Whittaker Library Helps Dispel 1st Year Music History Essay Anxiety

Help for Music in History 1 Essay from the Library

Here are a few suggestions of resources you can use to help answer and support your essays.

Library Catalogue

The library catalogue is where you can find books / e-books, CDs and DVDs that may be useful for your essay. For example if you enter the search term Beethoven AND symphony 3 you get a list of resources that you can then limit to the type of item that you are looking for, such as books.

Grove Music Online

If you are struggling with where to start then this is the place to go. Grove has over 60,000 articles covering composers, genres, periods, structures and forms. For example if you search sonata form you can see articles about the form and see which composer articles discuss sonata form.
It also has massive bibliographies which can help you find further useful articles.

 

JSTOR

Here you can find articles from a range of music journals. Try searching for nineteenth century german tradition or "musical innovations" AND Debussy and see what you find.

 Cambridge University Press
Here you can find articles and chapters from books. Try Mozart AND enlightenment and see what results you get.

 

 

 

TIPS FOR SEARCHING

• Try different combinations of words to see if you get different results.
• Try using inverted commas to search for a term, for example "sonata form".
• You can also use AND / OR / NOT to limit what you get back, for example Debussy OR Stravinsky AND "musical innovations".
• You can find our full listings of our e-journals and databases on the library website.

Come and talk to Karen or Catherine in the library if you need any help.