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Music Research Guide

Music Research help from the UMSL Libraries.

Music Research Guide. Text over sheet music photograph.

Welcome

This guide offers an introduction to music research at UMSL Libraries. Use this guide for help with:

  • Discover@UMSL, the library's main search tool for books, articles, and more
  • Music and multidisciplinary databases
  • Scores & sheet music at the library
  • Streaming audio & video
  • Citations

Quick Resources

What's New?

Narrative and Robert Schumann's Songs

Proceeding from the premise that the performance of a Lied is a narrative act, in which the singer and pianist together function as a narrator, Andrew Weaver's groundbreaking study proposes a comprehensive theory of narratology for the German Romantic Lied and song cycle, using Schumann's complete song oeuvre as the test case.

Music's Making

A personal voyage of discovery drawing on musicology, literary theory, Jewish studies, and philosophical phenomenology.

Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory

Examines musical responses to three major crises in US society at the turn of the twenty-first century: the AIDS epidemic, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ongoing conditions of anti-Black violence. Analyzing a range of works written to commemorate these losses, Andrea Zarafshon Moore explores how contemporary classical music (aka “new music”) frames and narrates these crises, gives voice to grief, imagines other possibilities, and makes loss audible.

Popular Music Will Not Save Us

Challenges music educators to rethink their philosophical stances in the face of contemporary capitalist values and explores the intersection of music education and globalized capitalism, unveiling how certain practices exacerbate material inequities and erode social responsibility.

Queens of Afrobeat

Dotun Ayobade's wide-ranging research pulls from interviews with surviving queens, ethnographic narratives, the exploration of newspaper archives, and close readings of album covers, photographs, and promotional materials to help us see and understand the women who surrounded Fela Kuti on stage and in everyday life.

The Psychology of Music

Connects the science to larger questions about music that are of interest to practicing musicians, music therapists, musicologists, and the general public alike. For example: Why can one musical performance move an audience to tears, and another compel them to dance, clap, or snap along? How does a "hype" playlist motivate someone at the gym? And why is that top-40 song stuck in everyone's head?

Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives

Quoting extensively from the narratives and exhaustively annotated and indexed, this volume provides readers with detailed explanations and full references for every musical item or tradition featured in the ex-slave narratives. John Minton covers instrumental music and social dancing, spirituals and hymns, singing games and lullabies, ring plays and reels, worksongs, minstrel songs, ballads, war songs, slavery laments, and much, much more.

Mood Machine

Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today's highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.

Mozart, Genius, and the Possibilities of Art

Proposes that anti-Romantic accounts of Mozart's genius themselves get lost in both the infinitely big--in utopianism and millenarianism--and the infinitesimally small--in materialism and process. Throughout, the book buttresses this argument with probing readings from contemporary documents ranging from ephemeral periodical literature to Kant's Third Critique, along with original analyses of the music itself.