MUSI 10B: History of Music from Early Modern Culture through Modernism (1745-1848) (Sprigge, Winter 2025)

Recordings: Where to Find Them and How to Listen to Them

Photo by Norman Bruderhofer.  Collection of John Lambert-Hopkins. Used under a Creative Common Share Alike 2.5 license.

How to Access Recordings for Listening and Viewing:

There are several ways to listen to audio materials through the Library, from LPs (records) to Compact Disks (CD) to streaming media through licensed databases. These will give you more options and often better listening quality than a standard YouTube video or Spotify track, for example. The Sara Miller McCune Arts Library on the Library's First Floor Mountain Side offers listening rooms that allow you to experience the vast array of available recordings. The streaming options can be enjoyed from anywhere on- or off-campus.

Using the UCSB Catalog to find LPs, CDs, and more:

Use the UCSB Library Catalog to find books, scores, sound recordings, videos, journal titles, and other materials. Here are some tips for searching the catalog for musical works:

• In Basic Search, you can use Author searching not only for authors and composers but also for performers and ensembles:

• Advanced Search is recommended if you're searching for musical works.  You can combine composer and title, and limit your search to scores, CDs, LPs, videos, etc.:

• To find works with generic titles (i.e., sonata, symphony, concerto, quartet, etc.), it is often helpful to search for the genre in the plural:

• If the work includes a solo instrument, add it as a phrase:

Searching using Uniform Titles:

In library catalogs, musical works each have a unique, standardized uniform title.  Whereas the title of a work can vary on different scores and recordings, its uniform title in library catalogs is always the same.  Therefore, if you know a little bit about uniform titles, you can use them to search more effectively. 

To learn more, see the tutorial "Using Uniform Titles" from the Cook Music Library, Indiana University.

Streaming Music and Video:

The following list of databases will be accessible either with your UCSB login information or will be freely and openly available.

except as indicated