Grove Music Online
Script
All of the resources shown in this video are available to Western students, staff and faculty and can be accessed through the Western Libraries website or library catalogue. Licensed, online resources can be accessed from off-campus. You will need to log in with your Western ID and password.
Grove Music Online is the premier, English-language encyclopedia for Western classical music. Using it is a quick and easy way for you to get a lot of information about composers, instruments, locations, musical genres and other musical topics.
To get to Grove Music Online, start at the Music Library's homepage: www.lib.uwo.ca/music
Under Key Research Resources, click the link to Grove Music Online. If you're off-campus, you'll have to login to our proxy server.
And here we are in Grove Music Online. Let's do a search for Franz Schubert. This is likely the article that we're after.
At the top of the article you'll get some very brief information, followed by the first section which is really biographical information. You can see here it is broken down by Schubert's background and childhood, the adolescent composer, finding a career, the miracle years, independence, travel, the professional composer, crisis, despair and resolve, respite the Summer of 1825, return to reality, beginnings and the end 1828, and Schubert's character and the reception of his works. Different articles, being about different composers or topics, will have different subsection titles.
The next two sections are both called "Works" but as you'll see, they contain very different information. The first contains a discussion of the composer's musical style, usually divided by the genres in which they composed. So for Schubert we have sections on songs, part songs and choruses, sacred music, dramatic music, piano music, chamber music, orchestral music and finally Schubert's style and influence.
In the second section called "Works" the first thing you'll see are details of collected works editions. These contain the most authoritative versions of a composer's works. To find out where in these collected works editions a particular composition is located, look at the tables down below. If the table is too large for your browser, you may need to open it in a new tab. References to collected works editions are located in the column on the right. This columns header contains one or more acronyms (in Schubert's case, SW, NSA and P) which refer to one or more collected works editions. So the SW represents this collected works edition, the NSA represents this one, and the P represents this one. Find the work that you are after using the original language title or other information, then look for series, volume and/or page number references to the collected works editions in which it is located.
Below the collected works editions you'll find information about any thematic catalogues that exist for the composer. A thematic catalogue is a list of compositions in a collection or of an individual composer, using the opening notes as a means of identification (according to the Harvard Dictionary of Music). Not all composers have a thematic catalogue. To find a composition's thematic catalogue number or numbers, look at the column or columns on the left. The column header refers to a particular thematic catalogue. For Schubert, the thematic catalogue is represented by the letter D. This refers to this particular thematic catalogue. Now there are a number of sections and tables beneath "Works."
Beneath Editions you'll find Theatrical, Sacred, Mixed voices, Male voices, Female or unspecified voices, Orchestral, Chamber, Sonatas, Fantasies and shorter works for piano, Dances for piano, Piano four hands, Songs, Index to the songs, Miscellaneous, and Doubtful and spurious works. These sections will vary from one composer to the next. Now if we were looking for Schubert's Symphony number 9, we could take a look under Orchestral compositions and then scroll down until we see Symphony number 9. Here it is. It looks as though it was published together with Symphony number 8, and we see that the D number (the thematic catalogue number) is 944. We can use this later on when we're searching for a copy of this composition.
Now here we are in the article for Johann Sebastian Bach. You'll notice that he has two thematic catalogues associated with him, and the abbreviations are BWV which represents this thematic catalogue, and BC which represents this particular thematic catalogue. You could use either number when searching for a copy of that composition.
Here we are in the article for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. You can see down on the table, two different thematic catalogue numbers are provided for each work: K and K superscript 6. Only one thematic catalogue is provided up above, but details are explained down below. K refers to an 1862 edition and the K superscript 6 refers to a 1964 edition. As a general rule, you should search using the number from the most recently published thematic catalogue.
Not every composer has a thematic catalogue. Here we are in the Grove Music Online article for Beethoven. While there are three collected works editions provided, there is no thematic catalogue provided for Beethoven. However what we do have in the case of Beethoven are these opus numbers for each one of his compositions. So if we were looking for his Symphony number 9, we could use the opus number 125 in our search.
Here we are back in the Grove Music Online article on Schubert. The final thing you'll find in any article in Grove is a bibliography. This is a chronological list of references. Here you'll find references to tons of literature that has been compiled by previous researchers. It can include references to books, chapters in books, journal articles and other types of sources. Using these bibliographies can save you a lot of time in tracking down useful resources. You can search for these in the library catalogue. So if we were after this second title under General studies, we could copy the author's name and the title of the book and plug it into our library catalogue. And we get 29 search results back. It looks like the first one is the book that we're after.
Most citation styles aren't very clear on how to cite music sources. See Indiana University Bloomington's "A Guide for Music Citation - Chicago/Turabian Style" for advice. https://guides.libraries.indiana.edu/c.php?g=516265&p=3529690
These tips can help you, but finding music can be extremely tricky. If you've spent 10 minutes searching and still haven't found what you're after, ask us for help! We can be reached by email musref at uwo.ca, by phone 519-661-3913 or in person in the Music Library. You can contact me, Dan Sich, the Teaching and Learning Librarian covering Music, at dsich2 at uwo.ca or Brian McMillan, Head of the Music Library, at bmcmill2 at uwo.ca
