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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

 

Questions? 

Please contact a librarian using the online chat or by emailing/scheduling an appointment (see contact information on the left).

 
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What's New?

Samuel Barber

Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin) offers a multifaceted account of Barber's life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu.

Kansas City Jazz

The first comprehensive work on the subject in over 15 years, this book draws on new research to delve deeper into music of the American Midwest that evolved into Kansas City jazz, and includes profiles of individual musicians who developed very different styles within or beyond the framework of the sub-genre. Kansas City Jazz focuses on the broader themes and the stories of the major personalities whose individual talents came together to create the larger whole of Kansas City's distinctive brand of jazz.

Spectacular Listening

With a range of compelling ethnographic case studies, McDaniel investigates a broad shift in contemporary listening norms and the stakes for listeners with disabilities. He reveals how listening-as-performance can be an opportunity for play, as well as a critical practice that exposes ableism in music institutions, technologies, and discourse.

Easily Slip into Another World

(Henry Threadgill) An autobiography of one of the towering figures of contemporary American music and a powerful meditation on history, race, capitalism, and art.

Union Divided

Leta Miller follows the AFM's history of Black locals, which competed directly with white locals in the same territories, from their origins and successes in the 1920s through Depression-era crises to the fraught process of dismantling segregated AFM organizations in the 1960s and 70s.

Together, Somehow

Examines how people find ways to get along and share a dancefloor, a vibe, and a sound. Drawing on time spent in the minimal techno and house music subscenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin as the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, Garcia-Mispireta explains this bonding in terms of what he calls stranger-intimacy: the kind of warmth, sharing, and vulnerability between people that happens surprisingly often at popular electronic dance music parties.

Homesick Blues

Explores how artists, fans, amateur practitioners, and others have used music to tell stories of everyday life in Japan from the late 1940s to 2018, a practice that author Scott Aalgaard calls "musical storytelling."