Library Home > Research Guides > Music > Books about Music

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Books about Music

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NOTE: Please see Audio Recording Collection for information on finding recordings of music in our Library. For help with finding music scores, please see How to Find Scores and Sheet Music.

The Library's printed music materials are classified according to the Library of Congress Classification System. Below are some especially useful classification numbers for locating musical scores and writings on music. These call numbers are used in the Library's Reference Collection, the main book stacks, and our Periodicals Collection. You may notice that, unlike most of the LC System, the section for music is mnemonic.

M   Scores (the music itself)

M 3 M 6 - M 1490 M 1497 - M 5000      M 1500 - M 1509

Collected works of individual composers Instrumental music Vocal music      Operas

ML   Music Literature

ML 159 - ML 3797

History and criticism

MT   Music Teaching

MT 170 - MT 810 MT 820 - MT 949

Instrumental Techniques Singing and voice culture

Use the HSU Library Catalog, to find books about music and related subjects. The HSU Library Catalog is a powerful search engine, and there are many ways to search it. For an introduction to searching the Catalog, please see the HSU Library Catalog Help Contents.

In the default Basic Search, you can search by Keyword, Title (leave out ay initial article, in any language), Subject (you must know the Library of Congress subject heading), Author (last name first), or Call Number.

Keyword is the most powerful of these, especially for subject searching. All you need to do is type in keywords for the subject of interest with a few special punctuation marks, then press the Fast Search button. Here are the details:

• If your search has one or more separate words, type them in without punctuation. The computer will add a + before each word. This requires that the word be present in each record retrieved. Here are some examples:

You type:	The search is:
mozart biography piano performance rock criticism composers germany biography	+mozart +biography +piano +performance +rock +criticism +composers +germany +biography

• If your keyword has one or more phrases, enclose each phrase in quotation marks. If there are other terms in your search, put a + sign in front of each phrase. The computer will add a plus in front of a word only, not a phrase. Here are some examples:

"rolling stones"
+"folk music"  history
+"chamber music"  +"20th century"

• Use the ? as a truncation symbol at the end of a word if you need to retrieve variant endings. For example:

+"folk music"  +ir? for Irish or Ireland
+"folk music"  +gree? For Greek or Greece

Here are a few more tips:

• Keyword searching works best if you have two or three terms (word or phrases) in your search. A search with more than four terms usually returns zero results.
• The Library of Congress has designations for time periods in Western music history that do not always correspond to the familiar period names. The LC designations are added to all relevant records in the HSU Library Catalog and are searchable, so it is useful to know what they are:

To 500 500 - 1400 15th century 16th century 17th century 18th century 19th century 20th century

(includes Medieval music) (includes Medieval and Renaissance music) (includes Renaissance music) (includes Renaissance and Baroque music) (includes Baroque and Classical music) (includes Classical and Romantic music)

Send comments and suggestions about this page to: Martha Johansen
Last Updated: February 22, 2005
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