university presses. Temple does not have access to all available ebooks.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Complete provides full text scholarly publications and full text journals for academic areas of study.
Arts & Humanities Citation Index This link opens in a new window
From the Web of Science. Small Arts and Humanities coverage but useful for citation searching.
ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials This link opens in a new window
Contains information on music used for religious purposes in various cultures.
C19: The Nineteenth Century Index This link opens in a new window
C19 covers documents published between 1790 and 1919. It contains the following collections: Nineteenth Century Short Title, Catalogue, Nineteenth Century microfiche project, American Periodicals Series (Full-Text),-British Periodicals Series, Periodicals Index, Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals , House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (Full-Text), Archives USA , and Palmer's Index to the Times.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Concurrent user limit: unlimited
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains page images of every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473–1700.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
Concurrent user limit: unlimited
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a digital edition of The Eighteenth Century microfilm set, which includes English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera.
ERIC [via EBSCOhost] This link opens in a new window
ERIC [via EBSCOhost] contains bibliographic records of research reports, conference papers, teaching guides, books, and journal articles relating to the practice of education. ERIC Digests are included. Covers the period 1966-present.
Foundation Directory Online (FDO) This link opens in a new window
Note: Due to budget constraints, FDO will no longer be available after 6/30/24. Additional grant and funding resources can be found through Temple Libraries or the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Foundation Directory Online (FDO) provides access to information on grantmakers and their grants. Included in the database are foundations, corporate giving programs, and grant making public charities in the U.S.
Hispanic American Periodicals Index(HAPI) This link opens in a new window
Hispanic American Periodicals Index provides bibliographic citations to the contents of scholarly journals published around the world on Latin America and the Caribbean since 1970. The coverage includes political, economic, and social issues to the arts and humanities.

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