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Libraries Indiana University Bloomington

M401 History and Literature of Music I

This guide will assist M401 students with locating resources for their research assignment in History and Literature of Music I.

Evidence Sources

Evidence sources in music usually consist of scores, manuscripts, treatises, and peer or audience criticism (for example: a review of a music performance).

Often, resources like these are "primary sources."

Find Evidence Sources

IUCAT
Find books, scores, and recordings held in IU's library collections.

  • Search for scores in IUCAT, IMSLP, or in online digital archives!
  • You can refer to particular measures or excerpts within a score to use as a musical example in your  research paper--this is a great way to use evidence to bolster your argument/thesis.
  • Search for a critical edition or urtext score in IUCAT if you can, because those scores are very scholarly. 
  • If you find a score with a call number that begins with M2 or M3, you have found a high-quality, scholarly score.
  •  a manuscript or early copy of a score or treatise can be very interesting to look at and study. Primary resources are wonderful!
  • A facsimile is a photographic representation of the composer's manuscript, or an early copy, or a first published edition. Facsimiles can be a great alternative if you cannot visit the manuscript where it resides in a vault or archive far away.
    • The library owns many print copies of facsimiles. But, you can also view digitized manuscripts online in digital archives of libraries, museums, and other organizations devoted to music preservation.
    • One way to find them: go to the IUCAT advanced search, add "facsimile" as a keyword, limit to scores. If you want, you can also add M2 as a search criteria--but if you do, change the drop-down menu to "call number" instead of leaving it as the default "all fields"
    • Contact Misti Shaw if you need assistance trying to find digital manuscripts! mistshaw @ indiana.edu

Source Collections

One great way to find evidence sources is by looking for collections of primary sources in IUCAT! The titles of these often include terms like "source readings," "letters," or "a reader." These may be collections of letters by a particular composer, essays written by music theorists and thinkers of a particular time period, or focused on a particular subject like aesthetics. Many of these are music-specific, but you can also search for collections relating to a more general topic, like the Italian Renaissance!

To find these collections:

You can combine a composer name or era (such as the Baroque) with a keyword. Potential keywords include: "source readings", letters, correspondence, and sources. Once you've conducted a search, restrict using the Format tab to Books or E-Books. You can also restrict by language to include only English-language works. 

Here are some examples:

Manuscripts and Facsimile Portals

DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music)
A portal and for the study of medieval manuscripts. Lists collections and individual sources of medieval polyphonic music dating up to 1550.

Répertoire des manuscrits médiévaux notés
Includes actively maintained lists of digitized medieval music manuscripts grouped by repertoire and location (starts mid-page). Part of the network Musicologie médiéval: Resources for medieval musicology and liturgy. Production of Grégofacsimil, created and administered by Dominique Gatté

Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG) = Digital Abbey Library of St. Gallen
Creates a digital, virtual library of the medieval codices (currently numbering 600 and growing) in the Abbey Library (Stiftsbibliothek) of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 19 of which contain musical notation.

e-codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland
A continuously updated and expanding virtual library accessing all medieval and a selection of modern manuscripts held by 70 Swiss libraries. As of 30 May 2017, there are 1,749 manuscripts online, 78 of which contain musical notation.

Early Music Online
Digitized collection from holdings at the British Library of over 320 volumes of 16th-century anthologies of printed music (mainly partbooks of vocal polyphony), representing ca. 10,000 musical compositions, published in Italy, Germany, France, and England. Maintained by Royal Holloway, University of London and the British Library.