Reference Resources
Black Conductors by Call Number: ONLINE & REFERENCE ML402 .H36 1995
Black Women in American Bands and Orchestras by Call Number: ONLINE2nd ed. (online)
1st ed. located in REFERENCE ML82 .H36
Blacks in Classical Music: A Bibliographical Guide to Composers, Performers, and Ensembles by Call Number: REFERENCE ML128 .B45 G7 1988ISBN: 0313260567
A Blues Bibliography by Call Number: REFERENCE ML128 .B49 F67 2007
Brass Music of Black Composers: A Bibliography by Call Number: ONLINE & REFERENCE ML128 .W5 H62 1996 & ONLINE
A Century of Musicals in Black and White: An Encyclopedia of Musical stage Works by, about, or involving African Americans by Call Number: ONLINE & REFERENCE ML102 .M88 P37 1993
Choral Arrangements of the African-American Spirituals: Historical Overview and Annotated Listings by Call Number: ONLINE & REFERENCE ML128 .V7 T75 1998
Encyclopedia of African American Music by Call Number: REFERENCE MLA101 .U6 E53 2011
An Index to African-American Spirituals for the Solo Voice by Call Number: REFERENCE ML128 .S4 A27 1999
International Dictionary of Black Composers by Call Number: REFERENCE ML105 .I4 1999 v.1-2
Keyboard Music of Black Composers: A Bibliography by Call Number: REFERENCE ML128 .B45 H68 1992
Piano Music by Black Women Composers by Call Number: ONLINE
String Music of Black Composers by Call Number: REFERENCE ML128 .B45 H7 1991
Books
African American Music: An Introduction by Call Number: ML3508.1 .A37 2006
The African Imagination in Music by Call Number: ML3760 .A42 2016
African Theatre: Opera & Music Theatre by Call Number: ONLINE
Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll by Call Number: ML3534.3 .M346 2020
Black Music, Black Poetry: Blues and Jazz's Impact on African American Versification by Call Number: PS310 .J39 B57 2014
Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement by Call Number: ML1700 .A53 2018
A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music by Call Number: ONLINE
Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music by Call Number: ML200 .H798 2022
From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz by Call Number: ONLINE & ML3565 .F47 2006
Images: Iconography of Music in African American Culture (1770s-1920s) by Call Number: ML3556 .S738 2000
Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris by Call Number: ONLINE & ML3509 .R7 B72 2016
Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Call Number: ML3917 .G3 T58 2021
Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry by Call Number: ML3556 .G77 2018
The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs, and the Ships That Make the African Diaspora by Call Number: ML3545 .F598 2017
Composers, Performers & Repertory (Online)
- The African American Art Song AllianceFounded in 1997, this is the home of interchange between performers and scholars interested in art song by African-American composers. Links to composers, performers, and sites for African American Music Research.
- African Diaspora Music ProjectADMP's vision is to create a repository for concert works of composers of the African Diaspora (composers throughout the world descended from people of West and Central Africa); provide access to scores, recordings, and programmatic information; encourage the research, exploration and performance of these works.
- Institute for Composer DiversitySearch the ICD's databases for composers and links to their websites and works.
- Paul Laurence Dunbar Music ArchiveIncludes lists of composers, selected poems, and musical settings--many with downloadable PDFs.
- Beyond Elijah Rock: The Non-Idiomatic Choral Music of Black ComposersListing serves as a starting point to the non-idiomatic choral music of Black composers.
- Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music : Works by Composers of African DescentHoused at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
- Music by Black ComposersMBC's mission is (a) To inspire Black students to begin and continue instrumental training by showing them that they are an integral part of classical music’s past as well as its future; (b) To make the music of Black composers available to all people regardless of background or ethnicity; (c) To help bring greater diversity to the ranks of performers, composers, and audiences, and help change the face of classical music and its canon.
- Music by Black Composers (Theodore Front Musical Literature)Theodore Front is a commercial site offering thousands of scores, CDs, and books. Their topical lists are a great place to start learning new works.
Publishers & Labels
Archives & Collections
- Amistad Research CenterThe ARC is a community-based archive in partnership with Tulane University. The Amistad Research Center is committed to collecting, preserving, and providing open access to original materials that reference the social and cultural importance of America's ethnic and racial history, the African Diaspora, human relations, and civil rights.
- Archives of African American Music and Culture (Indiana University)The AAAMC holdings cover a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions primarily from the post-World War II era.
- Center for Southern African American Music (University of South Carolina)The mission of the Center for Southern African-American Music is to preserve and record oral histories, music recordings, film and video footage of African-American Music in the South.
Additional Online Resources
- Center for Black Music ResearchCBMR holds materials highlighting the role of black music in world culture with materials originating or representing black music in the United States, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean in a variety of formats: personal papers, scores, sheet music, audio-visual materials, photographs, books, periodicals, and commercial recordings.
- Intercultural Music InitiativeIMI, formerly African Musical Arts, is a concert and education outreach program highlighting contemporary works by lesser-know composers, along with standard repertoire.
- The Music of Black Americans (Harvard University)A digital appendix to Dr. Eileen Southern's The Music of Black Americans that contains many scores of works discussed in Southern's book.
- SphinxThe Sphinx Organization is dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts.
- Spirituals DatabaseThe Spirituals Database offers searchable access to recorded track information for concert Negro Spiritual settings performed by solo Classical vocalists. The resource contains a selection from a century of historic and contemporary concert spiritual recordings produced on compact discs, long-playing (33 1/3 rpm) albums, 78 rpm records, 45 rpm discs, audio cassettes and streamed audio files, as well as demonstration recordings from musical score collections.
Audio & Visual Resources
Films on Demand
- African Wave: South African Music and Its InfluencesThis series includes films about Brenda Fassie, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ntemi Piliso, among others.
Smithsonian Global Sound/American Song
The links below will launch searches on the following subjects:
UK Libraries
Blues Masters: History of the BluesCall Number: VR 141 v.1-2
The Harlem Renaissance: The Music & Rhythms That Started a Cultural RevolutionCall Number: WT Young AV-D6132Request at 1st floor circulation desk.
The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black MusicCall Number: BCD 37
Rhythm of Resistance: The Black Music of South AfricaCall Number: DVD 254
The Songs Are Free: Bernice Johnson Reagon and African American MusicCall Number: DVD 947 & Films on Demand
WattstaxCall Number: DVD 511
UK Libraries Research Guides
- African American Women Play Musical InstrumentsAn amazing research guide created by UK Libraries Special Collections Librarian Reinette Jones.
UK Libraries Databases
- American MusicFormally "African American Song," this streaming database includes folk, roots, early R&B, blues, jazz, gospel, spirituals, and reggae,
- Black Thought and Culture: African Americans from Colonial Times to the PresentBlack Thought & Culture is a collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history.
- Notable Kentucky African AmericansContains short biographies of notable African Americans with Kentucky roots or ties, organized by profession or subject. Also includes entries for events and locations. Includes links to related resources.
- Slavery, Abolition & Social JusticeThe resource offers primary source materials from America, the Caribbean, Brazil and Cuba examining European, Islamic and African involvement in the slave trade. This link launches a search for the keyword "music."
- Smithsonian Global SoundSmithsonian Global Sound is a collection of the world's musical and aural traditions. Search by geographic location, cultural group, genre, instruments, etc.
Subject Headings & Call Numbers
►SUBJECT HEADINGS & THE ADVANCED SEARCH
These links will launch searches in the Advanced Search:
- African American women musicians
- African Americans -- Music -- Bibliography
- African Americans -- Music -- History and criticism
- Blacks in opera
- Music -- African influences
- Music by African American composers
For your own search:
- Go to Advanced Search
- Search for Library Catalog
- Search Filters Subject contains [type your terms here]
- Material Type All items [or specific format]
Scores and AV are best searched by composer, performer, and/or genre, and limiting to the material type Scores, Audio, or Videos, for example:
- Go to Advanced Search
- Search for Library Catalog
- Search Filters Author/creator contains William Grant Still
- AND Subject contains symphonies
- Materials Type Audio
►CALL NUMBERS -- BOOKS
- ML128 .B45 Bibliographies of African American music
- ML3478--ML4379 African American music
►CALL NUMBERS -- SCORES
- M1670--M1671 African American ethnic music in the United States (includes spirituals, songs of enslaved people, protest songs, folk songs, etc.)
Or try searching in an Advanced Author/Creator search set to "Contains" the composer's name and setting the Material Type to Scores.
Works in the Western art music tradition are not generally given separate call numbers that indicate ethnicity, gender, orientation, or place of birth. See the document below of an outline of the Library of Congress Classification System for scores: