For a more complete list of resources, check out our Ethnomusicology Research Guide
Most items in this guide are links to UC or UCLA licensed database resources. These resources are available from all public computers in the library or via UCLA’s wireless network. However, when using these materials from off‐campus, UCLA Students, Staff and Faculty will need to use either the UCLA VPN (Virtual Private Network) or the BOL Proxy Server to gain access.
For information about UCLA Dial-up access, the BOL Proxy Server, the UCLA Wireless Network Access or UCLA Virtual Private Network, click here.
Archive Catalog
UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive Catalog
The UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive is one of largest ethnographic sound recording archives in North America. Collections include non-commercial field recordings and commercially produced recordings of traditional, folk, popular, and art musics from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific islands, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas on a variety of audiovisual formats.
Reference resources
Grove Music Online
Grove Music Online offers the full texts of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition (2001), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edition (2002), as well as numerous subsequent updates and emendations. Also includes more than 50,000 signed articles and 30,000 biographies contributed by over 6,000 scholars from around the world. The Oxford Companion to Music (2002) offers more than 8,000 articles on composers, performers, conductors, instruments and notation, forms and genres, and individual works. The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd edition (revised 2006), which supplements Grove’s more extensive articles with content geared toward undergraduates and general users. Colin Larkin’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 4th edition (2006), an encyclopedia of rock, pop, and jazz artists, covering popular music from 1900 to the present.
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online is the first comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world’s peoples. More than 9,000 pages of material, combined with entries by more than 700 expert contributors from all over the world, make this the most complete body of work focused on world music.
Periodical indexes (how to find articles)
RILM: abstracts of musical literature
Provides broad international coverage of Western and Eastern classical music, pop, folk, and jazz, as well as interdisciplinary studies on music. It includes records in over 202 languages from 3,700 journals. Abstracts and citations are drawn from articles, books, conference proceedings, bibliographies, catalogs, dissertations, festchriften, iconographies, critical commentaries to complete works, ethnographic recordings, videos, and reviews. Coverage is 1969 to date.
RIPM: retrospective index to music periodicals
(“RIPM” is the acronym for “Répertoire international de la presse musicale.”) RIPM currently indexes the contents of 120 music periodicals including articles, reviews, illustrations, music examples, advertisements, press reviews, and more. In addition, RIPM offers more than 5,000 English-language translations of articles from journals in other languages.
Music Index
The Music Index is a comprehensive guide to music periodicals and literature featuring digitized content from 1970 to present. This database contains cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts of articles about music, musicians, and the music industry for more than 475 periodicals, as well as book reviews, obituaries, news, and selective coverage for more than 230 periodicals. Music Index cites book review, obituaries, news periodicals, news and articles about music, musicians, and the music industry.
[Note that RILM, RIPM and Music Index are all hosted by Ebsco, you can search all three databases at the same time by choosing all three databases when you search.]
MPA: Music & performing arts online
The Music & Performing Arts Online portal brings the International Index to Music Periodicals (IIMP) and the International Index to Performing Arts (IIPA) together in one site, enabling users to search both resources simultaneously. MPA indexes scholarly journals as well as music magazines.
Dissertations
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT)
The official digital dissertations archive for the Library of Congress and the database of record for graduate research. PQDT — Full Text includes 2.7 million searchable citations to dissertation and theses from around the world from 1861 to the present day together with 1.2 million full text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and strong retrospective full text coverage for older graduate works. More than 70,000 new full text dissertations and theses are added to the database each year through dissertations publishing partnerships with 700 leading academic institutions worldwide and collaborative retrospective digitization of dissertations through UMI’s Digital Archiving and Access Program.
Note that ProQuest also includes a wide variety of other databases, including current and historical newspapers.
Journals
JSTOR
Alphabetical list of JSTOR journals
Subject list of JSTOR journals
JSTOR includes over one thousand leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. Journals are always included from volume 1, issue 1 and include previous and unrelated titles. Beginning in 2011, current issues for more than 150 journals will be available on JSTOR as part of the Current Scholarship Program. Additional collections include valuable primary source content complementary to the academic journals and monographs. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references. The content is expanded continuously with a current emphasis on international publications as well as pamphlets, images, and manuscripts from libraries, societies, and museums.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Archives
Online Archive of California
The Online Archive of California (OAC) provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 150 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.
LA as Subject
Resources
Directory
L.A. as Subject is a research alliance dedicated to preserving and improving access to the raw material of Los Angeles history. Much of the city’s history is preserved in libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions. Other valuable and unique collections – those that reveal the stories of neighborhoods, families, and influential Angelenos – are scattered across Southern California, curated by smaller institutions and individual enthusiasts. With an online directory of more than 230 separate collections, L.A. as Subject ensures that researchers know what materials are available, where they are located, and how to access them.
Repository of Primary Sources (maintained by Terry Abraham, Society of American Archivists)
A listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar. All links have been tested for correctness and appropriateness.
Sound
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.
The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings at UCLA
Listen to approximately 40,000 recordings of music from the border regions of Mexico and the United States. These performances document many types of popular lyric songs, including the first recordings of corridos (narrative ballads on topics of the day), canciones, boleros, rancheras, and sones, including the first recordings of norteno and conjunto music.
D.K. Wilgus Collection at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive
Wilgus and Wayland D. Hand established Folklore studies at UCLA, and together founded the Folklore and Mythology Program in 1965. Wilgus was the Program’s first chair and served in that position for 17 years. During his tenure at UCLA, Wilgus built an archive of folksong and folk music of over 8,000 commercial recordings and 3,000 field recordings. These recordings are now part of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.
UCSB Special Collections Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project provides free access to a digital collection of nearly 8,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. You can find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound.
So many possibilities…
The Library of Congress: American Memory
American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.
UCLA Library Digital Collections
Los Angeles Times Photograph Collection
Featuring more than five thousand of the three million images contained in the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Daily News photographic archives housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, this collection chronicles the history and growth of Los Angeles from the 1920s to 1990.
UCLA Center for Oral History
The mission of the UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research is to document the history of Southern California and the Los Angeles metropolitan region through oral history interviews. The center gives information and advice regarding the practice of oral history to UCLA students, faculty, and staff as well as to the broader Los Angeles community. It offers campus and community workshops and provides instruction on oral history methodology to UCLA classes.
‘Art Project’ powered by Google
A unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.
Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection
The Los Angeles Central Library’s History Department began collecting photographs sometime before World War II and had a collection of about 13,000 images by the late 1950s. In 1981, when Los Angeles celebrated its 200th birthday, Security Pacific National Bank gave its noted collection of 250,000 historical photographs to the people of Los Angeles to be archived at the Central Library.
How to cite references
Ask your professor if he or she has a specific style they want you to use. Or…
Cowdery, James R., editor. How to write about music: the RILM manual of style. New York: RILM International Center, c2005.
In the Ethnomusicology Archive: ML3797 .H69 2005
Remember, there are countless resources available. If you need more information or assistance, ASK A LIBRARIAN!
The Ethnomusicology Archive, email: archive@arts.ucla.edu or call: 310-825-1695
The UCLA Music Library
