Guides: World Music: Choose a Topic

Preliminary Research

To help familiarize yourself with your topic, it is helpful to do preliminary research in encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. Preliminary research can also help with:

Identifying keywords and synonyms for searches
Determining if your topic is too broad or too narrow
Identifying sub-topics
Seeing if there is current research on your topic

Find Background Information

Use the following resources to get a general, high-level information about your area of interest

Grove Music Online
Grove Music Online is the authoritative encyclopedia offering coverage of music, musicians, music-making, and music scholarship. Search GMO's 51,000 articles, 33,000 biographical articles, and 5,000 images to access quality background research on topics of interest. Content for GMO draws from the full texts of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2nd ed.). Also included in GMO is The Oxford Dictionary of Music and The Oxford Companion to Music.

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Please note, access to Grove Music Online allows for 3-simultaneous users per article. If a page you are looking for says it is unavailable, try checking back in a little while. Likely one of your classmates is viewing that page!
Credo Reference
Find quick facts and background information in over 600 reference sources. Then continue searching in the NOBLE catalog and other electronic resources right from the Credo search screen.
Oxford Reference Online
Find facts, figures, definitions, quotations, translations, and illustrations from over 175 Oxford reference titles.
Statista
Statistics portal integrating statistics and other quantitative data on over 60,000 topics including media, business, finance, politics, and more.