Music Resources
The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America
The Library of Congress has wonderful essays about the songs of social movements and the United States. Click through these links to read more and also find links to essays on song and other social movements.
Encyclopedias
- Oxford History of Western Music
The Oxford History of Western Music online offers an unmatched account of the evolution of Western classical music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time, Richard Taruskin. - Music Online: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
Music Online: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music 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.
For additional resources, visit the following Performing Arts Research Guide pages:
Online Music Collections
- Smithsonian Folkways RecordingsSmithsonian Folkways Recordings is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, the national museum of the United States. We are dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among peoples through the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound.
- Music and Social Justice Resources ProjectThe Society for Ethnomusicology’s Music and Social Justice Resources Project is a repository of material on how people worldwide are currently using music to address issues of social conflict, exclusion/inclusion, and justice.
- The Freedom ArchiveThe Freedom Archives contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings as well as print materials dating primarily from the late-1960s to the mid-90s. These collections chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements for liberation and social justice.
- The Internet Archive: Audio ArchivesThis library contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download
- Alan Lomax Sound ArchivesThe Sound Recordings catalog comprises over 17,400 digital audio files, beginning with Lomax’s first recordings onto (newly invented) tape in 1946 and tracing his career into the 1990s. In addition to a wide spectrum of musical performances from around the world, it includes stories, jokes, sermons, personal narratives, interviews conducted by Lomax and his associates, and unique ambient artifacts captured in transit from radio broadcasts, sometimes inadvertently, when Alan left the tape machine running.