Researching in the Performing Arts @ CCM

An international network of over 30 organisations, IAMIC aims at becoming the foremost global network to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and expertise in the field of music documentation, promotion and information, leading to an increased international cooperation, performance and use of repertoire of music of all genres.

Cecilia is IAML(UK & Ireland)’s online searchable database of descriptions of music collections in libraries, archives, and museums throughout the UK and Ireland. At present there are descriptions of over 1800 collections from about 600 institutions including libraries, conservatories, museums, national trust houses, cathedral libraries, and specialist societies. The collections cover everything from scores, audio-visual materials, musical instruments, manuscripts, and a fascinating array of musical artefacts. Individual entries are kept up to date by the relevant institution.

Volumes in the Oxford Handbooks in Music series to which UC Libraries have online access.

Music e-books published by Oxford University Press, appearing in the Oxford Scholarship Online collection.

Volumes in the Cambridge Companions to Music series to which UC Libraries have online access.

Volumes in Routledge Handbooks Online series, subject = Arts, to which UC Libraries has online access. The link provides access to resources for which UC is licensed to provide full-text access or open access. Use facets to left if you wish to see further RHO resources.

The Society of American Music's index to more than 25 centers of American music with descriptions explaining available resources at each.

Oral History of American Music (OHAM) originated in 1969, when Vivian Perlis, a reference librarian in the Yale School of Music, began recording interviews with friends and colleagues of Charles Ives. Today the collection comprises more than 2,900 audio and video interviews with composers, jazz musicians, and other major musical figures. The collection resides in Gilmore Music Library and is a key resource for the School of Music as well as for musicians, students, scholars, arts organizations, and the media worldwide. OHAM staff continue to record and preserve new interviews with emerging talents as well as established artists.

An exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. By examining those holdings afresh and querying them in a new and feminist light, the curators of the Women Working collection have aggregated thousands of items that illuminate women's history. The result is a unique digital collection comprising over 650,000 individual pages from more than 3,100 books and trade catalogs, 900 archives and manuscript items, and 1,400 photographs. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented.

A digital collection of more than 10,000 early cylinder recordings held by the UCSB Library. To bring these recordings to a wider audience, the Library makes them available to download or stream online for free.

The Library of Congress's National Jukebox includes early recordings digitally transferred from the collections at the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and from other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings. The Jukebox initially launched more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Content is increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles of other Sony-owned American labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others. Detailed metadata about Jukebox recordings can often be found on the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) website.(http://victor.library.ucsb.edu/).

This database of master recordings made by American record companies during the 78rpm era is part of the American Discography Project (ADP), an initiative of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the Packard Humanities Institute.
DAHR currently includes information on more than 327,000 master recordings (matrixes) made by Victor, Columbia, OKeh, Berliner, Edison, Zonophone, Leeds & Catlin, Brunswick, and Decca. The ADP is a partner with the Library of Congress National Jukebox project and provides most of the cataloging data used in the Jukebox. As a result, 11,000 recordings made by Victor and Columbia between 1900 and 1925 can be streamed online. An additional 35,000 masters from Columbia, Okeh, Zonophone and Edison are also available via UCSB's streaming player or embedded YouTube links.
DAHR staff are currently editing masters for: all Bluebird issues; Victor's 1940s ethnic, popular and classical masters; Victor's 1950s Latin American recordings; selected ethnic and foreign Columbia issues; leased Gramophone masters issued by Victor; and Brunswick issues from 1927 through 1931.

The Lomax Digital Archive provides free access to audio/visual collections compiled across seven decades by folklorist Alan Lomax (1915–2002) and his father John A. Lomax (1867–1948). The entirety of Alan’s photographs and open-reel tape recordings—made between 1946 and 1991—are available here, as well as transcriptions of his 1940s radio programs, and a selection of clips from his film and video-work of the 1970s and 1980s. The LDA also contains several large audio collections the Lomaxes made, together and apart, on instantaneously recorded discs under the auspices of the Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Song between 1933 and 1942. They are presented here in partnership with the LC’s American Folklife Center.

Alarmed by the collective loss of creative voices, musical recordings, and cultural spaces, Detroit Sound Conservancy was established in 2012. We create programs and provide leadership in the preservation of musical heritage in a spirit of partnership and celebration. Our arts and culture programming emerge from our commitment to careful archival practice and creative placekeeping. These programs include the Club Heaven Sound System, Detroit Sound Hall of Fame, and the Historic Blue Bird Inn Stage. Our collection includes the Graystone International Jazz Museum and Hall of Fame as well as thousands of additional artifacts, recordings, manuscripts, and oral histories.

The John Carter Brown Library is the preeminent research collection in the world for the study of the Americas prior to 1825. In its digital repositories are high resolution images from the Library's archive of early American images, map collection, and political cartoon collection, available through Luna. Scans of over 15,000 full books are available through Internet Archive. (Brown University)

Bronisław ("Nek") Mirskey (1887-1927) was a Polish violinist and conductor who worked as music director at several movie theaters across the United States between 1914 and 1927, including Toledo, Ohio, Punxsutawney and DuBois, PA, Richmond, Virginia, Washington D.C., New York, Boston, Dallas, and Kansas City. His efforts to improve the quality of musical accompaniment performed live for early silent film productions are an important part of the history of both music and cinema. Mirskey was considered one of the experts in the field, possessing a great intuition for selecting musical pieces, taking into account the tastes of the local audiences, and skillfully conducting orchestras in close synchronization with the films.
The collection contains the instrumental parts for approximately 3,500 musical compositions. The sets include numerous markings, marginalia, and manuscripts in Mirskey's hand, revealing certain patterns of preparing music material for performance. The open-access online collection includes digital scans of all the instrumental parts in each set, including those with performance markings.

Music Online: Popular Music Library from Alexander Street contains a wide range of popular music from around the world, including hundreds of thousands of tracks from major genres in pop music, including alternative, country, Christian, electronic, hip-hop, metal, punk, new age, R&B, reggae, rock, soundtracks and many more. Alexander Street Press's platform: Music Online: Listening.

Music Online: American Music is a history database that allows people to hear and feel the music from America's past. The database includes songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers and cowboys. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests and more. Alexander Street Press's platform: Music Online: Listening.

Music Online: Jazz Music Library is a large and comprehensive collection of streaming jazz — with thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres. Alexander Street Press's platform: Music Online: Listening.

Access archival issues of Billboard magazine, published weekly, documenting over a century of news relevant to many kinds of popular musics, as well as to the music and recording industries.

Full text coverage, 1988 to present.

Variety has been published since December 16, 1905, and is still published today. It was launched as a weekly periodical covering theater and vaudeville, with its headquarters in New York City. Variety's website features entertainment news, reviews, box office results, plus a credits database, production charts and film calendar. The UC Libraries holds some issues from the Variety archives on microfilm (1986-93; search in UC Libraries online catalog).

Coverage: 1981 to present.

Coverage: 1996 to present.

Coverage 1997 to present.

Coverage: 2004 to present.

NME brings you the latest music and pop culture news and reviews, along with videos and galleries, band features, concert tickets, magazine, radio, etc.
Coverage: 2017 to present (selected full-text only).

Rock Hall EDU, our free digital learning platform, is full of resources and activities that use the power of rock & roll to engage students of all ages. What you'll find includes digitized primary source materials from the Rock Hall's Library and Archives (see also below). Rock and Roll Hall of Fame platform.

Search through the Rock Hall's archival collections, including photographs, manuscripts, business records, posters, handbills, recordings, and much more from performers, bands, record label executives, recording studios, and the fans. Search also for books, scores, magazines, CDs, LPs, DVDs, and other published items in the Rock Hall collections. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame platform.

Links to internet resources focusing on American popular genres, including jazz, blues, country, ragtime, rhythm and blues, rock, folk, bluegrass, new age, and hip hop. Compiled by the Society for American Music.

Popular Culture explores the dynamic period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. The resource allows users to study this exciting period using manuscript and rare printed material, as well as photographs, ephemera, and memorabilia. The interactive chronology, extensive visual resources and video footage provide valuable contextual background to the materials included in this collection.

Songtrust is committed to closing the gender gap in the music industry. It believes in helping to close the gender disparity we too often see in the music industry. This page leads to a collection of organizations and resources to support and empower the women in music in your community.

Search for articles on Women in Rock music @ America: History & Life. EBSCO platform.

Here are 30 of our favorite bands fronted by inspiring female artists: from Blondie to Garbage to Paramore to Florence + the Machine and beyond.

Books, databases, list of inductees, archives, and other resources at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland.

The Women Who Rock Community Research Project brings together musicians, media-makers, performers, artists, scholars and activists to explore the role of women and popular music in the creation of cultural scenes that anchor social justice movements in the Americas and beyond. This multifaceted endeavor reshapes conventional understandings of music and cultural production by initiating collective methods of research, teaching, and community and scholarly collaboration. We encompass several interwoven components: an annual participant-driven community engagement conference and film festival; project-based coursework at the graduate and undergraduate levels; and an oral history archive that ties the various components together.
The Project is developed through collaborations between University of Washington faculty, graduate students, community members and scholars of gender, race and sexuality in music and social justice movements.

Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power is a provocative exhibition that illustrates the importance of women in the world of popular music from the 1920s to present day. It highlights the flashpoints, the firsts, the best, and the celebrated and sometimes lesser-known women whose artistry advanced the progress of rock-and-roll music. Featuring more than 250 artifacts and performance videos, the exhibition moves through rock-and-roll eras, demonstrating how women have been engines of creation and change.
This exhibit was organized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, and on display at the National Museum of Women of the Arts, Washington, DC, from September 2012 to January 2013.

Excerpted from Steve Morse’s Berklee Online course Rock History, this list chronicles some of the most influential females up to the turn of the twenty-first century.

These music leg­ends broke the charts and cap­tured our hearts. Check out these titles to learn more about the suc­cess­es and strug­gles of these singers and songwriters.
List curated by the staff of the Dekalb County Public Library, Decatur, Georgia.

Philip Auslander argues that the question of “women-in-rock” cannot be separated from the way the history of rock is biased toward a very limited canon of “great” artists, most of whom are indeed male, because this bias excludes historical consideration of the vast majority of rock musicians, among whom are a significant number of female players. To frame the question as a search for “great” women guitarists is to perpetuate both this problem and the mythologizing of “guitar gods” in rock as if the contributions of other musicians are less important. ... If one’s listening experience during the psychedelic rock era was not limited to the American rock bands eventually deemed significant by the history books, that is, if one had frequently been hearing music in clubs at the time, then one’s odds of having seen women performing in rock bands are far greater than is usually suggested. Consequently, one’s understanding of women’s status in rock during the time at which rock came into its own as a distinct musical genre might be quite different than the impression conveyed by the standard histories.
Article in theartsection: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary.

These digitised volumes contain approximately 10,000 musical compositions that have been individually indexed. The volumes mainly consist of partbooks of vocal polyphony, but also include some early printed tablatures for keyboard or plucked string instruments. They include music printed in Italy, Germany, France and England.
To browse Early Music Online via Royal Holloway’s digital repository: https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/access/hierarchy.do?topic=52facdbd-19ce-2b92-dbd5-434289d29e8b&sort=rank&page=1
The British Library Catalogue gives access to catalogue records for all the digitised volumes, searchable by composer name and title of composition: http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=BLVU1

This project puts sixteen sets of books expertly crafted by the Parisian printer Nicolas Du Chemin between 1549 and 1568 before a diverse audience of modern scholars and musicians in ways that prompt renewed understandings of their meanings and the books as cultural artifacts. In them, we can trace changing literary tastes, musical fashions, and above all the impact of the relatively new medium of printing on musical culture of the day.
Here readers find facsimiles of all sixteen sets of books, plus modern transcriptions, scholarly commentaries, and tools for research. There are also links to related projects, including a broader database of the sixteenth-century chanson repertory, a project devoted to the reconstruction of pieces with missing voice parts, and another devoted to the study and editing of the literary texts of the chansons themselves. All of this has been assembled under a number of headings designed to encourage researchers, students, and performers to explore the rich world of the chanson at mid century.

Chopin’s First Editions Online (CFEO) project’s chief aim was to create an online resource uniting the first impressions of Chopin’s first editions. This unprecedented virtual collection provides direct access to significant primary source materials relevant to the composer’s music. The full score of each first impression appears with commentary on significant textual features. There are also excerpts from the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions.
The c5,500 digital images in the CFEO archive were obtained from five lead institutions (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bodleian Library, British Library, Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, and University of Chicago Library), and seventeen other libraries. The CFEO project was funded from March 2004 to August 2007.

A detailed catalogue, based on scholarly sources, of early vocal music, including 15,012 movements of Handel, JS Bach, Haydn, Mozart, CPE Bach, Buxtehude etc. Current projects include cataloguing Rameau, Telemann, Purcell, Schütz, and Mozart. Search by movement, text, theme, etc.

New entries from The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, second edition (2014), now available on Grove Music Online.

SEM webpage collecting resources for the study and practice of ethnomusicology.

Useful resource guide organized geographically by country.

The British Library's collections of ethnographic sound recordings are available for non-commercial research, study, and private enjoyment.

The Lomax Digital Archive provides free access to audio/visual collections compiled across seven decades by folklorist Alan Lomax (1915–2002) and his father John A. Lomax (1867–1948). The entirety of Alan’s photographs and open-reel tape recordings—made between 1946 and 1991—are available here, as well as transcriptions of his 1940s radio programs, and a selection of clips from his film and video-work of the 1970s and 1980s. The LDA also contains several large audio collections the Lomaxes made, together and apart, on instantaneously recorded discs under the auspices of the Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Song between 1933 and 1942. They are presented here in partnership with the LC’s American Folklife Center.

This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of 'Empire' and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology.

Explore the history of South Asia between the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 and the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, through the wonderfully rich and diverse manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland.

Digital musicology can be understood as a branch of digital humanities focusing on musical topics. Examples take on a variety of forms and styles, not limited to digital editions, sound archives, computational analysis, etc. This guide is intended to demonstrate extant resources and cultivate the potential for new projects. It is divided into three main categories: tools, projects, and open access aggregators+resources.
Guide from Duke University Libraries

On this website, you can browse or search an open-source bibliography of specialized digital resources and born-digital scholarship in music. Here you may tour the world of digital humanities in music, loosely interpreted. The entries in this directory were compiled over a period of five years: 2018-2023.
A project of the Digital Humanities Interest Group of the Music Library Association.

This page features a range of interdiscplinary projects relevant to music that discuss engaging research questions using digital humanities techniques (such as static visualizations, interactive maps, archive databases). New projects are added as discovered, if they are worth sharing.
The page is organized into three sections: Musical Models, Sound-Related Models, and Other Humanitites Models.
Project of St Olaf's College.

Digital Musicology is a forum for musicological research engaged with digital technology. The term “musicology” is used in its broadest sense: including more traditional approaches, such as ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and music theory, as well as newer ones, such as music information retrieval, music library studies, and music perception and cognition. Articles engage not only with Western art music, but also non-Western art music and popular music from any regional tradition. Equal interests are represented for scholarship that engages with musical scores and recorded music, as well as scholarship engaged with written texts about the music itself or the context in which music is created or received.
The Digital Musicology specialty section showcases papers that describe new methods, tools, and infrastructures, papers that use existing technologies for both big and small data investigations of musicological questions, and papers that comparatively evaluate existing approaches. It also showcases papers that consider technical or philosophical issues related to the acquisition, representation, and standardization of musicological data. Digital Musicology is committed to supporting reproducible research, and encourages authors to make their algorithms, implementations, and datasets freely available, whenever possible.

DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) is a leading resource for the study of medieval manuscripts. We present images and metadata for thousands of manuscripts on this website. We also provide a home for scholarly resources and editions, undertake digital restoration of damaged manuscripts and documents, publish high-quality facsimiles, and offer our expertise as consultants.

The Roaring 'Twenties extends Emily Thompson's groundbreaking 2002 book, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, into new sensory registers and toward new audiences. The project richly draws from the Municipal Archives of the City of New York, cataloging over 600 unique complaints about noise around 1930 and reproducing over 350 archival pages. It also includes 54 excerpts of Fox Movietone newsreels -- early sound experiments that captured and remediated the sounds of New York City -- as well as hundreds of photographs and print materials. The data is mined through human filtering and detailed close readings. Presented here through a stylized multimedia interface, the site invites users to linger with the artifacts and to listen and read with care.

Database of records that include authoritative, detailed, multilingual descriptions of digital images, texts, video clips, sound recordings, and complex media objects related to the performing arts around the world, plus information about related pieces, productions, performers, and creators. Approximately 4,500 objects are currently available. GloPAD is a collaborative venture, and its development is based at Cornell University.

Musical Passage tells the story of a little-known record of early African diasporic music. The project aims to shed light on this unique document and to further efforts to understand the early history of this fundamental cultural movement.

Vectors launched in 2005 as a journal devoted to multimodal research, often featuring projects produced collaboratively through a fellowship model. Although that model is now outgrown, Vectors continues to offer a platform for experimenting with the forms and potentials of online scholarship. Vectors continues its role of pushing the boundaries of research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. As always, our goal is to showcase work that is not easily contained by the conventions - often still limited to portable documents and embedded video files - of contemporary electronic publication.