LibGuides: Music History: Databases and Major Journals

Research Guide

Databases
Major journals

Berklee provides a wealth of databases for research in music history. Below is a sampling of our larger list of music history databases. For basic information, we recommend two encyclopedias: Grove Music for general music history and the Garland Encyclopedia for folk, regional, or ethnic music. If you're looking for articles, we recommend RILM, Music Periodicals, and JSTOR. To dig a little deeper, check out the Cambridge Companion collection, which include topics from Opera to Video Game Music.

Grove Music: Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window
Includes the full text of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Features more than 67,000 articles on people and places; instruments and techniques; and genres and styles, including non-western and folk music. Periods covered range from ancient times to the present.
Music Online: The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world’s peoples. More than 9,000 pages of material and 300 audio recordings, combined with entries by more than 700 expert contributors from all over the world.
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full-Text This link opens in a new window
RILM abstracts of music literature with full text (RAFT) expands and enhances the unrivaled global bibliography of writings on music with the addition of a million pages of full-text content from more than 200 key periodicals. Coverage includes articles and reviews as well as obituaries, editorials, correspondence, advertisements, and news. Full publication runs back to the first issue will be present for most journals.
Music Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window
Formerly known as International Index to Music Periodicals (IIMP). Music journal resource with more than half a million indexed articles, plus detailed abstracts and full text from 1874 to current, covering the scholarly to the popular.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. With more than a thousand academic journals and over 1 million images, letters, and other primary sources.
Cambridge Companions to Music This link opens in a new window
Cambridge Companions to Music cover composers, instruments or musical topics, written with the student, the performer and the music lover in mind.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.

Here is a list of some of the major journal related to music history research. If you need to find a specific journal not listed here, use our Publication Finder to see if we offer access.