Find Books
Books and articles will make up the core of your research. These textual sources contain the research of established scholars, and they can help you interpret the scores and performances you are studying. On this page, learn how to use OneSearch to find books, read about how books are organized on library shelves, and view recommended books you might consider for your research.
Finding Books in OneSearch
Use OneSearch to find books, scores, recordings, and other items held by Ball State University Libraries. OneSearch can be found at the front page of the Libraries website and operates like Google, Bing, and other search engines. Enter keywords to begin your search and then use the filters on the left side of the page to narrow down your results. Select the filter “Library Catalog” to limit your results to items owned by the Libraries, in either print or digital formats, and to eliminate web results.
To find books, select the filter “Book/eBook” under Content Type. Scrolling through results, most books will show as available either at Bracken Library and its Music Collection or as an eBook with Full Text Online. Click on the title or location of the book to see its full record, including its Summary and Contents. For print books, make note of its call number so that you can find it on the shelves. You might choose to keep a list of books either by their authors, titles, or call numbers.
For more information about OneSearch, see the research guide https://bsu.libguides.com/onesearch, or feel free to ask any Libraries staff member for help.
A call number is an item's address in a library. Just like you have a unique mailing address, each library item has its own unique call number. Also like the components of a mailing address (i.e., street name, zip code, etc.), each part of a call number means something. The first letter or two letters is called a subclass. In music, there are only three subclasses. M is the subclass for music scores. Music books are in either ML or MT. ML is the subclass for music literature while MT is the subclass for music instruction and study, so usually music education or theory. The digits which follow indicate the specific topic of the book or score within each subclass.
Typically two alphanumeric signifiers called cutters follow the subclass. Cutters often correspond to the author or composer's last name or derive from the subject or title of the work. The numbers which follow the letter then offer clues as to the next letters of that name or title. Scores by Bach, for example, might be cuttered as B3. This provides an alphabetical ordering for each topic. The final number in a call number, for example 1991, is typically the date of publication. You can practice your knowledge of call numbers with this tutorial.
The easiest way to find items in OneSearch is through a basic keyword search as described on the Getting Started tab. You might, however, choose to run an advanced search, if you are not finding your desired results through other means. Open advanced search by clicking “Advanced” either below the OneSearch dialog box or next to the magnifying glass. The main advantage of advanced search is the ability to separate terms and select fields. Use the dropdown to select field types like “Author,” “Title,” “Call Number,” and “ISBN.” Then use operators like “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT” to specify how your first term relates to your second. Use the plus sign to the right of the window to add terms.
In using advanced search, you unfortunately run the risk of eliminating some results before you have the chance to see them. This is especially true if you apply filters too early in your search process. For this reason, it is recommended that you wait to apply filters until after hitting search. Generally, it is better to start with too many results and then narrow them down through filters and stronger keywords, than to start with too few.
A keyword search is when you enter text of your choice into a search box, whether as a basic or advanced search. A subject search, however, uses standardized terms which are assigned to an item by librarians. These subjects are linked from record to record, so that every item with the same subject appears when you search that subject. On OneSearch, these subjects appear as red hyperlinked text and are typically found in the Details section of an item record. When you click on this text, OneSearch runs a subject search on this term to find every other record also assigned this subject.
Subject searching is useful when you wish to search comprehensively on a known term: you already found it in one record and now want to find it in others. It is also useful if your keyword fails to yield as many results as you had imagined, and it can help you determine the term more commonly used by scholars and librarians. You can also use hyperlinked text to search for every item held by a particular author or composer. Notice how subjects are structured and you will be able to modify subject searches to meet your specific needs.
How Books are Organized
The Music Collection uses Library of Congress Classification, or LCC, for organizing print books and scores on the shelves. Used in libraries worldwide, this system groups items by topic and assigns each a unique alphanumeric call number. Tip: Enter the first part of a call number into OneSearch to see all items on a given topic.
Call Numbers for Music History:
ML 55 - 89 Aspects of the field of music as a whole
ML 79 - 80 Literary authors and music
ML 82 Women and music
ML 85 Music in art. Musical instruments in art
ML 159 - 3785 History and criticism
ML 159 - 161 General works
ML 162 - 197.2 By period
ML 198 - 360.6 By region or country
ML 385 - 429 Biography
ML 410 Composers
ML 417 Pianists
ML 420 Singers
ML 421 Performing groups
ML 422 Conductors
ML 430 - 458 Composition and performance
ML 459 - 1380 Instruments and instrumental music
ML 1400 - 3275 Vocal music, including opera
ML 3300 - 3351 Program music
ML 3400 - 3465 Dance music
ML 3469 - 3541 Popular music
ML 3544 - 3776 Folk, national, and ethnic music
ML 3797 - 3799.5 Musical research
ML 3845 - 3877 Aesthetics
ML 3880 - 3915 Criticism
ML 3916 - 3918 Social and political aspects of music
Recommended Books
The recommended books below represent a wide sampling of topics in music history research and include biographies, stylistic analyses, and investigations into different social and aesthetic issues. Perhaps one or more of these topics will inspire your next research project. Books are sorted by their call numbers for ease of browsing. Click on the info icon to see a description.
The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music by
Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the "new musicology." Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period. In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the "contemporary," and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a "popular modernism," a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.
Call Number: ML193 .R66 2019Publication Date: 2019
The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven by
A reissue of a masterpiece by a world-class pianist and top-rank thinker now expanded and with a compact disc. This outstanding book focusing on the three most-beloved composers of the Vienna School is considered basic to any study of the music from their era. Drawing on his rich experience and intimate familiarity with the works of these giants, Charles Rosen presents his keen insights in language that is clear, persuasive, and nontechnical. For this reissue of The Classical Style, Rosen provides a comprehensive new introduction that incorporates ideas he has formulated in the past twenty-five years and responds to the reactions of others writers to the book during that time. Readers are also treated to a compact disc, recorded by Rosen in 1996 and produced especially to accompany this new version of the book. The CD offers complete performances of two late sonatas of Beethoven that are discussed extensively in the text: the Opus 106 in Bb major (the Hammerklavier) and the Opus 110 in C minor.
Call Number: ML195 .R68 1997Publication Date: 1997
Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond by
Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing which developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the post-war modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman's book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed towards concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass.
Call Number: ML197 .N85 1999Publication Date: 1999
The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents by
"Just reading these documents brings this great composer to life in a most exciting and vivid way. I love this book!" —Yo-Yo Ma. Through hundreds of letters, family papers, anecdotes, and records, the Bach Reader established a new approach to biography by offering original documents in impeccable translations. In The New Bach Reader, Christoph Wolff has incorporated numerous facsimiles and added many newly discovered items, reflecting the current state of scholarship about the composer's life and music. The readings in this volume provide an accurate and vivid picture of Bach's world and of his far-reaching influence.
Call Number: ML410.B1 D24 1998Publication Date: 1998
Words Without Music: A Memoir by
A world-renowned composer of symphonies, operas, and film scores, Philip Glass has, almost single-handedly, crafted the dominant sound of late-twentieth-century classical music. Yet here in Words Without Music, he creates an entirely new and unexpected voice, that of a born storyteller and an acutely insightful chronicler, whose behind-the-scenes recollections allow readers to experience those moments of creative fusion when life so magically merged with art. "If you go to New York City to study music, you'll end up like your uncle Henry," Glass's mother warned her incautious and curious nineteen-year-old son. It was the early summer of 1956, and Ida Glass was concerned that her precocious Philip, already a graduate of the University of Chicago, would end up an itinerant musician, playing in vaudeville houses and dance halls all over the country, just like his cigar-smoking, bantamweight uncle. One could hardly blame Mrs. Glass for worrying that her teenage son would end up as a musical vagabond after initially failing to get into Juilliard. Yet, the transformation of a young man from budding musical prodigy to world-renowned composer is the story of this commanding memoir. From his childhood in post-World War II Baltimore to his student days in Chicago, at Juilliard, and his first journey to Paris, where he studied under the formidable Nadia Boulanger, Glass movingly recalls his early mentors, while reconstructing the places that helped shape his artistic consciousness. From a life-changing trip to India, where he met with gurus and first learned of Gandhi's Salt March, to the gritty streets of New York in the 1970s, where the composer returned, working day jobs as a furniture mover, cabbie, and an unlicensed plumber, Glass leads the life of a Parisian bohemian artist, only now transported to late-twentieth-century America. Yet even after Glass's talent was first widely recognized with the sensational premiere of Einstein on the Beach in 1976, even after he stopped renewing his hack license and gained international recognition for operatic works like Satyagraha, Orphée, and Akhnaten, the son of a Baltimore record store owner never abandoned his earliest universal ideals throughout his memorable collaborations with Allen Ginsberg, Ravi Shankar, Robert Wilson, Doris Lessing, Martin Scorsese, and many others, all of the highest artistic order. Few major composers are celebrated as writers, but Philip Glass, in this loving and slyly humorous autobiography, breaks across genres and re-creates, here in words, the thrill that results from artistic creation. Words Without Music ultimately affirms the power of music to change the world.
Call Number: ML410.G398 A3 2015Publication Date: 2015
The Songs of Fanny Hensel by
Fanny Hensel created some of the most imaginative and original music of her era, making her arguably the most gifted female composer of the nineteenth century. While Hensel has finally stepped out of the shadow of her famous brother, Felix Mendelssohn, as scholars have begun to study her life and writings, her music has remained surprisingly underexamined. This collection places Hensel's music at the center, focusing on the genre that not only made up more than half of her creative output but also, as Hensel herself put it, "suits her best": song. In eleven new essays, leading scholars in the fields of music theory and musicology consider Hensel's songs from a wide range of angles, covering topics such as Hensel's fascination with particular poets and poetic themes; her innovative harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and textual strategies; and her connection to larger literary and musical trends. The chapters also provide insight into Hensel's efforts to break free from the constraints placed on her as a woman and her place in the larger history of the nineteenth-century Lied. Drawing on diverse biographical, historical, cultural, and musical contexts for their detailed discussions of Hensel's songs, the authors underline Hensel's historical importance and deepen our understanding and appreciation of her compositions. This volume, in short, finally gives Fanny Hensel and her songs the stage that they deserve.
Call Number: ML410.H482 S66 2021Publication Date: 2021
Orlando di Lasso Studies by
Orlando di Lasso was probably the most famous and most popular composer of the second half of the 1500s. This book of essays written by leading scholars from Europe and the United States is a survey of a broad spectrum of Lasso's music. The essays discuss his large and varied output with regard to structure, expressive qualities, liturgical aspects and its use as a model by other composers, focusing in turn on his Magnificat settings, masses, motets, hymns and madrigals. His relationship to contemporaries and younger composers is the main subject of three essays and is touched on throughout the book, together with the circulation of his music in print and in manuscript. His attitude toward modal theory is explored in one essay, and another considers the relationship of verbal and musical stress in Lasso's music and what this implies both for scholars and for performers.
Call Number: ML410.L3 O6 1999Publication Date: 1999
Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams by
The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in--and stretching beyond--a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls. Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages. In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.
Call Number: ML410.W7134 K46 2004 and EBSCOhost EbooksPublication Date: 2020
Bluegrass: A History by
"Bluegrass" chronicles the colorful story of the birth and enormous growth of one of America's most popular musical forms. Originating in the country music of the thirties and forties, bluegrass developed during the fifties and beyond into a distinctly independent form, featuring such talents as Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Ralph and Carter Stanley, Sonny and Bobby Osborne, the Country Gentlemen, the Dillards, the Lewis Family, the Johnson Mountain Boys, Jim and Jesse McReynolds, and Ricky Skaggs. But "Bluegrass" is not just a genealogy of bands or a history of the music's evolution. What makes the book so valuable is Neil Rosenberg's ability to place bluegrass in the larger context of American culture. Country music show business, the rural upland South, the urban folk revival, rock and roll, the fiddling revival, commercial gospel music, the counterculture, movie and TV soundtracks, bluegrass festivals, and local bluegrass associations are all part of the rich history Rosenberg narrates. Never before has the bluegrass story been more deftly told or more meticulously researched.
Call Number: ML3520 .R67 1985Publication Date: 1985
Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament by
What does it mean to be in the groove? Winner of the 2007 Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music. Winner of IASPM's 2007 International Book Award. In this exploration of the funk groove and its unique sounds, author Anne Danielsen takes an in-depth look at this under-explored genre. Danielsen concentrates on the golden age of funk in the late 1960s and the 1970s, focusing on two of the era's artists who made a substantial impact on the landscape of popular music: James Brown and George Clinton/Parliament. Aiming to understand funk not only as objectified musical meaning but also as lived experience, she begins with the musical events themselves and draws on her experiences as both a fan and a scholar to capture how their particular organization creates the funk listener's pleasure. Danielsen further examines issues surrounding race in the construction and consumption of this music, focusing her study with how white listeners responded to funk in the 1970s, and arguing that African American music has remained a means of catharsis and of dealing with pleasures of the body. Funk's crossover to international success among listeners of pop and rock music affected both the music itself and audiences' understanding of it. Presence and Pleasure shows us how.
Call Number: ML3527.8 .D36 2006Publication Date: 2006
The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records by
After a hundred years of recording, the process of making records is still mysterious to most people who listen to them. Records hold a fundamental place in the dynamics of modern musical life, but what do they represent? Are they documents? Snapshots? Artworks? Fetishes? Commodities? Conveniences? The Poetics of Rock is a fascinating exploration of recording consciousness and compositional process from the perspective of those who make records. In it, Albin Zak examines the crucial roles played by recording technologies in the construction of rock music and shows how songwriters, musicians, engineers, and producers contribute to the creative project, and how they all leave their mark on the finished work. Zak shapes an image of the compositional milieu by exploring its elements and discussing the issues and concerns faced by artists. Using their testimony to illuminate the nature of record making and of records themselves, he shows that the art of making rock records is a collaborative compositional process that includes many skills and sensibilities not traditionally associated with musical composition. Zak connects all the topics--whether technical, conceptual, aesthetic, or historical--with specific artists and recordings and illustrates them with citations from artists and with musical examples. In lively and engaging prose, The Poetics of Rock brilliantly illustrates how the musical energy from a moment of human expression translates into a musical work wrought in sound.
Call Number: ML3534 .Z35 2001Publication Date: 2001
The Invention of "Folk Music" and "Art Music": Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner by
We tend to take for granted the labels we put to different forms of music. This study considers the origins and implications of the way in which we categorize music. Whereas earlier ways of classifying music were based on its different functions, for the past two hundred years we have been obsessed with creativity and musical origins, and classify music along these lines. Matthew Gelbart argues that folk music and art music became meaningful concepts only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and only in relation to each other. He examines how cultural nationalism served as the earliest impetus in classifying music by origins, and how the notions of folk music and art music followed - in conjunction with changing conceptions of nature, and changing ideas about human creativity. Through tracing the history of these musical categories, the book confronts our assumptions about different kinds of music.
Call Number: ML3545 .G45 2007Publication Date: 2007
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.