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Finding Books in OneSearch
OneSearch is Ball State Libraries' integrated discovery tool for books, scores, articles, recordings, and other library materials. It also indexes selected trustworthy online resources and incorporates subscription databases such as Academic Search Complete. On the Libraries' home page, you will see a simple search box:
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After searching for your topic, you may find more resources than you need. You can narrow your results by using the filters listed to the left of the search results. For both physical and online books owned by Ball State University Libraries, check "Library Catalog." For physical books, the location (Music Collection) and call number (beginning with "M") indicate the books' location in Bracken Library. To specify online books (ebooks) only, check "eBook Full Text Online." Some eBooks require log in with Ball State University authentication to view the book. |
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More information on OneSearch can be found at the research guide here: https://bsu.libguides.com/onesearch.
Classification and Call Numbers
The Music Collection at University Libraries uses Library of Congress Classification, or LCC, for organizing books and scores on the shelves. This system, maintained by the national library of the United States and utilized by libraries across the country and around the world, groups together items on similar subjects. Each item is then assigned a unique call number which combines alphabetical and numerical characters. These features are designed to make browsing library collections easier for users and librarians alike. Tip: Enter the first part of a call number into OneSearch to see all items in a given section.
Call Numbers for Musical Theatre:
ML 48 - 52.8 Librettos. Texts. Scenarios
ML 385 - 429 Biography
ML 410 Composers
ML 420 Singers
ML 1400 - 3275 History and criticism. Vocal music
ML 1711 Dramatic music. United States
ML 2054 Musicals. Revues
ML 3918.M85 Social and political aspects. Musical theater
MT 67 Composition. Popular music
MT 820 - 915 Singing and vocal technique
MT 892 Interpretation, phrasing, expression, etc.
MT 955 - 956 Instruction and study. Musical theater
MT 955 Production, including direction, costume, scenery, etc.
MT 956 Performing, including singing, acting, etc.
Subject Headings and Subject Search
University Libraries also uses Library of Congress Subject Headings, or LCSH, to facilitate subject searching of its online records. This integrated and multilayered system of tagging establishes a controlled vocabulary whereby users can search the catalog with agreed upon terminology. The easiest way to run a subject search is to find an item with your subject and then click the red hyperlink under Details to see other works with this same subject. You can also set the search field to Subject Terms and enter approved subject headings manually.
Subject Headings for Musical Theatre:
Musicals -- History and criticism
Musicals -- United States -- History and criticism
Musical theater -- History -- 20th century
Musical Theater -- [country]
Musicals -- New York(State) -- New York -- History and Criticism
Recommended Books
The recommended books below represent a wide sampling of topics in musical theatre and include biographies, histories, and investigations into a variety of social issues surrounding musicals. Perhaps one or more of these topics will inspire your next research project. Books are sorted by their call numbers for ease of browsing. Hover over the info icon to see a description.
Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical by
Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical tells the full story of the making and remaking of the most important musical in Broadway history. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and including much new information from early draft scripts and scores, this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later directors, choreographers, and performers up to the end of the twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered, as are five important London productions and four Hollywood versions. Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power of performers to remake the show, winning appreciative audiences for over seven decades. Unlike most Broadway musicals, Show Boat put black and white performers side by side. This book is the first to take Show Boat's innovative interracial cast as the defining feature of the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and white onto the same stage -- revealing the mixed-race roots of musical comedy -- Show Boat stimulated creative artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the American musical. This tremendous longevity allowed Show Boat to enter a creative dialogue with the full span of Broadway history. Show Boat's voyage through the twentieth century offers a vantage point on more than just the Broadway musical. It tells a complex tale of interracial encounter performed in popular music and dance on the national stage during a century of profound transformations.
Call Number: ML410.K385 D43 2013Publication Date: 2013
The Letters of Cole Porter by
The first comprehensive collection of the letters of one of the most successful American songwriters of the twentieth century. From Anything Goes to Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter left a lasting legacy of iconic songs including "You're the Top," "Love For Sale," and "Night and Day." Yet, alongside his professional success, Porter led an eclectic personal life which featured exuberant parties, scandalous affairs, and chronic health problems. This extensive collection of letters (most of which are published here for the first time) dates from the first decade of the twentieth century to the early 1960s and features correspondence with stars such as Irving Berlin, Ethel Merman, and Orson Welles, as well as his friends and lovers. Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh complement these letters with lively commentaries that draw together the loose threads of Porter's life and highlight the distinctions between Porter's public and private existence. This book reveals surprising insights into his attitudes toward Hollywood and Broadway, and toward money, love, and dazzling success.
Call Number: ML410.P7844 A4 2019Publication Date: 2019
The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers and Hammerstein by
The greatest partnership in the history of the musical, captured in print, wonderfully illustrated. For this new edition, the book has been completely rewritten and substantially expanded to include material on Rodgers' early career with Lorenz Hart as well as his later work, and also features recollections from such theatrical titans as Sheldon Harnick, Martin Charnin, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents. Also, a completely new appendix reveals the details of the continuing worldwide phenomenon of Rodgers and Hammerstein's work up to and including the 2002 centennial year for Rodgers.
Call Number: ML410.R6315 N64 2002Publication Date: 2002
The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond by
As the composer/lyricist for Godspell, Pippin, Wicked, and other musicals, Stephen Schwartz has enjoyed one of the most significant careers in American musical theater for more than four decades. Schwartz has also achieved success on the big screen, contributing to such films as Enchanted, The Prince of Egypt, and Pocahontas. For his work, he has received six Tony nominations, three Grammys, and three Academy Awards. The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond is a detailed examination of Schwartz's various projects throughout his career. Musicologist Paul R. Laird discusses at length Schwartz's major shows and also considers his other ventures, such as the music and lyrics for animated features from Disney and Dreamworks. The book focuses on two major aspects of Schwartz's creations: the process of collaboration resulting in a project's completion and a descriptive analysis of his music and lyrics. Laird also describes each show's critical reception and its place in the larger history of musical theater. Based on extensive interviews with Schwartz and a number of his major collaborators, this book provides a rare look into the creation of the composer and lyricist's shows and films. The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz is intended for fans as well as students and professional researchers in music, theater, and the musical theater.
Call Number: ML410.S42 L36 2014Publication Date: 2014
Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical by
From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work, including such musicals as Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, has established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim's musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work, Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim's musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power, questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and explorations of contemporary identity.
Call Number: ML410.S6872 M36 2016Publication Date: 2016
Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman by
Broadway star Ethel Merman's voice was a mesmerizing force and her vitality was legendary, yet the popular perception of La Merm as the irrepressible wonder falls far short of all that she was and all that she meant to Americans over so many decades. This marvelously detailed biography is the first to tell the full story of how the stenographer from Queens, New York, became the queen of the Broadway musical in its golden age. Mining official and unofficial sources, including interviews with Merman's family and her personal scrapbooks, Caryl Flinn unearths new details of Merman's life and finds that behind the high-octane personality was a remarkably pragmatic woman who never lost sight of her roots. Brass Diva takes us from Merman's working-class beginnings through the extraordinary career that was launched in 1930 when, playing a secondary role in a Gershwin Brothers' show, she became an overnight sensation singing "I Got Rhythm." From there, we follow Merman's hits on Broadway, her uneven successes in Hollywood, and her afterlife as a beloved camp icon. This definitive work on the phenomenon that was Ethel Merman is also the first to thoroughly explore her robust influence on American popular culture.
Call Number: ML420.M39 F55 2007Publication Date: 2007
Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical by
Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists - from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim - have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience's aspirations and concerns have played out in the shows themselves. Musicals thus became a paradigm which instructed newcomers in how to assimilate while correspondingly envisioning "American Dream" America as democratic and inclusive. Broadway musicals still continue to function today as "cultural Ellis Islands" for fringe populations seeking acceptance into the nation's mainstream - including women, blacks, Latinos, and gays - all essentially modeled upon the Jewish example. Stuart J. Hecht offers a fascinating examination of the relationship between Jews, assimilation, and the changing face of the American musical.
Call Number: ML1711 .H34 2011Publication Date: 2011
A History of the American Musical Theatre: No Business Like It by
From the diverse proto-theatres of the mid-1800s, though the revues of the '20s, the 'true musicals' of the '40s, the politicisation of the '60s and the 'mega-musicals' of the '80s, every era in American musical theatre reflected a unique set of socio-cultural factors. Nathan Hurwitz uses these factors to explain the output of each decade in turn, showing how the most popular productions spoke directly to the audiences of the time. He explores the function of musical theatre as commerce, tying each big success to the social and economic realities in which it flourished. This study spans from the earliest spectacles and minstrel shows to contemporary musicals such as Avenue Q and Spiderman. It traces the trends of this most commercial of art forms from the perspective of its audiences, explaining how staying in touch with writers and producers strove to stay in touch with these changing moods. Each chapter deals with a specific decade, introducing the main players, the key productions and the major developments in musical theatre during that period.
Call Number: ML1711 .H87 2014Publication Date: 2014
The Golden Age of American Musical Theatre: 1943-1965 by
The Golden Age of American Musical Theatre: 1943-1965 provides synopses, cast and production credits, song titles, and other pertinent information for over 180 musicals from Oklahoma! to On A Clear Day You Can See Forever. Concentrating on a 22-year span, this book lists both commercial successes and flops of the Golden Age-when the musicals presented on Broadway showcased timeless, memorable tunes, sophisticated comedy, and the genius of creative artists like Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, George Abbott, Moss Hart, Angela Lansbury, Robert Preston, and many others.
After an introduction and an overview of the history of Broadway, Naden offers a chronological timeline of the Golden Age musicals in America. She then presents details, in succeeding chapters, about the shows, the stars (on and off stage), the theatres, and the awards, beginning with an alphabetical listing of shows. Each show entry supplies the title, opening date, theatre, number of performances, primary cast and crew, and a plot synopsis, as well as other interesting data about the show, such as the awards won. Additional details about well-known actors, singers, composers, lyricists, directors, and choreographers of the period are provided, including birth and death dates, birth cities, born names, a brief biography, and award nominations and wins. Finishing with a bibliography and an index, this book is beneficial to anyone wanting to know more about one of the richest periods in Broadway history.
Call Number: ML1711 .N22 2011Publication Date: 2011
The Book of Broadway Musical Debates, Disputes, and Disagreements by
Musical theater fans are a famously disputatious lot, always eager for an argument, always willing to defend their opinions to the bitter end. Onto that smoldering fire comes the gasoline that is Peter Filichia's latest book, in which the esteemed critic and author cheerfully dispenses judgments on such volatile and divisive questions as "Who was the most miscast performer?" and "Which show has the best overture?" This is a book meant to start fights-and, perhaps, win them, if you happen to agree with the author. But even if you don't, The Book of Broadway Musical Debates, Disputes, and Disagreements is a diverting, provocative, and only occasionally infuriating romp through musical history, perfect for kicking off a shouting match during intermission or over post-show drinks. All you have to do is open to a question at random and watch the sparks fly. Book jacket.
Call Number: ML1711.8.N3 F52 2022Publication Date: 2022
A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical by
Subverting assumptions that American musical theater is steeped in nostalgia, cheap sentiment, misogyny, and homophobia, this book shows how musicals of the 1950s and early 1960s celebrated strong women characters who defied the era's gender expectations. A Problem Like Maria reexamines the roles, careers, and performances of four of musical theater's greatest stars-Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Julie Andrews, and Barbra Streisand-through a lesbian feminist lens. Focusing on both star persona and performance, Stacy Wolf argues that each of her subjects deftly crafted characters (both on and offstage) whose defiance of the norms of mid-twentieth century femininity had immediate appeal to spectators on the ideological and sexual margins, yet could still play in Peoria. Chapter by chapter, the book analyzes the stars' best-known and best-loved roles, including Martin as Nellie in South Pacific, Merman as Momma Rose in Gypsy, Andrews as Eliza in My Fair Lady and Guinevere in Camelot, and Streisand as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. The final chapter scrutinizes the Broadway and film versions of The Sound of Music, illuminating its place in the hearts of lesbian spectators and the "delicious queerness" of Andrews's troublesome nun. As the first feminist and lesbian study of the American Broadway musical, A Problem Like Maria is a groundbreaking contribution to feminist studies, queer studies, and American studies and a delight for fans of musical theater.
Call Number: ML2054 .W65 2002Publication Date: 2002
Rock in the Musical Theatre: A Guide for Singers by
Today's musical theatre world rocks. Now that rock 'n' roll music and its offshoots, including pop, hard rock, rap, randb, funk, folk, and world-pop music, are the standard language of musical theatre, theatre singers need a source of information on these styles, their origins, and their performance practices. Rock in the Musical Theatre: A Guide for Singers fills this need. Today's musical theatre training programs are now including rock music in their coursework and rock songs and musicals in their repertoires. This is a text for those trainees, courses, and productions. It will also be of great value to working professionals, teachers, music directors, and coaches less familiar with rock styles, or who want to improve their rock-related skills. The author, an experienced music director, vocal coach, and university professor, and an acknowledged expert on rock music in the theatre, examines the many aspects of performing rock music in the theatre and offers practical advice through a combination of aesthetic and theoretical study, extensive discussions of musical, vocal, and acting techniques, and chronicles of coaching sessions. The book also includes advice from working actors, casting directors, and music directors who specialize in rock music for the stage.
Call Number: MT956 .C613 2019Publication Date: 2019
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.