MUHL 423

Begin your research with tertiary sources.  They will help you:

• Learn the scope of your topic, 
• Find options for narrowing your research topic to a manageable size
• Discover areas related to your topic.
• Identify key names, dates and terms
• Find additional sources for your paper in the bibliography at the end of each article.for a summary of the topic. for writing program notes, fact-checking, or informing your performance of a piece, Tertiary sources assemble and summarize information from primary and secondary sources. Often, tertiary sources will lead you to secondary and primary sources relevant to your project in the bibliography at the end of articles.  

Examples include:

• Encyclopedias
• Dictionaries
• Discographies
• Bibliographies
• Thematic Catalogues

Encyclopedias:  Authoritative reference to get an authoritative overview of a topic or look up terms.

         To Find: search "music encyclopdias" in the online catalogue or browse the ML 100 section of the library.

• Oxford Music Online 

  Premier reference for musicians and musicologists. Covers the New Grove Dictionary of Music, the Oxford Dictionary of Music, and the Oxford Companion to Music. 

• The New Grove dictionary of music and musicians   ML 100 N48 2001  20 vols.  Earlier print edition of the respected encyclopedia.

Thematic Catalogues: organize a composer's entire corpus of work.  to qualify as a thematic catalogue rather than a bibliography the work must include inicipits (first few bars of the music) .  They typically also yield information as the original date and place of composition, manuscripts, early editions, and other details to aid scholarly research.  Thematic catalogues exist for specific composers and repertoires.

       To Find:  search "<composer's name> thematic catalogue" or browse the ML134 section of the library.  For thematic catalogues for particular repertories search "<the repertoire>  thematic catalogue" as in "vocal music thematic catalogue".

• Musipedia: Search by melody, contour or rhythm.
• RISM: documents over 1 million entries, mainly manuscripts.  Has powerful advanced features including incipit searching.  Includes helpful video tutorials. RISM is a multinational, non-profit organization with the goal of documenting all extant music sources worldwide.
• Themefinder: find  incipits by pitch, interval, scale degree, contour, key or meter or any combination of those fields.
• Hymn Tune Index:  17,500 hymn tunes from 1,700 sources up  through 1820.