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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.

What to Include

In your Bibliography, you normally include every source you cite in your notes (for some exceptions, see below). If you want, you can also include other sources that were significant for your research.

The following sources are not generally included in a bibliography, unless they are of great significance for your research, but they should always be cited in footnotes:

  • Newspaper articles
  • Classical, Medieval, and early English literary works and some well-known English-language plays (e.g. Beowulf, Romeo and Juliet)
  • The Bible and other sacred works
  • Well-known reference works, such as major dictionaries and encyclopedias
  • Short published items, such as reviews of books or performances, abstracts, pamphlets, and reports
  • Unpublished interviews and personal communications, blog entries, online comments, and postings to electronic mailing lists
  • Individual documents in unpublished manuscript collections
  • Works of art and other visual sources, live performances, television, and other broadcast programs
  • The U.S. Constitution, legal cases, and statutes

Page Formatting

  • At the top of the first page, include the heading "Bibliography."
  • Leave two blank lines between the "Bibliography" heading and your first citation.
  • Each citation should be single-spaced with a 1/2-inch hanging indent.
  • Leave one blank line between each citation.

To create a hanging indent (PC or Mac): Highlight your citations and press Ctrl + t

Arrangement of Entries

List your citations alphabetically by author last name. When there is no author, alphabetize by the first word/name in the citation.

 

College Music Society. Directory of Music Faculties in Colleges and Universities, U.S. and Canada, 2013-2014. Binghamton, NY: College Music Society, 2013.

Lexikon des Klaviers. S.v. "Feurich," by Lydia Rilling. Laaber, Germany: Laaber, 2006.

Liszt, Franz. “Les Préludes.” In Famous Symphonic Poems in Score, edited and devised by Albert E. Wier, 52–74. Miniature Score Series. New York: Bonanza Books, 1938.

Repeating Author Names

When your bibliography includes multiple items by the same author, do not repeat the author's name. Write the first citation normally. In the following citations, replace the name with three em dashes.

 

Taruskin, Richard. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

———. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

———, and Piero Weiss, eds. Music in the Western World: A History in Documents. New York: Schirmer Books, 1984.

 

To insert one em dash:

On a PC: Alt + Ctrl + Num Lock + dash (repeat 3 times)

On a Mac: Option/Alt + Shift + dash (repeat 3 times)