Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers/Guide to online research

WikiProject Composers

Discussion

Newspaper and magazine archives

Searching newspaper archives

With the caveat that journalists can sometimes be sloppy about checking facts, often the best independent sources for current composers and works can be mainstream press or journal articles. The Guardian (UK), The New York Times (archives go back to 1881), the San Francisco Chronicle, and Time all have extensive archives that are largely free (except for certain NYT articles). The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Melbourne) also have many free articles in their pre-2006 archives. To access their contents quickly, type the following in the search box at Google:

site:guardian.co.uk "search term"
site:query.nytimes.com "search term"
site:www.sfgate.com "search term"
site:www.time.com "search term"
site:theage.com.au "search term"
site:smh.com.au "search term"

Examples using this method:

If you are looking for articles in smaller newspapers or just want to do a quick general news search Google News Archives is useful, although it may miss some items picked by searches in individual periodical archives. Example using this method:

"Benjamin Britten" in the Archives of Google News

Specialist publications

Gramophone Archives, a searchable database containing scans of every issue of Gramophone starting from April 1923.
La Scena Musicale, a Canada-based magazine in both English and French, has virtually all their issues available online. Use the site search or browse the Back Issues page.
Revistas Culturales, the official web site of the Asociación de Revistas Culturales de España, reprints many back articles (with the original illustrations) from Spanish classical music and opera magazines, most of which are only available in hardcopy. The magazines covered include Scherzo, Ritmo, Ópera Actual, and Melómano. To access the articles available from each magazine, click on the magazine name.
JSTOR is very useful for finding articles in scholarly journals. Although the full articles generally require subscription (held by many university libraries), the site will display the first page of the article, which may have useful information. The best way to search it if you are not a subscriber is via Google using site:.jstor.org "search term". Sample search results for "Thea Musgrave"

Books

Note that most of the complete books available on the internet are published prior to 1923. While they can be useful for researching obscure figures and for first-hand accounts and contemporary reviews of their works, they are not a substitute for modern scholarship.

Google book search

Google's specialized book search engine Google Books can be very useful, although the results will vary from citation only, to very limited 'snippets', to fairly extensive previews, to the full book. However, even a snippet can be enough if you just want to reference a single fact. You can set the search for the type of results you want (all books, books with previews, or complete books). Note that the books are generally not in text format. They are scans of the actual pages in the original work, although many of the out of copyright works are also available in PDF and plain text versions. When searching for mentions of an individual person, try searching the name in a variety of orders, e.g. "Giorgio Tozzi" and "Tozzi, Giorgio". The latter form is particularly useful for finding entries in biographical dictionaries and similar reference works.

University of California Press

The University of California Press has made many complete classical music-related books from their 'Scholarship Editions' available online. Note that although they are free, they are still in copyright and their contents must not be pasted verbatim into articles. All the books in the series (including those without full public access) can be internally searched. The page numbering in the online versions reflects that of the hardcopy versions.

UCP Search page The filter can be set to either all books or public access books only.

Selected UCP public access books

Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 edited by Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr, University of California Press, 1997.
Music as Cultural Practice, 1800 - 1900 by Lawrence Kramer, University of California Press, 1990
Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution by Paul Metzner, University of California Press, 1998.
Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture edited by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, University of California Press, 1997.
The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908 by Walter M. Frisch, University of California Press, 1997.
Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring by Pieter C. van den Toorn, University of California Press, 1987.
Papal Patronage and the Music of St. Peter's, 1380-1513 by Christopher A. Reynolds, University of California Press, 1996.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg has many full-length books available including memoirs, classical music reference books, and biographies. Note that as all these are out of copyright, i.e. published before 1923, the reference works may contain errors that have been corrected in more modern books. Unlike Google Books and University of California Press, which provide access to the original publications, the books on Project Gutenberg are technically re-publications of the original works in text or HTML format and often do not contain the original page numbers or detailed information about the edition from which they were taken. The HTML versions of the books can also be good sources for photographs.

Project Gutenberg catalog

Unless you know the exact title or author you are looking for, it may be easier to do a key word search via Google by typing the following in the search box: site:gutenberg.org "key word (or words)"

Sample search on "Saint-Saens"

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a rich source for scanned out-of-print music books, most of which are no longer in copyright. The books are available in several formats and include foreign language books, e.g.

Annals Of Music In America (covers the period from 1645 to 1922)
Biographie universelle des musiciens (multiple volumes, most dating from the latter half of the 19th century)

The site has its own advanced search engine:

It can also be searched via Google site search:

Sample search results for site:archive.org "wagner" + "Ring" + "royal opera"

Biographical encyclopedias and dictionaries

The Canadian Encyclopedia – online version
Australian Dictionary of Biography – online version (biographies of deceased people only)
Dictionary of New Zealand Biography – online version (biographies of deceased people only)
Jewish Encyclopedia – online version (12 volumes of the edition published between 1901 and 1906)
Grand Larousse encyclopédique – online version (articles from the print version or written under editorial control of Larousse except for articles designated "Les contributions d'internautes", which are signed but reader-generated, in French)
Store norske leksikon – online version (in Norwegian)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – online version (The full version requires subscription. However, nearly all public libraries in England, Scotland, and Wales, and all in Northern Ireland, subscribe to the Oxford DNB online. The site also makes seven biographies free each week in the Lives of the Week section.)
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians – The 1900 edition in four volumes is available at Wikisource as scans of individual pages alongside un-proofed plain text:
Vol. 1 – A to Impromptu
Vol. 2 – Improperia to Plain Song
Vol. 3 – Planché to Sumer Is Icumen In
Vol. 4 – Sumer Is Icumen In (cont'd) to Zur Mühlen (also includes Final Additions, Index, and Catalogue of Articles by Writer)
Dictionnaire universel des contemporains: contenant toutes les personnes notables de la France et des pays étrangers – Multiple editions of Gustave Vapereau's monumental work (from the original 1858 edition to the 1893 edition) are available at the Gallica site of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It's best to choose the last edition before the subject's death as this will have the most complete information. Editions published after the subject's death will often have only a date of death and reference to earlier editions. Note that only the 1858 edition is available as PDF files. Later editions must be read online from scans of the pages.)
Édition 1858 – Volume 1 (A–H); Volume 2 (I–Z); Supplément
Édition 1870, Édition 1880, Édition 1893

Performance archives

The New York Philharmonic's Performance Archive (with works and their soloists) from 1842 to the present.
For detailed information on searching and using opera house archives see WikiProject Opera's Guide to Online Research

Image sources

When uploading any images, check that they are out of copyright (published before 1923 or the artist/photographer died over 70 years ago). It may require extra research on your part to establish this unless the image is obviously old, e.g. a contemporary portrait of an 18th or early 19th century composer or musician. Some later images such as portraits of deceased composers or musicians may still be used under "fair use", but this requires a detailed fair use rationale, and note that according to Wikipedia:Non-free content, images copyrighted to press agencies such as Associated Press, Corbis and Getty Images may not be used. (See image page help for guidance.) The page for this Portrait of Lucia Popp provides an example of how to document a "fair use" image.

The Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main has many music related images. You can either search by key word(s) "Freitext" or for a particular "Person". Note that not all the photos, drawings and paintings are out of copyright. However, the individual image pages generally have information (in German) about the date of the work and the photographer/artist.

Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt search page To start the search click on "Abfrage starten"
Sample image page resulting from a search on "Verdi". (The search produces over 35 images in all)

The New York Public Library - Joseph Muller Collection has thousands of images in their digital gallery, predominantly of composers, singers and musicians. They date from the 16th to the early 20th-centuries, and are mostly engravings and lithographs, with some drawings,

Muller Collection search page

The National Portrait Gallery (UK) has a large collection of music related portraits, with good documentation.

Gallery search page

The National Portrait Gallery (Australia) has good documentation and accompanying biographical articles.

Gallery search page

Sample image page resulting from a search for Florence Austral

The Library of Congress has a general search for digitized images. Suggested individual collections to search include:

Photochrom Prints Collection (all are public domain)

George Grantham Bain Collection (all are public domain)

National Photo Company Collection (images created between 1850 and 1945, all are public domain)

La Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine (in French) on the site of the French Ministry of Culture is a rich resource.

Médiathèque archives search page Enter your key word(s) in the "Texte libre" box and click "lancer la recherche". On the search results page, click on the small document icon next to the image for full details of the image and an enlargeable thumbnail.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France Virtual Exhibitions site is another rich source

The index page for the virtual exhibitions has French and English versions.

Sample Google Image search for "Berlioz" on the BnF virtual exhibitions site.

Dealers in antique prints and music memorablia can be valuable because they tend to document the images well, although they are not easily searchable. Suggestions include:

Roger Gross Ltd. has composer portraits, as well as posters and other emphemera. The most efficient way of searching for images on this site is via Google Images with site:rgrossmusicautograph.com "key word(s)" in the search box.
Harmonie Autographs and Music has a large collection of singer, composer, and musician portraits, as well as autographed scores, posters and ephemera. On this site, most images are hidden from Google searches. The best option is to use their own navigation links.

Sample image page from Composers 1 in the navigation bar. (Click on "More details..." next to each thumbnail for enlargement and detailed image information.)

Philographikon has two relevant galleries to browse:

Portraits of Musicians and Composers

Antique Music Prints

General resources

Almanacco Amadeus compiled by Gherardo Casaglia is useful for premiere dates and casts as well as records of other performances of a particular opera or singer. You can search by a specific date and/or a search string (the box labelled "testo"). Note that the almanac search engine is both case and diacritic sensitive. It doesn't read quote marks as meaning exact phrase, so leave them out. (Sample search results for Franz Schubert) See this page for the sources used to compile the almanac. For many years, the site was hosted by Amadeus, an Italian classical music magazine which has been in print since 1989.
Gallica from the Bibliothèque nationale de France has complete scans of thousands of books, scores, ephemera, periodicals etc. online. Many of them are richly illustrated. Some are also available in PDF format and/or plain text format.
Open Music Library published by Alexander Street Press, a subsidiary of ProQuest, is a database with links to scores and journal articles. It is can be of use as a specialised search engine. However, most of their material, even some that is out of copyright, is behind a paywall. Access is often available from libraries and other institutions, and the Wikipedia Library Card Platform may provide access to some of the paywall content on application. See Research in scholarly sources off- and online below for details.

Research in scholarly sources off- and online

While a great and expanding wealth of material is available on the Internet, it remains the case that the core scholarly resources for most classical composers are not available on line with open access. There are three reasons why printed scholarly books and articles tend to serve, even today, as the most reliable resources in writing about the classical composers:

First, these books and articles are typically greater in scope. For instance, a leading biography of Mozart, W. A. Mozart by Hermann Abert (recently updated by Eisen and Spencer), is over 1500 pages long. H. C. Robbins Landon's Haydn: Chronicle and Works covers five volumes, each about 600 pages. The bulk of the material in these two works has not been transmitted to the pages of Wikipedia. And the great number of journal articles about these composers often include material that even these huge volumes do not cover.
Second, scholarly books and articles are generally written by professionals. While amateurs are often capable of doing excellent work, the professionals have the advantage of having spent decades working with their subject day in and day out. All else being equal, this results in more reliable and deeper work.
Third, scholarly books and articles have generally undergone scholarly peer review: they are not published without some other scholar checking them for accuracy first.

Although many printed scholarly books and journal articles are now online, e.g. via Google Books (mentioned above) and JSTOR, much of this material is behind a paywall, including JSTOR. However, there are ways to cope with this:

Your first stop should be The Wikipedia Library Card Platform. Wikipedia has formed partnerships with a variety of academic publishers to provide free access to their online material for Wikipedia editors on approved application. Many of them are highly relevant to classical music or have a significant number of books and scholarly journals on the subject, e.g. Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (RIPM), JSTOR, Project MUSE, Taylor & Francis, Baylor University Press, Bloomsbury Publishing, Cambridge University Press, Edinburgh University Press, etc. The full list of partners and instructions for applications is here.
Many university students are not aware that in fact they do have access to a scholarly library. If you are a university student, it is a good idea to visit your library and see what it has in the areas you are editing. Don't just go to the online catalog; actually visit the book stacks and browse – typically they are cleverly arranged to assist browsing, by placing books on similar subjects adjacently. In addition, university libraries often pay for the entire university community to have access to essential online resources, as described above. Usually you can find these web sources by starting at the library's online catalog.
Even if you are not affiliated with a university, you may be able to access quite a bit of good scholarly material through your municipal public library, including the treasure trove of Grove Music Online
Even small libraries often provide access to extensive collections by means of Interlibrary Loan services. Asking the advice of a reference librarian can be particularly helpful here.
If you truly love the subject you are editing, and you are not dirt-poor, it is reasonable to shell out some of your own money to buy the best available books. One single book, if it is good enough, can be mined for a huge amount of Wikipedia content. A particular advantage of owning some of the best references is that they sit on your own shelf, waiting to be used in case some factual question or controversy arises.