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Music: Popular Music

Selected resources for students of music

Popular music

This page contains selected resources relevant for the study of popular music. Introductory texts on the basic research principles of ethnomusicology and popular music scholarship are included. To find journal articles use databases such as Proquest which has a music specific database, Music periodicals database, and EBSCOhost which includes RILM Abstracts.

Bloomsbury Popular Music provides access to scholarly coverage of modern popular music worldwide, covering the mid-20th century to the present day, through the Bloomsbury Enyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, and an expanding range of scholarly books.  reference content, scholarship, 
If you are seeking a particular kind of resource, please contact your librarian

In addition to the keywords hip-hop and gansgsta rap indicated in your assigned topic, you may have also noted useful terms from your lectures and readings. Try these in library search or databases such as Proquest or Ebsco.

For further examples, try searching the following databases:
Kanopy
EduTV
Music Voyager: India: Bollywood Adventures
ArtFilms Digital
Here are examples from ArtFilms Digital: 
Raga revelry: a journey through North Indian classical music 
T​​​​he End of the Corrugated Road 
about the Warumpi Band who for twenty years told the stories of Australia in their music. 

 

Hip-Hop
Reggae
Samba

Sources for all regions from every continent

The following databases offer sources which you can search using keywords : hip-hop and gansgstareggae and Jamaica or samba and Brazil. There will also be sources relevant to the Expo on the Eurovision Song Contest and the pop music of East AsiaIndiaIranSouth Africa and West Africa

Bloomsbury Popular Music is a database containing in-depth analysis of popular music in a global context. You can search with keywords to find sources for the essay topics and the Expo.

Contemporary World Music contains streamed sound tracks and online liner notes which offer different perspectives on your topics. You can search by Place or Genre and browse by performer or ensemble.
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Smithsonian World Music is a a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. There are over 35,000 individual tracks of music and online liner notes which you can browse or search using controlled vocabularies or keywords to find musical instruments, geographic areas, cultural groups and genres.
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Oxford Music Online (searching example)

Many comprehensive encyclopedias contain articles accompanied by extensive bibliographies which provide ideas for further sources.  Try the entries for Hip-Hop, Samba, Brazil, Iran, Jamaica, South Africa and West African in Oxford Music Online. The search interface allows you to search for keywords across the full text of all articles. For example:

Link to the full Oxford Music Online (also known as Grove Music Online). 

Popular sheet music collection in Special Collections

The Popular sheet music collection in Special collections includes over 20,000 popular sheet music titles. A Finding List is available.

Star dust / by Hoagy Carmichael ; piano transcription by James Matté. (New York : Mills Music, 1930, c1929). "Star Dust" began as an instrumental, "Barnyard Shuffle." The lyrics were added in 1929 by Mitchell Parish. The most widely covered song of the twentieth century, Nat King Cole’s 1957 version is perhaps the best. The song ends with the words, "My stardust melody, the memory of love’s refrain."

Most of the music dates from 1900 to 1970 but includes  a substantial number of examples from the nineteenth century. It is representative of the many and varied forms of music that have been popular, including show tunes, jazz, dance, etc. from Great Britain, the United States and Australia. Much of the collection are popular songs from overseas that have been published in Australia and feature Australian stage performers' portraits on the covers.

Catalogue of the exhibition of sheet music from the Rare Books Collection, Stardust Melodies.