You may not tend to think of the library for your music classes – after all, how can words convey what music is, or duplicate the experience of listening to it? But the truth is, the library has plenty of materials that can accentuate or facilitate the study of music. And one of those tools, the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, just got a major overhaul.

The Garland Encyclopedia includes 9,000 pages worth of material digitized from the original print encyclopedia. It allows you to search for information by genre, cultural group, musical subject, instrument, person, ensemble, or place. It also includes nine CDs worth of culturally representative music, and has tools that let users create, annotate, and share playlists with audio content from anywhere on the internet.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg – a guide listing many of our music resources can be found here. Perhaps the most relevant is the Naxos Music Library, which includes over a million and a half tracks of streaming music from 100,000 CDs, and adds 800 new CDs every month. You can listen to music of any genre, search by composer, artist, or type of music, and assemble and save your own playlists.

But you can approach the study of music in many ways. If you are interested in performing music rather than listening to it, access to sheet music is crucial. Library Music Source is a good database for this, featuring hundreds of thousands of pages of classical music, all of which can be downloaded in PDF. And scholarship about music is well supported with databases like Humanities International Index, International Index to Music Periodicals, and International Index to Performing Arts-Journals which index millions of records from music and humanities journals.

And, for more encyclopedic information like the Garland Encyclopedia, try Oxford Music Online, which includes numerous seminal Oxford and Grove dictionaries and encyclopedias that have been digitized, including major texts like Oxford Companion to Music and the Oxford Dictionary of Music.

Regardless of your interest in music, the library has something to help. And if you have any questions, ask us at iueref@iue.edu!