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A Guide for Music Citation - Chicago/Turabian Style

This guide supports music students by providing examples and tips for Chicago/Turabian style citation. It covers all types of music sources, including texts, scores, and recordings.

Footnotes vs. Endnotes

Footnotes appear within your paper, at the bottom of each page, to provide citations for works cited on that page. They allow the reader to see a citation without having to flip to the end.

Endnotes come in a group at the end of the paper or chapter. They may be preferable when footnotes would take up too much space on the page. Make sure to check with your professor to see which style they prefer.

Jacobs School of Music departments that use Turabian require footnotes rather than endnotes for doctoral dissertations and documents.

Formatting

  • Footnote or endnote numbers are indicated in the text by means of superscripts, like this.13
  • These superscripts appear after any final punctuation, whether it is a period, quotation mark, or closing parenthesis.
  • If your note number refers to more than one source, put all the citations together in the same note, like this.14 Do not create multiple notes, like this.14,15
  • In a note with multiple citations, separate the citations with semicolons.

 

13. Massimo Ossi, Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi’s seconda prattica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34.

14. Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History, rev ed., ed. Leo Treitler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 102–7; Bruno Nettl, “Improvisation, Extemporization,” in The New Harvard Dictionary of Music.

 

  • Number the notes consecutively, beginning with 1. For example, if you are using Microsoft Word, the software will take care of your numbering for you. If you edit your paper and insert a footnote in the introduction, the rest of your footnotes will automatically renumber.  If you are working on a document or dissertation that has separate chapters, restart each chapter with note 1.
  • Indent notes as you would a paragraph.
  • Begin each note with its number in regular text (not superscript).
  • Insert one blank line between each note.

Using Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word will do some of the note formatting for you. Follow these steps:

  • Place your cursor at the point in the text where you want the superscript number to go.
  • Open the References ribbon.
  • Click Insert Footnote or Insert Endnote.
  • Add an indent before the citation
  • Change the citation number from superscript to regular type. (Highlight the number, open the Home ribbon, and click the x2 button.)

Short Forms of Notes

Author / Author-Title

If you are citing a work multiple times, include the full citation only the first time. Subsequent citations include only the (1) last name of author and page number, or (2) last name of author, shortened title, and page number. Make sure to check with your professor to see which style they prefer. The second method has the advantage of reminding the reader of the title of the work, and is essential if you are citing more than one work by the same author or composer. The shortened title is composed of up to four distinctive words from the full title.

 

13. Massimo Ossi, Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi’s seconda prattica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34.

14. Mary Rasmussen, “The Case of Flutes in Holbein’s The Ambassadors,” Early Music 23, no. 1 (February 1995): 115.

15. Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 37.

16. Rasmussen, “Case of Flutes,” 117.

 

Ibid.

Ibid. can be used as an abbreviation of a note when the same source was cited in the preceding note. In your note, Ibid. is not italicized. If the page numbers are the same, they need not be repeated.

 

13. Massimo Ossi, Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi’s seconda prattica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34.

14. Ibid., 41.

15. Ibid., 43.

16. Ibid.