Database Trial
Trial access to the Rock's Backpages database is available through the link below from Monday, October 21 through November 30, 2024.
- Rock's Backpages (Trial Access through 11/30/2024)The world's largest archive of music journalism, featuring over 50,000 articles on artists from Aaliyah to ZZ Top, with a new edition every Friday.
Introduction
Welcome to the Music & Performing Arts Library (MPAL) guide for ENGL 396: The Black Presence in American Rock Criticism. This guide has tips to help you navigate the research process and find library resources to help you excel in your research and writing.
Use the tabs to the left to navigate the guide and see what resources are available to you at MPAL. Notice that some of the pages have sub-pages that will expand when you click on them.
In addition to the resources included on this guide, you may want to consult the resources on the African American Research Center website or the English Studies resources from the Literatures and Languages Library.
Course Reading
If your instructor has placed any materials on course reserve for your class - meaning they are on hold for anyone in your class to consult while in the Library - you can browse them using the Course Reserves at MPAL link below!
- Course Reserves at MPAL (audio, video, and print)This link takes you to the library catalog's search screen for course reserves held at libraries across campus. To check if there are materials on reserve for your class, type your instructor's name and/or the course number into the search box. You can ask for these materials at the service desk.
Guides to Researching & Writing About Music
How to Write about Music by Call Number: Online ResourceHow to Write About Music offers a selection of the best writers on what is perhaps our most universally beloved art form. Selections from the critically-acclaimed 33 1/3 series appear alongside new interviews and insights from authors like Lester Bangs, Chuck Klosterman, Owen Pallet, Ann Powers and Alex Ross. How to Write About Music includes primary sources of inspiration from a variety of go-to genres such as the album review, the personal essay, the blog post and the interview along with tips, writing prompts and advice from the writers themselves.
Stories We Could Tell: Putting Words to American Popular Music by Call Number: Online ResourceHow has the history of rock 'n' roll been told? Has it become formulaic? Or remained, like the music itself, open to outside influences? Who have been the genre's primary historians? What common frameworks or sets of assumptions have music history narratives shared? And, most importantly, what is the cost of failing to question such assumptions? Stories We Could Tell: Putting Words to American Popular Music identifies eight typical strategies used when critics and historians write about American popular music, and subjects each to forensic analysis.
An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music by Call Number: Online ResourceWriting about music-about what it is and what it means-is akin to describing the act of love. Somehow, the reduction of the experience to an unblushingly detailed exposition of how, where, when, and why who does what to whom, from prelude to resolution, loses everything in the translation. The other extreme, the one wherein the writer, in desperation, resorts to metaphor (with or without benefit of meter and rhyme), most often results in imagery that is banal, vulgar, inane, obscure, pretentious, and almost always insufferably romantic. To achieve good and accurate writing about music is as rare an accomplishment as expert wine-tasting, lion-taming, diamond-cut ting, truffie-finding and (if one just happens to be an unconverted Mohican brave) deer-tracking.
Writing about Music by Call Number: Online and MPAL Ready Reference Non-circulating - ML3797 .H65W7 2014Extending the principles devised for the classical repertoires, this edition includes examples from world music, rock, jazz, popular music, and cinema. It covers some of the thorniest issues of musical discourse: how to go about describing musical works and procedures in prose, the rules for citations in notes and bibliography, and proper preparation of such materials as musical examples, tables, and illustrations.
A Short Guide to Writing about Music by Call Number: MPAL Stacks - ML3797 .B44S5 2007A Short Guide to Writing about Music parallels musical skills to writing skills, examining a wide range of writing tasks for undergraduate and graduate courses. Intended for all writers on music -- college through budding professional -- and far more than a course textbook, this brief and inexpensive text coaches writers how to approach, research, and write about music.
As you conduct your research, you may find it helpful to consult some of the handbooks below to help guide you through the research process. For help with writing about music - including selecting the right terminology as well as general style tips - be sure to check out the next tab of this box!
The Craft of Research, Fourth Edition by Call Number: MPAL Reference Non-circulating - Q180.55.M4 B66 2016This fundamental work explains how to find and evaluate sources, anticipate and respond to reader reservations, and integrate these pieces into an argument that stands up to reader critique. Bizup and FitzGerald provide fresh examples and standardized terminology to clarify concepts like argument, warrant, and problem.
Music Research by Call Number: MPAL Reference Non-circulating - ML113 .S28M8 2020With a strong focus on the connection between music and writing, this comprehensive guide is ideal for use in both undergraduate and graduate music courses that require students to engage in library research or to write research papers.
A Guide to Library Research in Music by Call Number: Online ResourceA Guide to Library Research in Music introduces the process and techniques for researching and writing about music. It provides examples of different types of writing; offers a thorough introduction to music literature; describes various information-searching methods and library-based organizational systems; and explores the wide array of music resources.
Introduction to Research in Music by Call Number: MPAL Stacks - MT1 W56I5Features a discussion of musical research, bibliographic tools, guides to print and electronic resources for research, specific research skills, discussion of the process of writing and editing a research paper on a musical topic, and analysis of an article from a musicological journal. The focus is on both music literature (books and writings about music) and music (scores, collected sets, thematic catalogues).
