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Questions? Ask the Experts!
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Anna Dimoula
Scholarly Communications Librarian for Performing Arts & Humanities
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Using This Guide
This research guide is designed for University of Miami students and faculty looking for library materials related to musical theater. Most of the materials related to musical theater are held by the Marta & Austin Weeks Music Library. This guide provides information on the following topics:
- Books and Reference Sources
- Finding Musical Theatre Repertoire
- The Larry Taylor - Billy Matthews Musical Theatre Archives
- Research Databases
- Streaming Databases and Physical Recordings
Purchase Requests
The Weeks Music Library welcomes material recommendations from UM students, faculty, and staff. Please fill out this purchase request form to recommend books, scores, or recordings for the collection.
Recent Books on Musical Theater
Reference Sources for Musical Theater (use these at the start of your research process)
Other Sources for Finding Repertoire
MusicalTheaterSongs.com draws from 150 years of musical theater repertoire, ranging from well-known standards to rare finds to help you find the right songs quickly and easily. Its easy-to-use interface lets you enter up to 20-plus parameters (voice type, character age, etc.) to generate a list of songs tailored to your needs from an ever-growing database. As an added feature, once you get your list of titles, we link you to various sites to make it simple to buy, rent, trade or download the sheet music and recordings (subject to availability).
Sheet Music Consortium
The Sheet Music Consortium, hosted by the UCLA Digital Library Program, is a cooperative project to build an open collection of digitized sheet music through harvesting metadata from collections around the world. It includes popular sheet music from the public domain (published prior to 1923), including many works from vaudeville and musical theater.
Tips for Locating Musical Theater Repertoire in uSearch
- The library catalog (uSearch) is designed to do an initial broad search. You have the opportunity to limit your initial search results by using the options under the "Refine my results" menu.
- If you are looking for the sheet music to a song or music, under "Resource type," choose Scores.
- You don't need to capitalize words.
- Put the titles of songs or musical in quotation marks ("more i cannot wish you," "guys and dolls").
- For recordings, narrow your search by including performers (“robert alda” “isabel bigley”), director (“george s. kaufman”), or record label ("decca").
- All of the scores, sound recordings, and scripts in the Larry Taylor-Billy Matthews Musical Theatre Archive can be found in uSearch.
- Scores for complete musicals and iIndividual pieces of sheet music are shelved alphabetically in the Secure Stacks at the Weeks Music Library.
- If you're having trouble finding something, stop by the Weeks Music Library's Service Desk for help.
- You can book a consultation with Sara Manus, Director of the Weeks Music Library.
Find Books, Scores, Recordings, and More in uSearch
Core Databases for Music Research
The Music Index provides citations for 882 international scholarly, popular, and trade journals and magazines. It indexes articles, book reviews, recording reviews, and live performance reviews.
The Music Periodicals Database indexes journal literature in all areas of music. It provides indexing and abstracts for more than 425 international music periodicals, plus full text for around 140 journals. Coverage includes recording and performance reviews of both popular and classical music.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature is a comprehensive, global bibliography of writings about music. RILM Abstracts currently indexes and abstracts scholarly music publications from 184 different countries, featuring content in 140 languages. RILM supports interdisciplinary scholarship by tracking music focused writings in anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, dance studies, dramatic arts, librarianship, literature, pedagogy, philosophy, physics, psychology, sociology, and therapy. Coverage dates from the early 20th century to the present, and includes journal articles, book chapters, books, reviews, editorials, obituaries, advertising, and news.
A full-text database of 138 jazz journals and magazines published in the United States between 1914 and 2006. Articles in RIPM Jazz Periodicals are primary sources for research on jazz. RIPM Jazz is projected to grow to include 350 to 400 additional titles.
The largest online archive of music journalism, Rock's Backpages (RBP) features 50,000 articles on thousands of popular music artists. RBP covers many different genres of music, including alternative, country, hip-hop, jazz, R&B, rock, and more. The interviews and feature articles are primary source material for popular music studies.
Reference Sources: Use These at the Start of Your Research Process
Oxford Bibliographies Online: Music
Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) Music is an authoritative research guide designed to help find reliable sources of information within books, websites, archives, or data sets. Each entry receives multiple peer-reviews as well as editorial board approval. It is best used at the beginning of the research process to determine the breadth of scholarship available on your topic.
Includes the Oxford Dictionary of Music, Grove Music Online, and the Oxford Companion to Music. These are key music reference sources used by performers and scholars around the world. This resource is used for answering basic questions (e.g., the definitions of music terminology), to research repertoire (Grove Music Online contains complete works lists for composers), or at the beginning of the research process.
Subscription Streaming Databases
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project provides online access to over 8,000 cylinder recordings held by the University of Santa Barbara's Donald C. Davidson Library. These recordings feature musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
medici.tv
The world's leading classical music channel, medici.tv broadcasts more than 150 live events are each year, in partnership with the world's most prestigious venues, opera houses, festivals and competitions. medici.tv's library features over 4,000 programs, including: concerts, operas, ballets, documentaries, artist portraits, educational programs, and master classes.
Music Online: Classical Music Library
An interdisciplinary collection of streaming audiovisual recordings organized into the following categories: American music, classical, dance, jazz, popular music, contemporary world music, and Smithsonian Global Sound. Music Online includes the Classical Scores Library, a five-volume set of online scores ranging from the Medieval period through the twenty-first century. Thousands of pages of composer biographies and program notes are also available. As of August of 2024, Music Online includes more than 14 million individual tracks of music and nearly 11,000 videos.
Naxos Music Library
The Naxos Music Library has nearly three million tracks of classical music from hundreds of record labels, including Bridge Records, Cedille, Chandos, Deutsche Grammophon, Naxos, Sony Classical, Vox, and Warner Classical.
Use uSearch to Find Recordings at Weeks
Audio and Video Recordings in the Library
You can find a variety of audio and video formats at the Weeks Music Library:
- CDs
- DVDs
- LPs (vinyl records)
- VHS tapes
- Audio cassette tapes
- DVDs
The Larry Taylor-Billy Matthews Musical Theater Archive includes many recordings, including 8,000 long-playing records, over 2,700 compact discs, and several hundred video and audio cassettes. Playback equipment for all formats is also available at Weeks. Physical media is kept behind the service desk in the secure access area of the library. Provide the call number to the staff at the desk and they will retrieve it for you. Headphones can also be checked out at the desk.
Need help using the turntable or another piece of playback equipment? Just ask! Staff are happy to assist you.
A Librarian