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MUSC 1190: World Music: Research

[MUSC|1190]

Encyclopedias and Dictionaries

Scholarly Articles

When searching RILM, you can use "Major Topics" to search for articles in broad areas of music research. If just keyword searching lets you down, combining a Major Topic with a keyword helps you refine your results more efficiently. Examples of Major Topics related to world musics include:

  • 39.21 Popular music of North Africa
  • 41.33 Vocal music in Southeast Asia
  • 97 Music and Islam

Look up the Major Topics associated with your research question on RILM's Classification System website.

Articles in RILM are also tagged with Subjects, which tell you more specifically what an article is about. You can also search by Subject to find more articles on that narrower topic. The following example shows how detailed subjects can be:

RILM article record (about First Nations popular music in Canada) with subjects highlighted

Tip:

Article Linker button

Need the PDF/full-text?

Use Article Linker to search for full-text across all databases. If the article isn't available, choose Request via ILLiad or use interlibrary services to request a copy from another library.

Books and Ebooks

You can use the USU library catalog to find books and ebooks about whatever topic you are interested in. This guide to searching for books shows you how.

One helpful resource for topics in this class is the Oxford Global Music Series, which has books devoted to specific music cultures and parts of the world. You can browse the list of titles in this series via the library catalog. Here's an example of one of the books:

Catalog record for the book Music in the Andes

Musical Instruments

Set up your InterLibrary Loan account

Set up your account here so you can quickly and easily request article PDFs, chapter scans, and books we don't have in the USU Libraries collection.