Composer Bibliographies
Script
All of the resources shown in this video are available to Western students, staff and faculty and can be accessed through the Western Libraries website or library catalogue. Licensed, online resources can be accessed from off-campus. You will need to log in with your Western ID and password.
Composer bibliographies are lists of references to books, chapters in books, journal articles and other sources. They can save you time in tracking down useful sources on your topic. Grove Music Online is one place to find composer bibliographies. See our video on "Grove Music Online" for more details. https://youtu.be/do2zcZCCAiw
Book-length bibliographies exist for some composers. You can find composer bibliographies by searching in the library catalogue using the Advanced Search. https://www.lib.uwo.ca/search
Search for "bibliography" in the Subject field and the name of the composer you're interested in another Subject field. Our search has come back with 17 results. Let's take a look at them. Some composer bibliographies will be available online. Others will be available in print.
This first one sounds interesting. It says that it's available online. Let's click on the link and see what we get. Because I'm off-campus, this is asking me to login to our proxy server. And here we are.
Once you've found a composer bibliography that looks promising, view the table of contents or the index, searching for your topic of interest. For example, I could search for Brahm's Requiem and find sources that deal with this topic.
So here I'm linking to the contents, and there's a handy search engine on the left hand side. It's come back with 51 search results, 51 references to Requiem. Let's take a look. You can use the left hand menu to navigate through these references, and you'll see them highlighted over on the right hand side. Now each one of these numbered sections is a reference to a different source. Not all references will be in English.
Once you've found a reference of interest, you can search for it in the library catalogue. https://www.lib.uwo.ca/search Here I'm copying the title. Back in the library catalogue, I can plug that title in... and we'll get rid of this line. It appears that we actually have this item, and it's located in the Music Library.
Most citation styles aren't very clear on how to cite music sources. See Indiana University Bloomington's "A Guide for Music Citation - Chicago/Turabian Style" for advice. https://guides.libraries.indiana.edu/c.php?g=516265&p=3529690
These tips can help you, but finding music can be extremely tricky. If you've spent 10 minutes searching and still haven't found what you're after, ask us for help! We can be reached by email musref at uwo.ca, by phone 519-661-3913 or in person in the Music Library. You can contact me, Dan Sich, the Teaching and Learning Librarian covering Music, at dsich2 at uwo.ca or Brian McMillan, Head of the Music Library, at bmcmill2 at uwo.ca.
Western Libraries Music Library: https://www.lib.uwo.ca/music
