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Music resources

Finding Scores and Recordings

The Music Online database makes available a large collection of both recordings and sheet music.  It is possible to read the sheet music on the computer while listening to the online recording, but it is tricky with this database.  What I recommend is to print the sheet music off first to follow while listening to the recording because the music will play faster than the browser can advance to the next page of music.

 

These are the steps to doing both together on the computer:

 

1. Go to Music Online and click "search".  This will bring you to their advanced search.  Click the tab for "composer works" and fill in your search information.  Click search.

For example: "Beethoven" in the composer field and "24" for opus number.

2. This will bring you to the "search results" screen.   Across the top are the headings All, Composer works, Audio recordings, and Scores.  Select "audio recordings" first.

3. Select an audio recording and hit the "play" icon (grey dot with an arrow).  This will open up a new window for the recording.  It will automatically start playing, so you’ll need  hit pause.

4. Back to the search results pages.  Now click the heading for “scores”.

5. Select a score by clicking the little rectangle by the music title.  The main browser window will go to the first page of the sheet music.

6. Now, with the score in front of you, you can go to the window for the recording.  Since it's a small window, it won't block much of the window with the score. Un-pause the recording and listen while following the score.

Like books, you can look up scores by the composer’s name (last name first) or by title.  For example, you find the score for Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique either by looking up Berlioz (as the author) or by Symphonie fantastique as the title.  You can also look for the work using the keywords in the Classic catalog.

For many musical works, it helps to have the opus number or the catalog number when doing a keyword search.  Some composers’ works are assigned special catalog numbers unique to each composition, such as Kochel numbers for Mozart or BWV numbers for Bach.  For most composers, you can find these numbers by looking up the composer in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Ref. ML100.N48 2000 vol.1-29) or Oxford Music Online.

Keyword searching can be useful for finding individual works in songbooks and music anthologies.  Most of the songbooks and music anthologies in the Moody Library collection can be searched this way.  Use the title of the work (for example “Greensleeves”) as your keyword (or words).

The same search methods can be used to locate recordings held in the Moody Library. Both HCUOneSearch and the classic keyword search provide options to narrow the search just to recordings.  When using HCUOneSearch, do your keyword search.  On the lefthand side of the results page, there are options to refine the search including format.  For the classic keyword serach, you click "add limits" and then select the format.