Culminating Experience Resource Guide: Performance & Composition Research Resources

1. Books
2. Journals / Databases
3. Mixing and Production

Welcome to our research guide for songwriters. Here, you'll find books, journal articles, websites, videos, databases, and sources of inspiration for songwriters.

The Contemporary Music Score Collection is published by the UCLA Music Library. The collection of over 6,000 scores includes digital, open access scores published by the library from international composers.

Babelscores features over 210,000 pieces of curated contemporary music, including sheet music, recordings and videos.

This database, from The Institute for Composer Diversity, contains the profiles of composers from historically excluded groups who have consented to be represented.

Provides its subscribers with an in-depth understanding of the craft and trends that shape today's chart-topping hits for success in today's music industry. This search features over 200 criteria enabling highly customizable and comparative searches based on compositional characteristics, production techniques and more.

The Global Jukebox presents traditions that are linked to the roots of the world's peoples. Alan Lomax called it a "democratic cultural system". The visitor may explore collections of music, dance, and speech from almost every corner of the globe, recorded by hundreds of pioneering ethnographers at times when mass communications were less pervasive than now.
Note: you can select "Guest" to view the site.

Comprehensive coverage of the music field and every aspect of the classical and popular worlds of music. Featuring digitized content from 1970 to the present, the Music Index contains cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts of articles about music, musicians and the music industry for more than 490 periodicals. It also provides selective coverage for more than 200 periodicals.

The largest and most comprehensive streaming audio collection of contemporary world music. It currently provides streaming access to over 1.5 million tracks from 169 countries and 800 labels, with new recordings added regularly.

From Hathi Trust, an open access collection of mostly 19th- and early 20th-century musical scores by women composers held at the University of Michigan Music Library.

AllMusic is a comprehensive and in-depth resource for finding out more about albums, bands, musicians and songs. It includes exhaustive discographies supplemented with reviews, biographies, sound samples and other information about audio releases.