This guide was created for use by staff and patrons of the Loeb Music Library. Locating sheet music for individual song titles in catalogs can be a challenge since many anthologies and collections do not have contents listings in the online catalog - HOLLIS. Since our patrons often need to locate single songs, this guide serves as a beginning finding guide.
Browsing for songs to perform (recommended for the extension school musical theater course):
The Singer's Musical Theater Anthology(we have various voice ranges in Volumes 1, 2 and 4, others on order):
Title word search brings them up in Hollis, mainly in the Mus 502.75 range (third floor stacks). This series has thorough contents notes so keyword searching by song title will also work.
Contemporary Singing Actor
Series, in the Mus 502.79-86 range, also has good contents listings.
Examples of other helpful subject word searches in Hollis:
Musicals -- Excerpts -- Vocal scores with piano
Songs (Medium voice) with piano
Songs (Low voice) with piano [And so on for different voice parts]
Popular songs (will retrieve some musicals, jazz)
Seeking a specific song title:
Online song indexes :
Online Resources for Music Scholars:
-- Sheet Music and Multi-Media Resources section: sites with "Sheet Music" or Songs or Singing in the title, worth checking but read the "About the Collection" scope notes ahead of time to save yourself search time:
ASU Libraries Song Index
California Library Systems Cooperative Song Index
Duke University Libraries (portal)
IU: How to find sheet music online (portal)
LC: I Hear America Singing (1800-1922)
LC: African-American Sheet Music
Sheet Music Consortium
19th-Century California Sheet Music (UC Berkeley)
Digital Archive of Popular American Music (UCLA)
Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music (Johns Hopkins)
Historic American Sheet Music (Duke)
Downloadable Scores from Acadia University
Mutopia
University of North Texas Music Special Collections Catalog
University of Washington Libraries - Popular Song Database (anthologies index)
UT Song Index (University of Tennessee)
Print indexes (in Aldrich Reading Room):
Popular song index
by Patricia Pate Havlice
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML128 S3 H4 & suppls. 1978, 1984, 1989
[very thorough]
Great song thesaurus
by Roger Lax
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML128 S3 L4 1989
SongCite: an index to popular songs
by William Goodfellow
ML128 P63 G65 1995
Song finder: A title index to 32,000 popular songs in collections, 1854-1992
by Gary Ferguson
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML128 S3 F47 1995
[LSU index]
Songs in collections: an index
by Desiree De Charms
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML128 S3 D37 1966
[1940-57, some pop songs included]
Song Index of the Enoch Pratt Free Library
by Ellen Luchinsky
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML128 S3 L665
[includes many types of songbooks]
These titles index recordings, but could provide useful information:
Popular music: an annotated index of American popular songs
ed by Shapiro and Pollock
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML120.U5.S5 (supplement, to present)
[Continues: Popular music, 1920-1979]
Popular music, 1920-1979: a revised cumulation
ed by Shapiro and Pollock
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML120 U5 S5 1985 v.1-3
[Annotated index of over 18,000 American popular songs]
Popular music, 1900-1919: an annotated guide to American popular songs
by Barbara Cohen-Stratyner
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML120.U5.C6 1988
[Companion volume to the revised cumulation (Shapiro and Pollock)]
Musical theater encyclopedias:
The American musical theatre song encyclopedia
by Thomas S. Hischak
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML102.M88 H59 1995
Broadway musicals, show by show
by Stanley Green
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML1711 .G735 1996
The encyclopedia of the musical theatre
by Kurt Gänzl
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML102.M88 G3 2001
The Rodgers and Hammerstein encyclopedia
by Thomas S. Hischak
Location: Loeb Music Aldrich Room ML102.M88 H595 2007
In addition we have many other reference books in the Aldrich Room (browsable) and regular stacks. To find more try Hollis subject word searches (for example):
Musicals -- Encyclopedias
Popular Music -- Encyclopedias
See more sources specific to Musical Theater.
