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Music Resources in Napier Library

Key Reference Books

Most of the material for this subject area is held at the Craighouse Campus Library - the catalogue will give you exact details.

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

• Grove music

This is the electronic equivalent of the 2nd edition of the New Grove dictionary of music and musicians, the key encyclopaedia for classical music, with detailed articles on composers, performers, instruments and general musical topics. The articles on composers include definitive lists of their works, and are the best place to check up things like Opus numbers and how they might relate to other numbers that have been assigned to composers' works, such as Koechel Verzeichnis numbers for Mozart. This updated edition also contains some material on pop and rock topics.

• The new Oxford companion to music

A good one-volume encyclopaedia of classical music.

• The encyclopedia of popular music

In eight volumes

• The new Grove dictionary of jazz

In two volumes

Directories and yearbooks

• British and International Music Yearbook

Contains contact addresses for Associations, Artists, Agents, Venues, Promoters, Competitions and Scholarships, Summer Schools, Study abroad, Music Festivals, Orchestras, Opera Companies, Recording and Broadcasting, Education, Marketing, Fund-raising, Publishers, Retailers, Insurance, Copyright, and various other relevant services.

• Music Education Yearbook

Includes sections on Organisations, Resources for Teachers, Youth Performance, Examinations, Schools, Further and Higher Education, Teacher Training, International Study, Recreational and Part-time Courses, Jazz in Education, Suppliers and Services.

• British Performing Arts Yearbook

Contains information on Companies and Artists in the areas of Dance, Drama, Community, Puppets, Mixed media/Entertainment, Opera, Orchestras, Jazz and Light Music, Arts Festivals, Suppliers and Services, Education, Organisations, Venues.

• International Who's Who in Music

Biographical information on living personalities in the fields of classical and light classical music.

Music history & anthologies

• Palisca - Norton anthology of Western music, 3rd ed., 1996

• Grout - A History of Western Music, 5th ed.,1996

These two works are inter-related, and there is a collection of recordings on CD to accompany them under Grout/Palisca - Norton recorded anthology of Western music, 1996. Note: This includes the recordings for both books.

The individual works included are not searchable in our catalogue under author or title, but we have included them in a contents list, which means that they will be found by doing a Word(s) anywhere search.

Audiovisual resources

We have a growing collection of videos on musical subjects that can be borrowed or viewed in the Campus Library.

Recorded music databases

• Naxos Music Library - online collection of music tracks from the catalogues of Naxos, Marco Polo and Dacapo, including Classical Music, Jazz, Folk and World Music.

Requires password for access, available from any Napier campus library

• Archival Sound Recordings - The British Library's Archival Sound Recordings website gives UK Higher and Further Education staff and students free access to over 12,000 recordings (3,900 hours) including:
  • 400 popular music tracks (mostly British bands from the 1930s to 1990s)
  • Beethoven String Quartets (750 recordings from the last 100 years
  • David Rycroft Africa recordings (music and poetry, mainly from Southern Africa)
  • Klaus Wachsmann Uganda recordings (1,500 recordings from 26 culture groups)
  • Oral history of jazz in Britain (with musicians, promoters and label-owners)
  • Records and record players (developments in recording technology)
  • Soundscapes (evocative environmental sounds from Great Britain and Canada)

Arrangement of the music collection

Music items can be tricky to find in any library - there are different formats to deal with, such as CDs, printed music, videos and books about music. See our guide to Locating Music in Napier Library

Journals

List of key journals available in Napier Library - print & electronic

Journal databases

These can help you identify useful journal articles. You may still have more work to do to find the full text of the articles! See our web page on Locating Journal Articles

Specialist music indexes

At Napier these are in print format, in Craighouse Library:

• RILM (Répertoire international de la littérature musicale)
  • covers mainly classical music.
  • Napier does not have a current subscription, but we have vols. 1-29, 1967-1995.
  • Indexes all the major music journals we take, and provides citation details for many other articles that you can try to locate in other libraries, or via document supply.

• Music index
  • covers all music subjects.
  • Napier does not have a current subscription, but we have volumes for 1949-1997.

Other specialist music services exist, such as International Index to Music Periodicals. If you find you need access to these, or the current years of RILM or Music Index in the Honours years of your course, see the section on visiting other libraries.

Edinburgh Central Library in George IV Bridge has a large music section, and should be visited before you consider requesting access to other academic libraries. They may be able to search their music indexes for you if you ask at the service desk.

((If you find you need to visit the Reid Music Collection, now housed in Edinburgh University Main Library, George Square, you should contact NULIS staff first to get a UK Libraries Plus card to gain access for reference purposes. Please note that full-time Napier students will not normally be allowed to borrow material from Edinburgh University Library unless you pay their external user fees.))

Journal databases with music content

To use some of these services you need an ATHENS password - ask the NULIS staff if you do not know what yours is. Look for the link to our helpsheets on the information and access page that comes up.

• BHI - British Humanities Index - may link to full text via SFX
• Expanded Academic ASAP - contains some full text
• FindArticles - Arts and Entertainment - some full text but may not include images
• IngentaConnect - contains some full text
• ISI Web of Knowledge - includes Arts and humanities citation index - may link to full text via SFX
• Zetoc - if not available locally, anything you find here can be requested from the British Library via our Document Supply service

Newspaper articles

• Nexis UK contains the full text of a huge range of international newspapers - but no pictures, sadly.

Internet Resources

Music Internet Resources