The following resources provide background information on a wide range of topics. Start here to get a sense of the scholarly context surrounding the work, composer, artist, or issue you're researching.
Online access to 4 major music reference works: Grove Music Online, the Oxford Dictionary of Music, the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, and the Oxford Companion to Music.
Music Online: Classical Music Reference Library brings together a variety of essential reference materials, spanning the entire history of Western classical music. Includes Baker's Dictionary of Music, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music.
Music Online: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music is a comprehensive resource devoted to music research of all the world's peoples. Each volume contains an overview of a geographic region, a survey of its musical heritage, and a description of specific musical genres, practices, and performances.
Music Online: African American Music Reference includes major reference works, biographies and personal narratives, manuscripts, song-sheets, lyrics, discography data, and other text sources to cover jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrels, rhythm and blues, and gospel.
Full text archive of scholarly journals and primary sources in various disciplines. As of August 2024, the interdisciplinary library of images once known as Artstor has been completely incorporated within the JSTOR platform. Artstor images will appear in all searches, or you can use the Browse Images function.
A bibliography of writings about music featuring citations, abstracts, and indexes. It covers nearly one and a half million publications from the early 19th century to the present on traditional music, popular music, jazz, classical music, and related subjects. 260 of the periodicals are included as full text.
Scores, CDs, performing-arts related DVDs, and a selection of performing arts-related books are held in the Performing Arts Resource Center (PARC) in the Performing Arts Building. Most books and literature are located in the main library's Stacks. Some DVDs and all LPs are held in the Instructional Media Center (IMC) in the main library.
Library of Congress Call Numbers for music include:
M: Collected works, music scores
ML: Books about music, music history, and more
MT: Books on music theory, instruction
This work by the Reed College Library is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International License.
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