LibGuides: Music: Articles & Databases

Other Databases

Off-campus access to these resources requires UNLV students, faculty and staff to enter a valid library barcode number (located on the back of your RebelCard) or use their ACE account login.

All Indexes and Databases
This link takes you to a comprehensive list of all databases available through the UNLV Libraries. Use the drop-down menu above to narrow by subject.

Databases for Finding Articles About Music

Grove Dictionaries

Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window
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The premier resource for music information, formerly known as Grove Music Online. Provides background information about musicians, instruments, styles, etc.
Oxford Music online (formerly Grove Music Online) contains the New Grove Dictionary and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and The Oxford Dictionary of Music. It is acknowledged as the premier authority in English on all aspects of music. Entries are extensive and contain work lists, bibliographies, terminology, and many other facets of music. Entries are updated and date stamped when needed. Oxford Music Online should be the first stop for any research or information seeking in music.

Indexes of music scholarship

Music Index This link opens in a new window
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1975-
Index to music journals.
The Music Index covers more than 725 international music periodicals back to 1975. Periodicals indexed covers both classical and popular music subjects. The Music Index is a primary resource for indexing performance, book, and record reviews, as well as obituaries.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature This link opens in a new window
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1967-
1 simultaneous user
Primary index for journal articles, dissertations, and book chapters in music.
Update frequency: monthly
RILM Abstracts is the primary resource for indexing of music journal articles, dissertations, book chapters, and festschriften. It covers approximately 350 music journals dating back to 1969, and is the only index that covers book chapters and dissertations in music. Materials covered are scholarly in nature, and entries contain detailed abstracts on the article, dissertation, or book cited.
ERIC This link opens in a new window
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Particularly useful for music education, ERIC contains scholarly and popular journal articles, book chapters, and reports from the field of education.
Update frequency: monthly
Use ERIC to search abstracts of journal articles, book chapters, and reports from the field of education. Subject indexing allows you to zero in on all the articles relevant to your topic. ERIC digests offer overviews of significant scholarship on a topic.

Professional News

Musical America
Industry news, jobs, performance reviews and other up to the minute notes for professional musicians.

Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window
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Access is limited to 2-3 simultaneous users
The premier resource for music information.
Oxford Music online (formerly Grove Music Online) contains the New Grove Dictionary and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and The Oxford Dictionary of Music. It is acknowledged as the premier authority in English on all aspects of music. Entries are extensive and contain work lists, bibliographies, terminology, and many other facets of music. Entries are updated and date stamped when needed. Oxford Music Online should be the first stop for any research or information seeking in music.

Oxford Bibliographies - Music
Annotated bibliographies surveying scholarship on a topic or musician, including catalogues, books, articles, critical editions and more.

African American Music Reference This link opens in a new window
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Comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of Black American musical expression.
Bloomsbury Music and Sound This link opens in a new window
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Scholarship about rock and roll and other popular music around the world, plus interdisciplinary studies of the theory, methodology, and practice of sound.
Includes the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, ebooks analyzing significant popular albums in the 33 1/3 series, and books about sound from disciplines like art, aesthetics, architecture, contemporary music, history, philosophy, technology, and cultural studies.
Classical Music Reference Library This link opens in a new window
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Essential music reference works.
This resource contains essential music reference works, including full text of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Within this resource one can find information on over 11,000 composers, 7,000 performers and ensembles, definitions of musical terms, photographs and images of musicians, instruments, and ensembles.
Ethnomusicology This link opens in a new window
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Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the material in this collection includes thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, slides, correspondence and ephemera from over 60 fields of study.
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online This link opens in a new window
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The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online is a comprehensive online resource devoted to ethnic music research of cultures throughout the world.
Oxford Bibliographies This link opens in a new window
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Scholarly topic overviews and annotated bibliographies with expert literature reviews from a wide range of disciplines.
Video tutorial for Oxford Bibliographies
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries This link opens in a new window
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Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries provides a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions.
Includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. Also includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies. Produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Users may also create, view, and share your own custom playlists in a free account available for registration set up within the database.

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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An archive of more than 700 important scholarly journals covering business, ecology, education, ethnic studies, history, literature, mathematics, music, philosophy, political science, and sociology with content ending 3-5 years ago
JSTOR digitally archives more than 700 scholarly journals. Subjects include African-American studies, anthropology, Asian studies, business, ecology, economics, education, finance, history, literature, mathematics, music, philosophy, political science, and more.
Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
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Searchable articles from academic and professional journals and magazines covering every academic discipline.
Update frequency: Updated daily
This excellent one-stop resource lets you search citations and summaries by keyword and then instantly retrieve the full text of articles from journals online. The Get Text button helps you locate any article without linked full text in alternate online sources or in UNLV's print journal collection.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
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1995-
Scholarly journals in the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.
Update frequency: monthly
Arts & Humanities Citation Index This link opens in a new window
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1975-
A&HCI provides access to current and retrospective bibliographic information and cited references found in nearly 1,130 of the world's leading arts & humanities journals.
Update frequency: Updated weekly
Use this tool to identify how often a particular author has been cited in the work of peers or to identify the most influential scholarship on a topic.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Searches scholarly journal articles. Set preferences to UNLV for full text access!
Google Scholar searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and reports from many academic and technical fields. It is freely available to anyone searching the Internet; however, many of the links that lead to full text resources are not. On your first visit, go to Google Scholar Preferences and use the Library Links box to set UNLV as your source for no-fee access to many full text articles. For answers to questions about Google Scholar, check out the FAQ.

Newspaper databases are a great resource for finding reviews.

Collections of newspapers from the last 20 years

Current newspapers (list)
Search newspapers for Las Vegas or other cities.

Access World News: Research Collection This link opens in a new window
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Newspaper articles from 7,400 + sources, including 50 Nevada titles.
Local, in-state, national and international news sources, including newspapers, broadcast transcripts, newswires, news blogs, news web-only content and video.
Newspaper Source Plus This link opens in a new window
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Regional newspapers and broadcast television transcripts.
Newspaper Source provides full text coverage for 40 national and international newspapers including USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Times (London), and The Toronto Star. Selected full text is offered from more than 330 regional newspapers including The Buffalo News, Orange County Register, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Full text transcripts are available from CBS News, CNN, CNN International, FOX News, National Public Radio, and more.
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
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Searchable published news, legal, medical and business information.
The news section delivers the full text of international, national and regional newspapers along with wire services, broadcast transcripts, magazines, and non-English language sources. The legal section contains U.S. Federal and state case law, codes, regulations, legal news, law reviews and international legal information. This includes Shepard's Citations for all U.S. Supreme Court cases back to 1789. The medical section supplies information from news and medical journals, and provides abstracts to medical news from Medline. The business section includes business news journals, company financial information, SEC filings and reports, and industry and market news.
US Newsstream This link opens in a new window
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1980s-
Searchable current and recent articles from newspapers, including Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Full text of articles from major national newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, USA Today. Also included are the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Historical Newspapers

Historical Newspapers (full list of databases)

Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune This link opens in a new window
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1849-2014
Major daily newspaper from Chicago.
Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Times This link opens in a new window
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1881-2015
Historical California newspaper.
Historical Newspapers: New York Times This link opens in a new window
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1851-2020
Historical New York newspaper.
Times Digital Archive, 1785-2019 This link opens in a new window
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1785-2019
The Times (London) newspaper.

Naxos Music Library This link opens in a new window
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Naxos Music Library is the most comprehensive classical music library online.
Limited to 10 concurrent usersNML offers access to over 1.6 million tracks from more than 112,000 albums and over 750 labels, with hundreds of new CDs added weekly.
Medici.tv This link opens in a new window
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Offers streaming classical music videos that include over 1,600 films as well as many events broadcast live, with replays available for several weeks after the live events.
Content includes music festivals (such as the Verbier, Salzburg, and Lucerne), concerts from baroque through contemporary music (Berlin, New York Philharmonic orchestras, the Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall recitals, etc.), operas (including Paris and La Scala), ballets, workshops and master classes with renowned artists (from Juilliard, Heidelberg and elsewhere), competitions (the Tchaikovsky from Moscow), documentaries, artist portraits, and archived performances.
Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window
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Search all music performances from the collections below in one place with this link.
BroadwayHD collection This link opens in a new window
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Streaming video of 19 recent Broadway theatrical productions, including Indecent, She Loves Me, Long Day's Journey into Night, Present Laughter, and Buried Child.
UNLV has perpetual access to only the 19 plays (spreadsheet) in this collection. This is not a subscription to the BroadwayHD.com web site, which does not offer academic licenses.
Broadway on Demand Collection This link opens in a new window
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Along with musicals, plays, and contemporary dance performances, the collection of videos includes unique behind-the-scenes series, documentaries, and masterclasses to help researchers gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the art of theater.
Classical Music in Video This link opens in a new window
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Medieval to the twenty-first century
Classical Music in Video provides coverage in a broad range of music studies from medieval to the 21st Century.
It contains streamed videos of performances, masterclasses and interviews, and documentaries profiling classical artists.
Dance Online: Dance in Video This link opens in a new window
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Ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance.
Music Online: Classical Performance in Video This link opens in a new window
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Music Online: Classical Performance in Video is a comprehensive video resource for the study of classical music. The database includes 1,600 performances, including 200 full operas and 75 dance titles, as well as masterclasses, documentaries, scores, and interviews.
Music Online: The Qwest TV Collection This link opens in a new window
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Over 150 live performances archived on video - funk, soul, hip-hop, folk, indie, electronic, blues, and other eclectic world genres.
Opera in Video This link opens in a new window
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Opera performances on streaming video, including staged productions, interviews, and documentaries.
Once complete, Opera in Video will contain 250 of the most important opera performances, captured on video through staged productions, interviews, and documentaries.

Classical Scores Library This link opens in a new window
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Classical Scores Library, in 4 volumes, contains over 10,000 classical music scores and manuscripts.
The comprehensive resource provides access to full scores, study scores, vocal scores, and piano reductions. Repertoire represented is across all genres from Palestrina to Bach, Beethoven to Stravinsky. It also contains autograph facsimiles of 17th century French opera.
Recent Researches in Music This link opens in a new window
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Critical performing editions of music.
The series fall into two basic categories: editions that span the history of Western music, and editions with ties to specific cultural milieus. Most editions in Recent Researches in Music are devoted to works by a single composer or in a single genre.

Series included are:
Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (repertoire spanning the early Middle Ages through about 1500)
Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance (1500–1600)
Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era (1600 through the early eighteenth century)
Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era (mid-eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries)
Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Recent Researches in American Music (music of all eras from the United States and the early American colonies)
Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music (musical traditions that are either exclusively oral/aural or that are transmitted only in part through written sources)

IMSLP Petrucci Music Library
A community-built library of public domain sheet music. Extensive collection of original scores scanned to PDF.

RISM - Répertoire International des Sources Musicales This link opens in a new window
The International Inventory of Musical Sources aims to comprehensively document extant musical sources worldwide: manuscripts, printed music editions, writings on music theory, and libretti that are found in libraries, archives, churches, schools, and private collections. RISM records what exists and where it can be found.

Digital Resources for Musicology
Browse links to online digital projects including scores and primary source material.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
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1880-2015
Music, film, broadcasting and theater industry trade publications published before 2015 including Variety, Billboard, Spin, The Hollywood Reporter, American Cinematographer, American Film, Picturegoer and more.
Ethnomusicology This link opens in a new window
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Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the material in this collection includes thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, slides, correspondence and ephemera from over 60 fields of study.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online: British Theatre, Music, and Literature This link opens in a new window
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- Good for: Finding primary sources related to entertainment in the Victorian era in Great Britain, including music, theatre, and popular literature.
- Contains: Books, popular magazines, playscripts, playbills, scores
- Dates covered: 1800-1900
Popular Culture in Britain and America This link opens in a new window
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1950-1975
Primary sources documenting music and popular culture in the US and Britain, 1950-1975, including manuscripts, video, photos, underground magazines and more.
Part of Americana combined search portal
Victorian Popular Culture This link opens in a new window
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- Good for: Finding primary sources related to popular entertainment in America, Britain, and Europe.
- Contains: Books, posters, scrapbooks, and optical toys.
- Dates covered: 1779-1930.

Dissertations & Theses

Dissertations and Theses
Full text of most dissertations produced after 1997; citations and abstracts for others.
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ProQuest Dissertations and Theses contains over 1.5 million entries, providing citations to North American and European dissertations from 1861 forward, with abstracts from 1980 forward. It also provides citations and abstracts for theses from 1988 forward. Full text of UNLV theses and dissertations available from 1996 to the present. Full text from all other institutions available from 1997 to the present.

Dissertations and Theses: UNLV This link opens in a new window
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Full text of most UNLV dissertations produced after 1997; citations and abstracts for others.

AMS--Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology
Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology (DDM) is an international database of bibliographic records for completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in the fields of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology, as well as in related musical, scientific, and humanistic disciplines.

Music

Other Databases

Databases for Finding Articles About Music

Dissertations & Theses

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