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Musicology and Ethnomusicology

This guide supports musicology, ethnomusicology and popular music studies at the University of Melbourne. It includes guides to researching books, journals, music scores, sound recordings and video.

Key reference works

There are three major reference sources for students in musicology and ethnomusicology:

  • Oxford Music Online
  • MGG (Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart) Online
  • Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online

Oxford Music Online

Oxford Music Online is a key source of scholarly reference material, including resources from:

  • Grove Music Online
  • The Oxford Companion to Music
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Music
  • The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
  • The New Grove Dictionary of Opera

You can search for musical genres, historical periods, composers, performers, theories and more.

MGG (Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart) Online

  • An exhaustive music encyclopedia, published in German
  • contains articles on music and related areas (literature, philosophy, visual arts)

You can access MGG Online:

Translating MGG Online articles into English:

  • Use an online translation service or your browser's 'Translate to English' function
  • When citing MGG articles in your assignment, make sure you indicate what translation service you have used

Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online is the first comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world's peoples. Entries by expert contributors, including essays, images and hundreds of audio examples.

The database offers browsing across 10 volumes covering:

What is Oxford Music Online?

Oxford Music Online is a key source of scholarly reference material. It includes resources from:

  • Grove Music Online
  • The Oxford Companion to Music
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Music
  • The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
  • The New Grove Dictionary of Opera

You can search for musical genres, historical periods, composers, performers, theories and more.

Oxford Music Online has recently updated its platform, and there are some current issues to be resolved. There are some alternatives to using Oxford Music Online:

Oxford History of Western Music

The Oxford History of Western Music is another important resource. 

Using the works list in Oxford Music Online to locate individual works in Collected Editions

The works list in the composer entries provides a list of collected editions of that composer's work. Each edition is assigned an alphabetical code. The works list includes volume and page numbers in each of the available collected editions. This is very important as the contents of some collected editions are not indexed in the library catalogue.

MGG (Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart) Online

  • An exhaustive music encyclopedia, published in German
  • contains articles on music and related areas (literature, philosophy, visual arts)

You can access MGG Online:

Translating MGG Online articles into English:

  • Use an online translation service or your browser's 'Translate to English' function
  • When citing MGG articles in your assignment, make sure you indicate what translation service you have used

Bibliographies

The bibliographies in Oxford Music are a rich source for you to explore, leading to further information on your topic. The entries are arranged chronologically.

You will see a 'Find it in your library' link below each entry. But these can be unreliable. It's best to search the catalogue directly, using the author, title, year and publication information. See the Bibliographies page of this guide for more information on how to do this. 

Colin Timms, et al. "Cantata." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed January 5, 2016,http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/subscriber/article/grove/music/04748pg2.

Further information on the structure of the bibliographies in Oxford Music Online may be found here.

Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online

The database offers browsing across 10 volumes covering: