Library News
Grove Music Online
Posted on December 7th, 2019
One of the many helpful resources that Booth library has access to is the database called Grove Music Online. This was originally a print music dictionary, but has expanded greatly since being brought online and serves as a useful tool for many.
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Getting to Grove Music Online from Booth’s homepage is easy. Click on the database option in the “Articles” tab. (Above)
Then click on the “G” to get to databases starting with “G”. After that, it is as simple as scrolling down and clicking on the link to go to Grove Music Online. (Below)
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Grove Music Online is essentially a music dictionary, but nonetheless is extremely useful when looking at a wide range of topics within the music world. This can be helpful for anyone who wants to learn more about music in general, or the researcher, who needs specific information about a topic. What makes Grove Music Online so useful is its layout and variety of search options.
The world of music is very broad, spanning world cultures and world history. Grove Music Online does a good job of providing intuitive categories for searching. The website describes itself as, “the authoritative resource for music research with over 52,000 articles written by nearly 9,000 scholars charting the diverse history, theory and cultures of music around the globe.”
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The general categorization that Grove Music Online has are Topic, Instrument, Era, Region, Place Type, and Occupation. Beyond those categorizations are sub-sections that go into more detail about each category. For example, the Topic section has general points of interest about a wide array of fields from Audio Engineering to the Philosophy of Music and more. The Instrument category specifically looks at wind instruments, stringed instruments, keyboards, and others. The section pertaining to Era includes a timeline of how music has been written, divided chronologically into different categories, like 18th c./Late Baroque (1700-1750). The Region section is by continent. Place Type is more granular and provides country, city, state, etc. Finally, the Occupation category lays out different careers within the music industry broadly speaking.
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In addition to the categories Grove Music uses, the platform also uses a filtering system in the advanced search, allowing you to narrow your search to very specific articles. It is a very useful tool to navigate 52,000 entries! Filters include: format, type, place type, and life event (See the image to the left for greater detail). One of the more useful of these filters will probably be type. This would refine the search to a type of article, like Biographical, Family, Place, Subject Reference, and more.
Subject guides and research resources are available on Grove Music Online to help any student find a place to begin looking. They can also be helpful for better understanding the website.
Some of the many useful tools on this page include an Opera index, timelines of different articles published, as well as topical guides for Grove Music Online (Below). I have personally found the research resources to be helpful when looking at articles when researching on a topic from some of my music classes. This especially came in handy when I was looking at music libraries, festivals, and looking at specific sources and manuscripts. Overall, Grove Music Online has many different resources and can be extremely helpful to everyone!
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