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  M 3  M 6 - M 1490  M 1497 - M 5000    M 1500 - M 1509	Scores (the music itself)   Collected works of individual composers   Instrumental music   Vocal music     Operas
ML   ML 159 - ML 3797	Music Literature   History and criticism
MT   MT 170 - MT 810   MT 820 - MT 949	Music Teaching   Instrumental techniques   Singing and voice culture

To find books, use library catalogs, such as the HSU Library Catalog, WorldCat, or other libraries. The search terms you use in the HSU Library Catalog also work in other library catalogs, and the search techniques are similar. If you need help with catalog searching, please Ask a Librarian.

In the HSU Library Catalog Basic Search, you can search by Keyword, Title (leave out the 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.

• Use Keywords for composer's name, title of work, genre, instrumentation, etc. Include the term criticism, if appropriate.
• If your keyword has one or more phrases, enclose each phrase in quotation marks:

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

• Use the ? as a truncation symbol at the end of a word 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 no more than two or three terms (word or phrases) in your search.
• Library of Congress subject headings use the singular form of a musical form or genre for books about the genre and the plural form for examples of the genre. For example, fugue will find books about the fugue as a musical form, while fugues will find examples of fugues (scores or recordings).
• 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)

If our Library doesn't own a book that you want, please request it on interlibrary loan. Please note that our interlibrary loan service is available to currently enrolled HSU students, faculty, and staff only.

Last Updated: September 17, 2008 Send comments and suggestions about this page to: Martha Johansen
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